Making Like a Family: CoActive knocks out walls between divisions.
The company formerly known as Inmark Enterprises, CoActive Marketing Group, thinks it has something to teach those giant marketing conglomerates.
After buying capabilities from event marketing to full-service promotion, the Great Neck, NY-based agency has brought its five divisions together to formulate solutions for clients. Former Kraft marketing manager Tim O’Krongly, who joined CoActive in May as vp-business development, was handed the keys to what he calls a well-oiled machine for “efficient integrated marketing.”
“How do you protect the brand once it leaves the house and goes into the streets?” he asks. “If you have one company doing events, one Internet, one Hispanic, they have to work together.
“We start with the (brand) idea and ask, `What is the right way to integrate this with the consumer?’ We want the core brand communication working hand-in-hand with what the consumer sees, feels, and touches,” says O’Krongly.
The agency dispensed with separate profit centers for each division so groups no longer have a vested interest in selling their own services. Clients deal with one account-service team that can “look down into our core competencies and draw on any of them” by contacting designated point men at each division, says O’Krongly.
Chief executive John Benfield and principal Paul Amershadian built on radio-buying expertise (housed in the Inmark Services division) by adding full-service shop The Optimum Group, Cincinnati, in October `98. This year they bought event marketer/sampler U.S. Concepts as well as Market Visions, a multi-cultural shop. Optimum Group spun off its e-commerce business to create CoActive’s fifth division.
CoActive gained Rubbermaid as a client for retail partnership programs in November, adding to a roster that includes Hillshire Farms, Hewlett-Packard, and General Motors. The agency had $70 million in gross billings in 1999.
