Helium promotes Shaun Ethier to president to sharpen client ROI focus

Helium promoted Shaun Ethier to president on June 26, 2026, elevating the former vice president of client services in a leadership realignment built around client performance. The eight-figure agency, one of Ohio’s top-ranked digital marketing firms and a Google Premier Partner, counts Activate, A. O. Smith, Genesight, Logan Services, Manly Bands, TOPAS, Linde Gas and Keller and Keller among its clients.

The promotion puts Ethier in charge of client performance and retention across the full portfolio, while founders Tim Warren and Paul DeMott keep their roles tied to marketing and new client acquisition. That split matters because Helium has spent years pushing a blunt operating question through the business: how much did a client spend last month, and how much did they make. In an SEO shop, that is a stricter standard than rankings, traffic or lead volume. It forces the account team to connect content, search and media to revenue, not just activity.

Helium’s own positioning makes the logic plain. The company says it was founded in Cincinnati in 2016 and later ranked No. 679 on the 2022 Inc. 5000 list. It says it is trusted by more than 200 brands and has completed more than 500 audits. The agency also describes itself as AI-driven and revenue-first, with reporting that breaks results down to the customer, channel and campaign. Its service pages keep circling the same outcomes: phone calls, form fills and direct attribution, not vanity metrics.

That framework shows up in the company’s case studies as well. Helium says one client posted a 116% increase in content creation efficiency, a figure that fits the agency’s obsession with operational throughput as much as creative output. The current team page lists Ethier as president, Warren as chief executive officer and DeMott as chief technology officer, a structure that matches the company’s push toward a more specialized executive model. Finance and operations leadership now support that stack, giving Helium a clearer split between growth, delivery and accountability.

The title change is less about ceremony than scale. Helium is making client economics visible enough to defend retention and justify larger budgets, and Ethier’s promotion puts that discipline at the top of the org chart.