2011 Promo 100: #6: Integrated Marketing Services
Integrated Marketing Services launched its shopper marketing business roughly a decade ago at the dawn of the discipline itself, allowing the agency to help shape the discipline.
In what is arguably its biggest win, IMS nabbed Sam's Club's agency of record business last year, pushing the agency's two-year revenue growth up 130%, to $236 million. To accommodate the new business, it hired 6,000 people and built the entire field management infrastructure in 45 days. One hundred event staffers are based in an office adjacent to the Sam's Club headquarters in Bentonville, AK, while the other 5,900 are located in the field nationwide, Jill Griffin, president of experiential and field events, says.
The win put the agency's experiential and field events group — launched two years ago — to the test, with a goal to overhaul Sam's existing demo program from the standard static table and smiling brand rep handing out samples to a more one-on-one experience from events staffers educated about the product and trained to ask questions pertaining to customers' wants and needs.
In some clubs, the agency is testing video connected to the in-store Wi-Fi system that allows customers to provide immediate feedback on their experience through a web-based survey.
IMS' other retail clients include Walmart, Schwans, Best Buy, Kroger, Time Warner Retail and Stop & Shop.
To stay in tune with the latest technologies, IMS conducts “lunch and learns” where more than 150 vendors each year visit and give the staff demonstrations of their newest products or technologies. As a follow-up, the staff sends out internal memos recommending the tools and technologies they feel will be effective for clients and which are the ones to watch for the future.
One technology to watch is point-of-sale systems that will continue to get more sophisticated, allowing more granular data capture, says Gary Wagner, president of IMS' shopper marketing and health care groups.
“In the past, manufacturers have been relatively patient with their desire to understand the return on shopper marketing efforts, but now the heat is on and the need to prove performance through analytics has become a priority in the industry,” he says.
