About the Captain.

Founded in 1994 by Dick Damrow, Contract Marketing Resources can help you prioritize your limited marketing resources...and propel your business forward. Dick engages directly with his clients. He relies upon his independent marketing and communications contractor network to add efficiency and power to client marketing plans and programs.

An advocate for advertising accountability, advertising is the last thing Dick typically counsels his clients to do. His clients and associates respect his ability to help them define strategy and help them implement integrated campaigns rather than disconnected “one tactic at a time” communications that so often result in conflicting messages that can confuse the target audience … or are simply ignored.

He helps his clients define in advance the kind of response they seek. If you seek a change of attitude or perception that differentiates you from your competitors and increases awareness of your brand promise, he recommends brand marketing techniques and tactics to generate an emotional response. If you seek a measurable action or behavior that generates inquiries or orders, he recommends direct marketing to generate a direct response.

To help clients get a better return on their marketing and communications investment, he also cautions them against trying to achieve both kinds of response with the same campaign. Research and testing prove that marketers who try to do so dilute their strategy to the point that they seldom accomplish either objective.

Dick is a “creative spark” to campaign concepts that are relevant, remembered, and repeated. His experience as Executive Vice President of Carmichael Lynch in Minneapolis, recognized as one of the most creative agencies in the nation, taught him the importance of creative leverage … and the process that consistently produces compelling, persuasive creative communications. Having worked as a client, as well as on the client services and creative sides of the agency business, he has a unique empathy for the importance of collaboration and managing the “healthy tension” that leads to creative breakthroughs.

Dick was recruited to Cedar Rapids in 1992 to join an agency owned by Young & Rubicam. After founding Contract Marketing Resources in 1994, he consulted with agencies and clients throughout the Midwest. He contracted as Executive Vice President of one of those clients, The AdTrack Corporation, where he focused on the response management and accountability side of the advertising business and helped AdTrack achieve national recognition as the sales lead development firm for business-to-business marketers.

In an exclusive engagement with Stamats Communications from 1999 to 2003, he helped them build the largest creative department in Eastern Iowa and added media and direct marketing capabilities. In the first three years, revenue in higher education division increased 50% while staff grew from 40 to 65. Stamats continues as a charter client of Contract Marketing Resources.

A former Midwest Direct Marketer of the Year and faculty member of the American Association of Advertising Agencies Advanced Advertising Institute, Dick has also served on the faculty of the National Center for Database Marketing, ADWEEK Seminars, and Direct Marketing to Business conferences. He holds the Certified Business Communicator (CBC) designation from the Business Marketing Association, the Certified Professional Consultant (CPC) designation from the American Consultants League, and has been a guest lecturer at the University of Minnesota, St. Thomas University, University of Wisconsin/Madison, and University of Iowa. In addition to more than 100 college and university clients served by Stamats Communications, he has worked with more than 150 national brands and more than 50 Fortune 500 companies during his 30 year career in advertising and marketing communications.

Dick was named to the Cedar Rapids Advertising Federation Hall of Fame in 2002 and named Ad Person of the Year in 2004. He is a former board member of the Midwest Direct Marketing Association and two local National Agri-Marketing Association chapters.

He continues to give back his time and talent. He handles all marketing and serves on the board of directors of a national organization for Christian parents with children who abuse or are addicted to alcohol and drugs. He also serves on the board and marketing committee of Theatre Cedar Rapids and on the board of advisors of four small, emerging start-up businesses. He is a business/journalism honors graduate of Hastings College and did graduate work in business at Creighton University.

About the Crew.

The crew consists of a network of independent marketing and communications contractors, personally selected for each client engagement—but only after a meeting with you and your staff. Capabilities are important—but so is chemistry.

There is no pressure to “sell” you on someone just because they are on staff and available—even if they are not the best person for the project or program. There is no incentive for us to pass you off to inexperienced staff after the “pitch.”

Some would call this an “outsourcing” model. We prefer to call it “team sourcing”—and find our clients like the freedom and financial leverage this alternative staffing model provides.