Kirk's Blog

I grew up in the media world and have had a ringside seat to its evolution. As a result, I have become a huge consumer of news, information and advertising. A junkie. I worked as a cub sports reporter at my hometown newspaper at age 12 and rose to become President and Chief Executive Officer of the Denver Newspaper Agency, Publisher of the Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post in my mid-40s. I left that job in May 2006 to co-found Interactive Marketing & Innovation (IM&I) along with David Ehrlich, formerly Chief Operating Officer of Kroenke Sports Enterprises, owners of professional basketball and hockey sports teams and operators of entertainment venues.

IM&I, launched in July 2006, is a start-up marketing and communications company. Its core business is Outsource Marketing, which by definition lends itself to many different industry segments. Engagements begin with an interactive tool called the IM&I Marketing Scorecard, which is a repository for all of a client companies marketing data, ranging from employee costs to marketing spending to audience definition. Our company analyzes the data and presents recommendations for our to growing their audience and revenue. It is on the strength and understanding of our recommendations that clients hire IM&I—ranging from full Outsource Marketing engagements to product development assignments.

The experiences from our Outsource Marketing engagements will be the backbone of this blog. By far the most attention is paid to audience growth, regardless of industry. In that context, we have learned two universal truths in our short life:

• Marketing always intersects with media
• Ad dollars follow audiences

The first bullet point underlies the power of blogs. While we are late in joining the blogosphere (according to today's Google's Blog search, more than 6.3 million marketing blogs were returned, more than 54 million media blogs and more than 263,000 media and marketing blogs—and I would characterize this blog as a media and marketing blog), it is never too late to join the discussion and weigh in on trends and future media and marketing outcomes.

Given my background, the first question I am always asked is do newspapers have a future as a media platform. The second question is what will the media consumption look like in three years? How will advertisers effectively reach consumers as media channels increase exponentially?

I will wait to answer those questions in our next Post.

   —Kirk