Mike Gullaksen is CEO of NP Digital, the performance-marketing agency co-founded by Neil Patel. A search marketer since 2000, he helped build iCrossing's search practice, ran Covario as co-CEO through its 2014 sale to Dentsu Aegis, and served as president of iProspect before becoming NP Digital's chief executive in April 2020.
From Arizona State to iCrossing
As a high-school student Gullaksen wanted to work in marine biology or become a dentist, he told MediaPost in 2023. He was finishing a business degree at Arizona State University in early 2000 when his roommate's sister, a TV anchor in Scottsdale, Arizona, brought along the man she was dating, an "internet guy" who turned out to be Jeff Herzog. Herzog talked him into selling search-engine marketing services for a startup that later became iCrossing.
He stayed about nine years and rose to senior vice president of search. In that stretch iCrossing twice won search agency of the year at MediaPost's OMMA awards and was rated the top search agency by Forrester, and his client work included Bank of America, Coca-Cola, Fairmont Hotels and Resorts, and Williams-Sonoma.
Starting an Agency Inside Covario
Gullaksen moved to Covario in 2009, when it was still mainly a software company with no agency arm. "I had to start the agency at Covario, which was originally a software play," he later told MediaPost. Unsure whether he could do it, he leaned on advice from his father, who, like his own father, had started and sold businesses: "My dad kept telling me to bet on myself."
He ran Covario as co-CEO with his longtime colleague Jeff Johnson. Covario won OMMA's search agency of the year award three years running, from 2011 through 2013, and Advertising Age ranked it among the ten largest U.S. search agencies, with SEO clients such as Sony, Samsung, Wells Fargo, and RIM. After Dentsu Aegis bought the firm in 2014 and folded it into iProspect, he rose to president of iProspect, where the NP Digital hiring release says he focused on agency acquisitions, client services, and product.
He also spent eight years on the board of SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, including a term as its president.
Leading NP Digital from 2020
Patel, co-founder Mike Kamo, and Johnson, by then NP Digital's president, began recruiting Gullaksen at the end of 2019. He succeeded Kamo as CEO in April 2020, weeks into the pandemic, and met most of his new staff on video calls. "My trust factor with Jeff did it for me, but Neil's also a very intriguing person," he told MediaPost at the time.
His LinkedIn profile now puts NP Digital's global team at more than 1,000 people. In March 2026 Ad Age's A-List chose NP Digital as its Performance Marketing Agency of the Year.
MediaPost named him a Media All Star in 2023. In that profile he described himself as an introvert who finds crowds tiring, said he believes in karma and in doing right by people, and said his greatest joy is watching clients and employees succeed.