Seattle, WA.  (September 8, 2011) — buuteeq, the digital marketing system (DMS) for independent hotels, has enlisted two top executives to help guide the fast-growing company: Brad Becker as Chief Experience Officer and Rob Frerichs as VP of Sales North America. In use by hotels of all sizes in 15 countries, buuteeq powers hotel online reservations and marketing through the web, mobile devices and social media sites like Facebook – helping hoteliers to increase direct bookings and revenue with minimal investment.


buuteeq brings Chief Experience Officer (CXO) Brad Becker on board to lead its product design and usability group. Working closely with the engineering team, he will drive continued innovation and advancement of the cloud-based buuteeq system and build in best-practice digital marketing. Vice President of Sales, North America Rob Frerichs joins to further accelerate buuteeq’s adoption by independent hotels, inns and bed-and-breakfast properties. 
 
“Between them, Brad and Rob have more than 40 years of high tech experience and have set the world on fire in their areas of expertise,” said buuteeq CEO Forest Key. “Brad is not just an expert in the tools of the user experience trade – he actually helped create many of them. His experience, innovation and design expertise place him at the top of the user experience field that has become a critical piece of successful web businesses. Rob has demonstrated his strength in building customer bases by helping companies to be successful, and we’re excited to tap his skillset to helping even more hotels to succeed with the buuteeq system.”
 
Over the course of his 20-year career in web design and development, Becker has also mastered strategy, product planning and marketing in highly competitive global markets. For the last several years, Becker was a Director at Microsoft responsible for Azure, Silverlight, .NET, Visual Studio, and Expression Studio. He was the first Product Designer hired at Macromedia (now Adobe); responsible for Flash and Flex. As a founding member of the company’s user experience consulting group, he created cutting-edge solutions for clients including Avaya, Sherwin Williams, Yahoo!, Standard & Poor's, General Dynamics, and other Global 1000 companies. Becker is also a professional musician who has recorded and released several nationally distributed albums.
 
Frerichs has been building customer bases with great success for two decades, having created winning sales strategies and proposals that built recurring revenue streams for digital content, paid search, lead generation, mobile, SaaS, daily deals and venture startup companies. Prior to joining buuteeq, he led the SeattleTimes.com in retooling its online sales strategy. Even as ad revenues declined throughout the publishing industry, Frerichs consistently met and exceeded sales forecasts. As Vice President of Sales at LocalMarketers.com, he helped grow the client base by over 1000% in ten months. While at pre-IPO MarketLeader.com (LEDR), Frerichs built inside sales teams and launched sales efforts for mortgage and seminar sales. He also created a successful inside sales strategy for the wireless division USWEST communications (now CenturyLink). Frerichs is a member of the Screen Actors Guild, and of MENSA.  
 

About buuteeq
buuteeq is the world’s first Digital Marketing System (DMS) for independent hotels. It fuses technology ingenuity with online marketing savvy to help hotels increase occupancy and reduce distribution costs by converting more direct reservations through online bookings. buuteeq’s DMS includes a content management system, multi-channel digital marketing, content publishing, online reservations and integrated business intelligence. Hotels simply upload assets and data through an easy-to-use web-based ‘BackOffice’ and populate multiple digital marketing channels automatically, using proven-effective formats. buuteeq was founded in February 2010 by former Microsoft executives Forest Key and Adam Brownstein and is headquartered in Seattle. www.buuteeq.com