Each week on 5 Minutes With, our hosts Mike White and Gary Spurgeon talk to experts in the media industry because they usually know a thing two. Today, Mike & Gary talk to Darren Magarro from DSM.
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Mike White
Welcome back to BluHorn TV I’m Mike White. Joining me today is Gary Spurgeon the president of BluHorn. We’re talking about strategy today, why is it important for a company to build a strategy around their marketing?
Gary Spurgeon
Well it’s like anything else; you need a plan to know where you’re going. If you have a good strategic plan in place and you keep your eye set on that, you will always know where you’re going so you can drive your company, your people, and really your customers in the same direction.
Mike White
So I’m building a good strategic plan. What are some of the components that a company needs to think about when building that strategic plan?
Gary Spurgeon
You’ve got to know who your customer is, where are your financial goals are going and you’ve really got to start drilling down and ask very specific things from not only from financial but also right down to your to your employees.
Mike White
Joining us today we have Darren Magarro who is the president of a great company based in New Jersey. So Darren, tell us about what you guys do at the DSM group.
Darren Magarro
Good morning guys. Thanks for having me. We’re a full service agency, I started 12 years ago. My background was in media buying and strategy on the television side for companies like Toyota and Boston Beer and Puma. Over the last six years we’ve grown about 300 percent and we’re on pace to have our best year yet in 2019.
Mike White
When you started your career, did you start in media or do you start in the ad agency business right away.
Darren Magarro
I started in the ad agency business its actually an interesting story. I was a history major coming out of Lehigh University in Bethlehem Pennsylvania and I couldn’t find a job in 2000. I had a friend of mine who graduated a year ahead of me and she said come be a media buyer. I said I have no clue what that is but I’ll go interview and give it a shot. Here I am almost 20 years later with almost 20 people and a multimillion-dollar agency.
Gary Spurgeon
As a full service agency is there anything that you folks at DSM specialize in in particular that you focus your efforts on?
Darren Magarro
We really focus on bringing the full gamut together. We find that we do everything. So from traditional buying, to creative, to digital, both paid and organic. One of the things we really focus on though is to ensure that you know a lot of digital firms focus on the technical side of bringing sort of traffic to a client. We really focus on producing a quality product, or as we like to call it a mousetrap, and really bringing a beautiful website or a beautiful mousetrap together.
Gary Spurgeon
l What are you seeing and what do you think the next five years are going to bring to the industry.
Darren Magarro
I think there is a big shift. I feel strongly that there will always be a place for traditional media but as we started as we started the digital side of the agency we were able to produce a really quality product where we saw tangible results and our clients were really happy with that. So I think there is going to be a shift. Obviously as digital technology increases and gets smarter and AI with other elements comes in. I think it’s a great thing for the landscape but I also believe that there is a place for traditional media and they’re always be.
Mike White
Why is it important for someone that has someone in-house working in marketing to actually hire an outside marketing firm. What is the advantage of hiring that firm?
Darren Magarro
A lot of the clients that we work with they literally can’t do everything that an agency can do. That’s why we’re specialized with departments. It’s important to have that element of having an outside set of eyes. I tell a lot of our young interns make sure you start your career in an agency because the cadence and the speed at which you learn is so much faster than an in-house and were forced to learn because we need to we need to stay on top of things.
Mike White
Well outside of your business I like how you say the important things to you are God, family, business and then making sure that you participate in sports with your kids. I think the personal sides of the business when you create a strategy in your business you also create a strategy in your home life where you have the opportunity to spend the time with the family that you created. So thank you for joining us on the program today and to find more about the DSM agency Visit Bluhorn.com and we look forward to seeing you next time on Blue Horn TV.