Aspen Country Day School graduates are all over the world, building lives of meaning and purpose. As the founder of Covert Communication, Hawaii’s largest digital marketing firm, Anna (Lefkowitz) Covert ’98 has worked with hundreds of businesses, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. She is committed to helping create more oversight for the digital media industry with a strong focus on universal consent and consumer privacy.
“You are never done learning. You have to always be educating yourself, and that’s the way you stay on the pulse.”
Aspen Country Day School: Kindergarten to Ninth Grade
After: Boarding school at Stevenson School in California, then to Boston for a BS in marketing, minor in management at Bentley University
Career: Anna never expected to wind up in Hawaii. But while visiting her retired parents there after college, she took a gig running a fashion show for a charity, made some connections, and was recruited to manage marketing for Paul Brown, Hawaii’s largest spa and salon chain. Today, as founder and principal of Covert Communication, she consults with companies—from Fortune 500 to small businesses—on both the client and agency side; her staff is based in seven countries worldwide.
Blue or Green Team: Green. And that’s fitting, because Anna has made major contributions to the green energy industry. A website plugin she created, the Solar Wizard, allows customers to calculate how much solar power they need, to find credits for installing it, and to evaluate costs, savings, and environmental impacts.
FIVE QUESTIONS
What is something you learned at Aspen Country Day School that shaped your adult life?
The small classes. One thing I’ve noticed is that other friends of mine don’t have the same staying power, socially. Every year, they were in a new class with new people, and if they didn’t get along with them, they didn’t ever have to speak to them again. But it wasn’t like that at our school. You had to work through problems, and you had to stick it out together. I think that is a skill that has always followed me: to meet problems face-on and resolve them.
Favorite teacher? Francie Jacober. Before I started working with her, I thought I was really bad at math. But we would do algebra, and it changed my whole view of math and made me feel really empowered. (Note: today, Francie is a Pitkin County Commissioner.)
There have been a lot of changes in the marketing business since you first started. How have you adapted?
When I went to school, digital marketing wasn’t even a thing.Basically, I got to where I am because I taught myself WordPress. It was a lot of trial and error. But really, you are never done learning. You have to always be educating yourself, and that’s the way you stay on the pulse.
What prompted you to write your book?
Almost 30-50% of all clicks from Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are fake. Platforms have deployed bots to click on ads on their own sites so they make more money. It’s really dark. I finally had enough and realized that I could help. We wanted to get the word out faster. The party’s over. It needs to be over. How we manage and store consumer data is very important (privacy), and reporting needs to be transparent.
The good news is that there are good actors in the digital media space that will allow for third-party oversight and ways to prove delivery, clicks by humans vs. bots, and other important metrics. My book does just that: it provides the education that companies of all sizes can apply to target the right person at the right time with the right message, without the aid of an agency or big spend.
What’s next for you? I would like to get into public speaking: teaching, sharing knowledge. I believe it is important for businesses and marketers to understand what they are buying and how to protect themselves.
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