The founders of two top marketing agencies in Arizona, Bigfish Creative Group and Lucid Agency, launched a new larger company last week to take the concept of full-service to a higher level.��     

The company — Highnoon — is bringing a “holistic” approach to marketing for today’s new generation of customers, said the three behind the award-winning agencies: Ken Bonham and Scott Kaufmann of Lucid and Joe Pizzimenti of Bigfish.

Lucid and Bigfish boasted clients like Cisco, Oregano’s, Take Charge America and the Better Business Bureau. But in the past few years, clients are asking for more help in reaching across different channels to consumers.��

“A lot of our clients have been asking us to solve holistic business problems that intersect with marketing, communications and technology in different ways,” Kaufmann said.�� 

Shift in how customers interact with brands 

They began to envision a new kind of full-service agency. One that would directly address consumers’ shifting interactions with brands, he said.��

“There is this kind of democratization of ways that consumers are interacting with their favorite brands now. They can tweet the CEO directly, they get in touch with the shipping department, they look at the packaging design and tweet pictures of it when they’re opening a package for the first time, maybe communicate it on social media,” Kaufmann said.

“We had to be able to service all of these areas, from communication to technology to marketing to strategy.” 

All under one roof  

Instead of the traditional full-service approach of offering two or three services such as public relations, advertising and technology, Highnoon incorporates everything under one roof: creative, technology, performance, data, analytics, public relations, online and offline marketing, and consulting.

Analytics compares data and vendors

For analytics, they built an analytics and reporting platform, Monocle, that allows large organizations to compare their data across a gamut of different channels in social media and traditional advertising. The platform also allows clients to compare different agencies, vendors or other providers.

Home is downtown Tempe 

Headquartered in Tempe, Bonham, Kaufmann and Pizzimenti launched the company in the city that brought them together as alumni of Arizona State University. Through the years, the three have won dozens of awards in their respective companies, including the Community Impact award from the Phoenix Business Journal’s Corporate Philanthropy Awards and AzCentral’s Top Companies to Work for in Arizona.��

For more information about Highnoon, visit .��

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Finding a job isn’t the process it used to be. If you’re on the hunt for a new occupation, you’ve probably come across an online chat box personality asking how it can help you find your dream job. These virtual assistants or chatbots have literally popped up everywhere—from mobile banking to entertainment ticket websites to food ordering. Now, they’re helping you find a job.

And in order to create those very happy and helpful virtual assistants there are engineering and software-friendly professionals who create the personalities and algorithms to help job seekers in their quest. One of those companies is Paradox Inc., a Scottsdale-based artificial intelligence recruiting startup, a company that just landed $13.34 million in Series A funding.

The non-institutional funding round, which was open to friends and family and close professional associates of the company, closed on Feb. 28 and is classified as growth capital, essentially laying the groundwork for more investment in the product. The company is also using the funding to pump life into sales, marketing and doubling the size of its current staff.

Company founder and CEO, Aaron Matos, has some experience in the recruiting world as he also carried the titles of founder and CEO of Jobing.com, another Scottsdale-based job posting and recruiting machine. Paradox has been self-financed until the opening round of funding and will move on to more finance opportunities after growth.

“We believe that today the recruiting experience should be mobile first and conversational, so we took these ideas and developed our recruiting AI assistant, Olivia,” says Jessica Rush, Chief Marketing Officer at Paradox. “We believe there is an opportunity to help spend more time with their talent by automating many of the administrative processes that exist in recruiting today.”

Paradox’s mainstay machine learning, artificial intelligence-driven product is the Olivia AI careers assistant. The happy helping chatbot pops up right when you head to the company’s main website and has conversations with job candidates online and touts 24/7 service, answering questions and helping with things like employee referrals and applications. It can even take care of scheduling interviews. The assistant cuts out the middleman in job searching and applying, helping job seekers in communicating with companies through the role of AI.

“We’re proud to work with local Arizona clients, as well as national and global organizations who care about leading their industries in recruitment and candidate experience,” adds Rush.

Currently, the tech startup is housed in southwest Scottsdale and is run by 45 employees as well as 30 off-site employees. Matos is currently planning to bring on another 45 employees within the next year to help with everything from software engineering to sales before expanding to Dallas and Chicago for regional operations.

At this point, Paradox has around 200 mid-market and enterprise customers on its roster with a shift in focus to boost the latter in the coming months. Customers such as Procter & Gamble, CVS Health and Staples are just a few of the startup’s high-profile clients.

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