Dino Marketing Group
WILBERT FUNERAL SERVICES, INC. BRAND & CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
Agency History
DMG was founded in 2000 as Dino Publishing, a custom publishing company that created branded journalism and custom publications for brands years before the phrase content marketing was coined. We developed content that showed customers the value they received from their relationships with brands and their products. Initially we focused on the recreational marine space, but this expanded to include other luxury, recreational and lifestyle categories. Eventually it grew to include a sizable B2B stable, as well.
From the start, we were intimately involved in developing the messaging strategies of our clients, helping them unlock the story behind their brands, and presenting those stories with maximum appeal for their customers. We helped these brands approach the customers as an audience, we made them better storytellers and presented their stories with the highest production values in the most effective channels available.
Quickly our early clients realized our skillsets equally met their other agency needs, and they recruited us to help with their PR, advertising, branding and activation requirements. We named products, and we spun off and rebranded new divisions, holding companies and manufacturing operations. We wrote and implemented Vision statements and developed employment branding and internal communications. We managed trade and consumer shows and events, executed cobranding programs in distribution channels and managed brand lanes for companies with multiple adjacent brands. We curated their meaning and dressed them for success.
As websites and digital marketing became the way of the world we helped our clients become savvy and shift their efforts online. We worked with them to launch new websites, integrate with CMS, CRM and PIM solutions. The scale of these engagements has continued to grow, and the tools we use have continued to expand. But we still make our clients better storytellers, and we still help their customers, prospects and partners realize how valuable those brands and products are to their lives and business.
Dino Differentiators
Beyond our history and the experience, capabilities and taste of our team, there are three significant differentiators for our engagements versus many other agencies.
1
From the start we have been a fee-based agency. We have avoided the traditional agency time and materials approach.
We agree to a general statement of work and a fee, and encourage the clients to shift priorities and focus as needed without concern for cost, like an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord.
This allows budget certainty for both clients and us, and only agreed external costs are passed to clients.
2
Related to this, we do not have a standalone account executive function that primarily focuses on capturing all costs/revenue. Our account managers for all clients are also producers for them. This reduces cost, plus any miscommunication caused by intermediaries between clients and doers.
Philosophically, we believe that good storytelling must honor the needs of a brand’s various audiences, even when they don’t always know what those needs are. One crucial element of every brand story is why the brand exists. Because customers buy your why even more than your who, what, where and when. All things in balance, of course, but always with why at the heart of it. We’ve found one of the best ways to give meaning to your brand is to encourage customers to provide the meaning for you as they explain their interaction with your products and brand. They are even more believable than you, typically speak from experience and their stories work as an invaluable third-party endorsement.
Structure, Expertise, Account Team etc.
The differentiators above notwithstanding, we do take project work outside of our primary fee-based engagements, but this is a small percentage of our work, and is often supplemental to the fee engagements when those clients have projects beyond defined scope. If it is useful for clients, we do it, but prefer the fee approach for mutual predictability.
Our client engagement teams are typically co-led by a strategy/ content/copy person and creative direction/design person, supplemented by other team members with varied expertise and experience.
We also utilize long-term freelance relationships to supplement skill sets and capacity, primarily in the areas of photography/ videography, back-end web development, specific technology platforms, programmatic advertising, SEO, portal management and content subject matter experts. We also have relationships with high-end video studios, consumer insights firms, and other specialists. Across these partnerships we have managed their inclusion within our own cost structure or as an external cost paid by clients depending upon the situation. We also have extensive experience in multiple-agency engagements, and pride ourselves on working well with others.
Our location in downtown Chicago is a boon to our staffing needs in terms of available employee base, skillsets and access to major universities. We participate in full- and part-time undergraduate and graduate intern residencies with Northwestern University’s Integrated Marketing Communications, Journalism and School of Business, as well as DePaul University’s marketing and business programs and Columbia Chicago’s school of design. And the freelance and contractor community in Chicago is robust.
Our Wilbert team would include:
Randall Hess
Strategy, Branding, Content, Account Lead
30-plus years experience in agencies and publishing Northwestern University, Illinois (Masters and Bachelors)
Kraig Devenport
Creative Direction/Strategy, Digital Design, Account Management
30 years agency experience
Ferris State University, Michigan
Russell Duncan
Branding, Creative Direction, Multidisciplinary Design
25 years agency and publishing experience
Middlebury College, Vermont
Caroline Miller
Content Strategy, Copywriting, Account Management, Analytics, Social Media
6 years agency experience
University of Michigan
Lan Baylina Naval
Interactive Design, Web Development, Video Management, Social Media
8 years agency experience
University de Vic, Catalonia, Spain
Current Client List Includes...
Boston Whaler (Edgewater, Fla.) – The premier fishing boat brand in the world, with the requisite product luxury, pricing and customer base. Selling through dealerships, their product ranges from 14-foot skiffs to 43-foot offshore dreamboats that start at $1.5 million. That’s a massive range of customer types to attract. We’ve helped them do it for over 21 years, introducing new products and expanding their branding, while growing their average boat size and margin in the process.
Hyundai Translead (San Diego, Cal.) – This Hyundai subsidiary manufactures OTR trailers and related products, including dry van trailers, refrigerator trailers, and truck bodies, sold direct (to clients like Amazon) and through dealerships. In the six years we’ve worked with them, we helped expand a “manufacturing excellence” brand to include “innovation” and “customer success” storylines, and to become the #1 trailer manufacturer in North America. We’ve also helped them introduce new products, launch a customer portal, spin up an aftermarket business, launch new factories and shine at numerous trade shows.
Big Brand Tire & Service (Moorpark, Cal.) – The sixth largest tire retailer in the country, Big Brand owns and operates multiple retail tire shop brands and over 340 retail locations across 20+ states. They are on an acquisition tear, meaning that new shops must be integrated into their brands constantly. They are also very dependent upon direct marketing to integrate the brand and drive business. We assist with various brand integration and launch activities, product branding, email and CRM programs, video creation and employment brand efforts. We have worked with BBTS for about two years.
Oxford Capital Group and Oxford Hotels & Resorts (Chicago, Ill.) This venture capital and hospitality operations group develops, operates and runs boutique and marquee hotel brands and affiliated restaurants, etc., as well as luxury senior and rehab housing. Their business thrives on partnerships and outside investors who are comforted by both the glamour and buttoned-up business acumen of the group, and we’ve helped them burnish that storyline for the last eight years.
Sailfish Fishing Boats (Cairo, Ga.) – Sailfish is a middle-market offshore boat brand that serves both hardcore fishing and family recreation markets. Their range of boats includes models pushing $300k, so while there are more expensive brands, Sailfish buyers certainly think of them as luxury discretionary spends. We’ve worked with them for seven years, helping to expand their dealer network and clear out pipeline backlogs. They are owned by venture equity firm Georgia Oaks, which we also helped with positioning and content.
4Front Engineering Solutions (Carrollton, Tx.) – 4Front has acquired 12 companies across interconnected “materials handling” industries, and collectively is the largest player in most of them.
Owned by Sweden-based multinational Assa Abloy, 4Front is in the process of integrating the disparate companies into a cohesive collection, with well-honored brand lanes, CMS and CRM systems integration, and upgraded branding across the board. We had raised the profile and stature of several of the purchased companies, and upon purchase we were asked to do the same for the rest of the portfolio and for possible upcoming purchases. We began working with this team five years ago.
CM Truck Beds, PJ Truck Beds, Dakota Truck Beds (Kingston, Ok.) – These sister brands are owned by Bain Capital, as part of a larger trailer and heavy equipment group called ATW. We have worked with multiple brands throughout the ATW portfolio to raise their profile, brand perception, market share, dealer share and help them rise above a mom and pop industry. We have worked with various ATW brands for more than 10 years.
Pre-cast/Pre-stressed Concrete Institute (Chicago, Ill.) – PCI is an education, advocacy and networking association for a specialty product and architectural industry vertical. We’ve helped them punch above their weight with branding, publication design, trade show efforts and a nationally recognized design competition. We have worked with them for nine years.
Many of the above companies and brands are the #1 and/ or premium players in their respective categories. Looking back at former clients, that positioning was also generally the case with:
• Sea Ray Boats (Knoxville, Tn.)
• Big Tex Trailers (Mount Pleasant, Tx.)
• Big Tex Trailer World (Frisco, Tx.)
• EMPLOYERS workers comp insurance (Reno, Nev.)
• Bayliner Boats (Knoxville, Tn.)
• Lund Boats (Little Falls, Mn.)
• Harris Pontoons (Fort Wayne, In.)
• Grand Banks Motor Yachts (Malaysia)
• Palm Beach Yachts (Palm Beach, Aus.)
• Fisher & Paykel Appliances (Australia)
• DCS Grills (Los Angeles, Cal.)
• Beko Appliances (Australia)
We’ve also supported co-marketing opportunities with premium lifestyle partnerships in the liquor/wine, clothing, automotive, jewelry, cigars and travel industries.
Across our current and prospective clients, we see no conflict with Wilbert or its various brands.
1. What are Dino’s differentiators?
We often sum up our unique value as quality, quantity, ease and affordability. In addition to the qualities of our staff, this speaks to our pricing approach, which encourages clients to ask for more without concern for running up hours/cost.
2. How are external Dino partner costs accounted for?
Preferred partners are often covered within our cost structure, but are sometimes listed as external costs borne by clients depending upon the specific partnership and engagement. This can be clarified in the quoting process.
3. What challenges do we foresee in an engagement with Wilbert and its subsidiaries and partners?
We expect many of your challenges to be unknown to us, and will be clarified in the early parts of the engagement. On the surface, the breadth of your customer personas, complexity of your vertical/brands/subsidiaries and the strength of competitors will be an important part of an initial Discovery phase. Systems integration is surely expensive and slow, and even the best-managed tech stacks are challenging to integrate across disparate organizations. You have the advantages of market primacy, brand legacy, corporate history and an established customer base.
4. What technologies and solutions do we have experience with?
We have worked in a broad range of technical solutions, whether legacy, client chosen or our recommendation.
CRMs: HubSpot, Marketo, MS Dynamics, Salesforce, Adobe Marketing Cloud and custom client solutions. We have also suffered through problematic integration projects.
CMS, and related front- and back-end dev languages and applications: WordPress, Adobe Experience Manager, HubSpot, Drupal, SquareSpace, Woo Commerce, PHP, REST API, Gutenberg, Elementor, ACF, Laravel, NodeJS, Express, NPM, ASP.NET, HTML CSS, SCSS, Tailwind, Bootstrap, JavaScript, jQuery, VueJS 2, React, MetaLocator.
Database Management: MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, SQL Server Hosting: Heroku, WPEngine, Pantheon, AWS.
MAP: Catsy PIM, custom Digital Asset Libraries, Synology, Dropbox.
General, Project Management SEO, Accessibility, Performance, Security, Testing, Version Control, Agile, Sharepoint, Wrike, Basecamp.
