Wheelhouse DMG: Building Community, Driving Impact, and Redefining Digital Marketing Excellence

The Microsoft Advertising Partner Program Team had the opportunity to speak with Aaron Burnett, CEO of Wheelhouse DMG - our Culture & Community Award winner and Global Emerging Partner of the Year. The Culture & Community Award is presented to the Partner who fostered diversity, equity, inclusion, opportunity, or philanthropy in their client strategy, and/or community. 

Wheelhouse DMG exemplifies the Culture & Community Award through their deep and longstanding focus on community engagement, individual empowerment, and inclusive partnership. Generosity is a core value at Wheelhouse and it’s baked into the company’s operations. Examples include Generosity Days – a tradition that sees every team member of dedicate one day of service each quarter to helping people, places and organizations who most need it. The company wide event amplifies volunteered time with financial donations to make the biggest possible difference for the greatest number of people. To date, Wheelhouse DMG team members have volunteered about 4,000 hours to more than 60 organizations, which the company has amplified with approximately $150,000 in cash donations. They’ve also created inclusive marketing guidelines for client campaigns and expanded recruitment efforts to reach diverse candidates. This values-led approach has resulted in average client tenure of 7+ years and year-over-year agency revenue growth of 27% - proof that putting people first creates sustainable business success.

About Wheelhouse DMG

I founded Wheelhouse in 2010 with two things in mind:

1. To create the kind of digital agency I needed but couldn’t find when I led marketing for prior employers (I held VP marketing roles with companies ranging from AT&T Wireless to venture-backed startups).
   
   
2. To make Wheelhouse the best place to work for as many people as possible.

Fifteen years on, Wheelhouse DMG is known for delivering world-class performance marketing for clients in highly regulated industries. We have the privilege of working with some of the world’s most notable healthcare and medical device brands, consistently delivering exceptional business value through a combination of deep marketing expertise, purpose-built technology, and consistent innovation. To put it more plainly, Wheelhouse helps brands thrive by solving their toughest digital challenges.

We’re a fully remote team of 30.

Their mission and vision 

Our vision is to become one of the most sought-after digital marketing agencies in the country. As alluded to above, we have twin missions:

• To be the very best digital agency partner for as many clients as possible

• To be the best place to work for as many people as possible

However, it has always been our values that truly animate the company and attract our amazing team members. Our core values of helpfulness, generosity, joyfulness, integrity and stewardship are our North Star - guiding everything we do - from the way that we engage with our clients and one another, to assessing client fit and who to hire.

We believe that the purpose of business is not just profit, it's to do good in the world. Because of this, we operationalize our values in consistent and tangible ways. For example:

• Our company holds quarterly “Generosity Days,” during which all employees provide voluntary service to an organization or cause they care about in our community. We then complement their volunteer time with financial contributions from Wheelhouse. Since we started Generosity Days more than a decade ago, Wheelhouse team members have provided support to more than 60 organizations.

• Every employee is given a monthly “Joy Fund” of $50 – money they can use on anything that brings joy to another Wheelhouse employee or member of their community. Notably, team members can bank or pool their Joy Funds for more significant purchases as well.

Success with Microsoft Advertising 

Microsoft Advertising has been instrumental in advancing our business by enabling us to offer clients a comprehensive, competitive digital strategy. As a platform that's distinct from competitors, Microsoft Advertising allows us to diversify our media recommendations and ensure our clients can capitalize on all available digital inventory across the ecosystem.

Our approach centers on test-and-learn methodologies, and Microsoft Advertising provides us with another valuable channel to optimize budget allocation and maximize results for our clients. This platform integration strengthens our full-funnel recommendations, giving us more touchpoints to reach target audiences effectively.

What's particularly valuable in today's landscape is Microsoft's maintained credibility and reputation stability. While other major platforms have faced various market challenges and scrutiny, Microsoft has remained a trusted, reliable partner. This proves especially critical for our work in regulated industries, where audiences seek factual, trustworthy information. People want to feel confident in the information they're consuming, and Microsoft's platform provides that credible environment where our healthcare clients can connect with users who are actively searching for reliable health information. Ultimately, Microsoft Advertising enhances our ability to deliver results-driven campaigns while maintaining the trust and credibility that's essential in privacy-first performance marketing.

Making a difference

At Wheelhouse DMG, we've built diversity, equity, inclusion, and philanthropy into our foundation through meaningful action. Our Generosity Days program has channeled thousands of volunteer hours and donations to communities in need, while our Joy Fund empowers each team member to create positive impact monthly.

We enthusiastically celebrate diverse identities, creating an environment where unique perspectives thrive and enrich our work. By fostering a workplace where people from all backgrounds can grow professionally through initiatives like our Growth Fund and Student Loan Repayment program, we've discovered a powerful truth: organizational success and social responsibility aren't competing priorities, they're complementary foundations of sustainable growth in today's interconnected world. This values-driven approach doesn't just shape who we are, it powers the exceptional performance we deliver for our clients.

Innovative Ideas

Wheelhouse has developed a suite of proprietary technologies that enable exceptional clarity, insight and performance for our clients. Among these are:

• Compass: Our HIPAA-compliant, marketing data warehouse that empowers our strategists to rapidly surface novel insights and valuable opportunities. Using Compass, we can integrate and harmonize first-party data, CRM, digital advertising, web analytics and offline marketing data to create a complete view of the entire user journey, and definitively understand the value and relationship among all marketing channels and campaigns.

• Lighthouse: An enterprise search intelligence platform that enables us to see search results the same way a user does -- paid and organic together, search features and AI overviews broken out, query and landing pages included -- and it does this at scale. Lighthouse transforms complex and massive sets of search data into valuable insights that inform our client strategies.

We use AI extensively to support internal processes, strategy development and analysis but, because we work in healthcare and MedTech (where expert authorship and absolute accuracy are bedrock), we stop short of producing content using AI.

We’re also working on number of new AI-enabled solutions, including an augmentation to our Business Intelligence practice that enables our strategists to leverage AI to test and model advertising strategies and dynamically create new data visualizations through a natural language interface. These will be followed closely by advanced Media Mix Modeling and AI-enabled creative versioning. 

About Microsoft Advertising Partner Celebration 

The Microsoft Advertising Partner Celebration is a bi-annual event recognizing the exceptional and innovative work of our partners. Enrolled partners from around the world tell their story of growth, innovation, and excellence for a chance to become a Microsoft Advertising Celebrated Partner in one of three awards.