Be a Bigger Magnet

Imation bought Imaginet seven months later. Litman and Mallin—both around 30 years old at the time—took undisclosed (but, Mallin acknowledges, “phenomenal”) payouts and ran Imaginet as Imation employees. But the fast-moving young innovators were a terrible fit for a slower-moving giant like 3M.

“It just wasn’t a good marriage,” Litman says. “I won’t use the word ‘hate,’ but we were both really unhappy on the inside.”

“If This Scares You, Don’t Enlist”

On their own again by late 1998, after they’d left Imation, the two partners started Spot Buy Spot, developing IT services and software to help media buyers in the advertising industry manage their advertising inventory. They sold it to Comcast for an undisclosed eight-figure sum in 2007. Another success, but it hadn’t been the sole focus of their entrepreneurial drive.

They’d also gone to Gage in 1998 and asked him to help them buy Imaginet back. He agreed, and they relaunched it as a limited liability company that year, with Imaginet acquiring Gage Internet Marketing Services. Within two years, they’d tripled Imaginet’s revenues to $14 million.

Investment houses approached them about underwriting an IPO, but the partners decided instead to find a strategic buyer—WPP Group, a British holding company—and sold Imaginet for the second time in 2000, at an undisclosed price that Litman calls only “a wonderful, life-changing event.”

This time, the marriage was happier. Litman and Mallin stayed on as president and COO, respectively, commuting to the parent company’s offices around North America and London. And they developed Imaginet—later renamed Connect @ JWT, a division of WPP’s J. Walter Thompson business—into one of the country’s noteworthy digital marketing agencies, growing it to $66 million in revenues, according to industry publications, before they left once more in 2004.

They were enjoying their success this time. But what was driving it opened their eyes to a new opportunity, and they realized once more that they were, at heart, start-up entrepreneurs.

Tools and channels for marketers to reach audiences were continuing to proliferate and evolve. And these new-media channels were fragmenting a once-mass audience, appealing to niche groups down to the most minute level and allowing them to consume content on demand. The sheer volume of content this unleashed meant that marketing messages had to be designed more precisely than ever to cut through the clutter and reach their targets.

Litman says, “Because so much delivery is in the digital domain or the nontraditional marketing space, you have tremendous opportunities for unique agencies that are able to use the technology”—often smaller, specialized firms, rather than the big traditional, integrated advertising and marketing agencies—“to do amazing things for their customers.”