Fame is only fleeting when it ceases to provide seasoned entrepreneurs memories of the days when fame and fortune fueled their ambition. Fortune soon edges out and satisfies. Then that fortune provides the security needed to pursue the life’s dreams.
Stoic and stilted. Those two words contributed more to Kent’s entrepreneurship than any others. Graduating from college in the height of the 1980 recession, jobs were tough to come by. For an inexperienced kid with only college homework assignments as a portfolio, the Madison Avenue advertising world held no doors open. Kent and his dear friend Court Nauman worked their way through high school and college trading their graphics talent for enough pennies to keep tuition paid. With no jobs for either, they teamed up and started Naumann & Merrell Advertising. Forty plus years later, with a handful of various partners and a slew of extremely talented associates and employees, Kent’s portfolio is anything but stoic and stilted. For the past thirty years as Merrell Remington & Associates, the creative influence of Kent and his team has attracted blue-chip clients from around the country.
One of the great joys during this time was taking clients away from the Madison Avenue agencies and winning national awards with his stoic and stilted creative work. Direct magazine ranked Merrell Remington as one of the top twenty creative trendsetters in the world. Wander through the portfolio, read some of the articles and blog posts. And if you have the hankering to do so, read the story as told by Kent himself of “How did I get here?” Follow the trail of an entrepreneur, an accidental entrepreneur as Kent tells it. “I didn’t want to be a business owner. I couldn’t even spell entrepreneur. I just wanted to create great advertising. But with the people I’ve hired, loved, learned from, my life couldn’t be richer.”
TargetLeads
VCTV By TCI
Swipe A Pocket Full Of Chickens
Taking a line from a favorite comedy, “It’s who you know, you know!”, my decade-long relationship with TargetLeads began with an introduction from a mutual friend who said, “Kent, you need to meet Richard.” This was ten years after Richard and his company Senior Direct and one of mine, Online Insurance Services, competed voraciously for the same clients. I couldn’t think of a reason not to meet Richard. I’d never heard a single disparaging word about him or his direct mail division TargetLeads. At the time, the Long-term Care Insurance (LTC) industry was struggling through
Our entry into the Cable TV Guide industry came as we helped VCTV, a division of TCI Cablevision, test a new “video on demand” and “enhanced PPV” product line called Take One and Hits at Home. Since research showed that buy rates closely followed marketing efforts, we took the existing monthly guide and began developing and sending weekly guides to customers. We pioneered several new program and schedule presentation techniques that facilitated access to a complex array of entertainment options. As a result, buy rates were greatly enhanced.
Working in the financial arena does extend certain limitations when it comes to our style of hard-hitting, almost outlandish, creative. But even the very well-respected and distinguished Zions Bank encouraged our creative team to rise above the “safe and traditional” as we introduced their new Zion’s Visa/ATM Debit Cards. Our introduction campaign invited customers to “swipe” their purchases with their new cards. Materials included bill inserts, newspaper ads, and several posters, but the very successful “Better Than a Pocket Full of Chickens” direct mail effort helped lift the entire