Our Story - Spurrier Group

It’s all in the Family

Agency founder Donna Spurrier grew up around entrepreneurial thinking. Her dad, Jess Duboy, was an automotive advertising trail blazer and created both the sell-a-thon and Toyota-thon concepts, two of the most iconic sales tools in the automotive industry. Donna learned this kind of push-the-envelope thinking right at her dad’s knee. After working on the Toyota business for several years, Donna started to ask the hard questions about audience behavior and how Toyota was positioning its “import” brand in a “domestic” auto environment. That was really a thing in the 80’s! The advertising business wasn’t very flexible in those days. There was creative, there was media, and they didn’t coordinate much. This divide is what prompted Donna to start a media agency that would be designed to connect media and creative.

Early Times

Spurrier (Media) Group started with a lot of education needed. The 90’s were a heyday of advertising, but agencies didn’t see the need to make changes. That meant a lot of closed doors. Eventually, Spurrier (Media) Group got a few creative directors to see the value in our team having a better understanding of the audience they were trying to influence. We still spent a lot of time explaining what the value of smart media was. One of the first collateral pieces we created was a fun book called “The Spot, the Dot and the Line”. This was breakthrough for a media company to have such a creative approach and this creativity just kept going!

Shaping the Industry

The first few years were challenging, but as time went on Spurrier (Media) Group kept winning business. Creative partners started to realize just how valuable the collaboration between media and creative could be, as was our ability to provide strategic insights based on our consumer-centric approach. As time went on, these same creative partners, having seen the value, said that Spurrier (Media) Group was selling itself short by limiting our services to media. From these insights, Spurrier dropped ‘media’ from the name and became Spurrier Group, with three service lines: research, strategy, and media. While some media companies lean into a media first approach – Spurrier Group does not. Media planning is actually one of the last steps in our process with significant research, strategy development and creative infusion leading the way and influencing media.

Forging the Future

As Spurrier Group progressed in the research and strategy development, we were also able to perfect our particular form of media which is completely performance-based. We have a robust full-funnel approach to media ranging in impact from awareness channels like TV and OOH to addressable conversion tactics in social and digital media. We have a full performance-based approach to paid media that is based on ROI and ROaS. In today’s economy, knowing that your advertising dollars are precisely working as they are supposed to is so reassuring to clients and true to the original reason that Donna started Spurrier Group over twenty-five years ago. One of the most effective elements in our process is the infusion of the creative with the various channels and KPIs. We’ve never abandoned our core and have been fortunate enough to continue to grow and perfect this form of performance-based media.