Profiles: GMR Marketing
Gary Reynolds doesn’t want to set strategy. He’d rather be on the beach.
Or the street, or at the Super Bowl, or wherever brands meet consumers at play.
“I have no interest in sales promotion, advertising, or direct marketing as a core competency,” says the ceo of GMR Marketing. “A light goes on when we tell clients we just do events.”
And does GMR (No. 2) do events: 700 to 800 per week, in fact. Last year, the New Berlin, WI, agency relaunched The Pepsi Challenge, showed Mercedes Benz how to measure ROI on sponsorships, and brought eight marketers to the Super Bowl and 14 to the Daytona 500. This year, it’ll help Microsoft Corp. launch Xbox and tour the Miller Lite Garage.
Lifestyle — or event, or experiential — marketing is booming. That has bolstered GMR’s impressive growth: Net revenues jumped 72 percent last year (and 144 percent over two years) to $44.4 million; 82 percent of that growth came from such new clients as Pepsi, Visa USA, Pfizer, and Microsoft.
“Their execution expertise makes for a much more stable initial plan.”
— Joe Karcz, Jim Beam Brands
Reynolds credits the dot-coms. “Their talk about relationship marketing online propelled relationship marketing in events,” he says. “That’s their legacy.”
But on-the-street is far trickier than online. “Natural disasters are our everyday,” says chief operating officer Bryan Buske, so account teams learn to solve problems as they happen.
GMR sits in on Jim Beam Brands’ early meetings to foresee tactical complications. “Their execution expertise makes for a much more stable initial plan,” says director-promotional marketing and p.r. Joe Karcz. “They have a very good sense of the challenges inherent to field marketing, and set contingency plans to minimize problems.”
Staff skills are crucial. GMR has 340 full-timers and 1,200 field managers. (It also bills about 15 million field hours for local workers.) Field managers get three days training at GMR, then another three at the client’s HQ “so they know the product and passion intimately,” says president Jay Lenstrom. “We encourage them to treat the client’s money as their own investment.” They also help with trend snapshots, collecting info on new fads in their cities. GMR spreads out several cities’ worth of artifacts for clients to gauge trends (or competitors’ activities).
Visa hired GMR as events AOR last fall after “an exhaustive search,” says vp-event and sponsorship marketing Michael Lynch. “We like their people. We really felt comfortable with their approach and their skill.”
Strategy matters, of course. “Event marketing is part of the planning process now. Eight years ago, it was an afterthought,” Reynolds says. That’s because events have become more important; they’re better measured than in the past; and sponsorship fees are a sizeable investment. “That multi-million-dollar price of entry gets the attention of presidents and executive vps,” says Lenstrom.
Mercedes tapped GMR to develop an evaluation system for corporate and dealer sponsorships. The shop worked four months with the brand’s research department to fashion a system that links events directly to sales, so it can measure sales potential before signing on.
GMR took The Pepsi Challenge to 30 markets, working with Omnicom Group sibs TLP and BBDO (which shot TV spot footage as GMR served sips). The first few months were hush-hush. “We had to hire people without telling them what they’d be working on,” Buske recalls. “We told them what it wasn’t.”
Microsoft launches Xbox this year with two major promotions and guerrilla marketing via GMR. “I like their passion,” says Cindy Spodek-Dickey, group manager-promotions and events for Xbox. “They realize I’m not Miller, or Kraft Foods, or Jim Beam. I need to be treated differently, and they do it.”
Jim Beam teamed GMR with Track Entertainment, New York City, and Shandwick, Chicago, to execute its Rock the Rackhouse sweeps (December PROMO). GMR handled “everything around the stage,” taking care of all winners’ needs, Karcz says. “An event like that is a maze of details, and they’re so good at detail work.”
“They’re adept at finding solutions even if the budget changes,” says Paul Chibe, senior marketing manager at Wm. Wrigley Co., which tapped GMR to distribute eight million samples of Big Red gum to Spring Breakers this year. Even after cuts, “they over-delivered on our original program objectives. I’m a stickler for details — measurement, timelines, execution — and I didn’t have to be as emphatic about it with GMR. They came to me with it.”
GMR is doing more ethnic marketing — a natural evolution, since events take their cues from local culture. Field managers keep it locally relevant. Stll, Reynolds doesn’t want to be pigeonholed: “We’re not a mobile marketing agency. We’re also one of the largest sports and music marketing agencies. We just focus on what we do best.”
See you on the street.
