Interview with Andy Atkins-Krueger at SES London 2008

I interviewed Andy Atkins-KrÃŒger, managing director of Web Certain Europe Ltd, at the Search Engine Strategies conference and expo in London last month.

Yes, yes, we talked about serious issues, like the challenges of optimizing pages or running paid search campaigns for multiple languages across Europe. But Krueger topped anything that I could have asked him with a tale about the Tongue Twisters Multilingual team at WebCertain.

To prove his team is ready for multilingual tongue twisters in German, English, Portuguese, French, Spanish, Czech and other languages, Andy introduced Kia from his PR team, who provided a flamboyant Finnish flourish as a finale. (Go ahead, try saying that quickly three times.)

Andy Atkins-Krueger, WebCertain, at SES London on YouTube

Having started his career briefly as a journalist, Andy quickly moved into marketing communications, where he has spent the last 20 years. He worked first in advertising, then founded a public relations consultancy, The Partners Group, before moving into corporate marketing.

He’s worked on pan-European advertising and public relations campaigns for many years and first “discovered” search marketing in 1997, when he was charged with developing the European market presence of one of the U.K.’s best known B2B brands, Portakabin. After five years as the client, he bought into the supporting agency — Web Certain Europe Ltd — where he became managing director.

Under Andy’s leadership, Web Certain has continued to focus on multilingual websites, handling Europe’s major languages under one-roof, with partners around the world providing the more specialist language needs.

As a keen linguist himself, he has been a qualified member of the Institute of Linguists since 1984 and the Chartered Institute of Marketing since 1999. While he doesn’t claim fluency in every language, Andy has some knowledge of French, German, Italian, Dutch, Russian, and of course English.

He believes this helps in giving the best advice to clients who are planning website localization, translation, and promotion. He is particularly keen to promote the opportunities of “reaching out to Europe” to clients and believes that the significant opportunities open to website marketers are largely under-exploited.

He also edits the online newsletter www.web-marketing-secrets.co.uk and the blog www.multilingual-search.blogspot.com, which report on search marketing developments throughout Europe — both often summarizing reports published in other languages to help English-speaking marketers.

Watch my interview with Andy on YouTube in the Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conferences & Expos channel.