Changing the Channel

Red Ventures, a Charlotte, N.C.–based marketing firm, has grown from a two-man shop eight years ago to more than 500 employees, and has increased its revenue 60-fold in three years—earning several nods from Inc. magazine’s Inc. 5000 list. But company executives say they see Red Ventures as more of a B2B marketing partner, working to acquire new and qualified customers for enterprises such as satellite-television provider DirecTV.

As the largest reseller for DirecTV—a company that has seen its own share of growth, with the addition of nearly 4 million subscribers since 2002—the Red Ventures team attributes its success to several factors, one being its undying commitment to real-time answers. “Our offices are like a trading floor,” says Christy Durbin, president of two of the Red Ventures marketing wings. Employees, she says, are continually checking out the latest stats on any of the 15 monitors strewn around each of the two locations. “We aren’t waiting for a whole data pack at the end of the week,” Durbin says. “We’re responding quickly in a real-time fashion. We believe that we have the best data in the industry for the partners we support.”

Part of the winning combo includes giving employees access to sales data on their BlackBerrys, and proprietary software that allows the company to dabble in various verticals. (In addition to DirecTV, Red Ventures recently signed deals with ADT Security and Sirius Satellite Radio.)

Red Ventures also points to its dedication to the customer experience and to delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. “We’re able to tie all of our marketing initiatives and all the various pieces in the marketplace together, and to really track all the data and interaction points that the customer experiences in that process,” says Kevin D’Allaird, Red Ventures’ senior vice president of online marketing.

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