Louis Amira is our CEO, a lifelong competitive golfer, a Harvard graduate, and a co-founder of Crimson Advantage. After seven years at Google, Louis brings a keen digital marketing eye and unparalleled experience to our team. As CEO, his primary focus is the company’s direction, but he also works directly with many of our clients.
Harvard and Postgrad
Louis attended Harvard for his undergraduate degree and also played Division 1 golf. He graduated with degrees in economics and renewable energy. Immediately after graduating, he began working for a smart grid renewable energy startup in Providence, Rhode Island. Here, he observed how startups worked and ran. Shortly afterwards, he joined Google as a marketer, where he stayed for over seven years. At Google, his roles included digital marketing, strategic partnerships and product management.
“I would help Google’s largest clients get the most out of their $10-400 million digital spend,” he explained. “This helped me to master my understanding of advertisement and marketing campaigns...including how to help clients get more out of their campaign analytics.”
This experience would prove useful in his next career step.
An Entrepreneur Is Born
Google actually features an in-house startup incubator that encourages its employees to be entrepreneurial and focus on side projects for a portion of their work week. Within the Google Startup Incubator “Area 120”, Louis worked together with a few other Googlers to found an entertainment app. “The experience of taking an idea from concept to reality with team members really gave me the startup bug,” he shared.
He knew he wanted to start something significant, and he had the perfect service to offer: digital marketing and growing an online presence. After all, he had mastered his understanding of marketing campaigns through doing just that for Google.
Starting Crimson Advantage
Crimson Advantage, named after Harvard’s athletic team name and school color, wanted to do things differently from the start. We offer retainer pricing, rather than taking a percentage of the client’s ad spend. And we make sure to stay closely aligned with what customers most want in a digital marketing agency.
It’s a vision that began working almost instantly. Thanks to the alignment of client incentives and world-of-mouth referrals, new clients started to trickle in faster than even Louis expected. This created an early challenge for Louis and his team: Taking Crimson Advantage from a ‘mini digital marketing agency’ to a firm with scale.
Crimson’s CEO
Since the early days, Louis has overseen the company's growth and progress, with a recent focus on "Crimson Advantage 2.0." As the CEO of Crimson Advantage, Louis does a bit of everything: the direction and strategy for the company as a whole, while also maintaining relationships with several clients and keeping the lines of communication open.
“There’s a joke that CEO stands for ‘Chief Everything Officer,’” Louis says. “But, I really focus on the larger picture of Crimson, where it’s heading, and how we can continue to iterate on our current offerings.”
Louis strives to test new strategies, then implement the ideas that best serve the company in a way that benefits the team as a whole. With a hand firmly in client relations, he is always looking for ways to test new strategies and better serve our partners and bring their companies the exposure and traction they deserve.
Golfer Extraordinaire
Personally, Louis loves to play golf competitively, and has been playing since he was a toddler.
“My dad was a golf professional himself, and he got me plastic clubs to play with as a joke. Let’s just say I didn’t take it as a joke,” Louis says.
He fell in love with the game immediately. At age 8, he played in his first official golf tournament. At age 11, he broke 70, and won a junior championship later that year.
In high school, Louis was ranked 20th in the world amongst junior golfers, finishing runner-up to friends like Brooks Koepka and Rickie Fowler in numerous tournaments.
“Other career highlights include qualifying for the U.S. Junior and making it to a playoff to qualify for the U.S. Open.”
Louis continues to play golf in both amateur and professional tournaments with a handicap between 0 and +3, depending on how much time he has to practice.
His self-proclaimed competitiveness (in CrossFit, too!) keeps him an avid learner, as he loves nothing more than to be proven wrong on something he had originally believed with complete certainty. He believes this constant state of evolution is how we all should seek to live our lives, both personally and professionally.
