How nCentiv enabled IMM's profitable local store marketing at scale:
IMM Agency has built its reputation over more than a decade as a full-service digital marketing partner specializing in three core competencies: marketing (both organic and paid search, social, and programmatic), creative services (UX/UI, web design, and campaign creative), and analytics. The agency's guiding principle, "Ideas Made Measurable," reflects its commitment to delivering transparent, results-driven campaigns for clients across retail, restaurant, e-commerce, B2B, and telecommunications sectors.
Among IMM's longest-standing relationships is their work with Verizon's prepaid business, a partnership that began over 12 years ago with TracPhone and has thrived over the years. When Verizon approached IMM about creating local digital marketing programs for their retail stores using Market Development Funds (MDF), the opportunity was compelling, but the economics seemed impossible.
Strategic Context: The MDF Opportunity
Verizon needed to deploy Market Development Funds to support local store marketing across thousands of retail locations. These co-op dollars represented a significant opportunity for both the stores and IMM, but traditional campaign management made the economics prohibitive.
The challenge was straightforward: create and manage local digital campaigns for individual Verizon and Total Wireless (a Verizon brand) stores with small budgets (typically supporting 30-day live events and 90-day new store opening campaigns), generate measurable results, and do it all profitably enough to sustain an ongoing program that can scale nationally.
Alejandro Jauregui, VP of Digital Experience at IMM, explains the fundamental economics: "The margins on a single campaign are very small and it is a volume game. You need to be able to have enough campaigns running at any given time to make it meaningful so that we can see a return on it and still show the results."
Navigating the Manual Campaign Creation Impossibility
Traditional manual campaign creation made local store marketing economically impossible at scale. Jauregui believes to launch 100 campaigns in a single day using conventional methods, IMM would need approximately 20 people each building five campaigns, consuming most of their workday. The math simply didn't work. Labor costs for manual campaign creation would consume any margin on small-budget local campaigns. Without automation, IMM couldn't profitably deliver the local marketing programs Verizon's stores needed.
Solving the Platform Algorithm Problem
Google and Meta's algorithms naturally optimize for overall campaign performance, which means driving impressions, clicks, and conversions to the highest-performing locations. For Verizon co-op and MDF programs, this creates an unacceptable outcome. When individual store owners invest their marketing dollars, they need to drive traffic to their specific location, not feed the algorithm's preference for neighboring stores that happen to perform better. Traditional radius targeting also creates overlapping store territories, wasted budget on irrelevant geography, and internal competition.
Selecting nCentiv as the Automation Partner
IMM needed a technology platform that could automate campaign creation at scale while maintaining the customization and strategic targeting that drives results. After evaluating options, they partnered with nCentiv to transform the economics and execution of local store marketing.
nCentiv's platform checked all the critical boxes: automated campaign creation for hundreds of campaigns in minutes (versus thousands of manual hours), dynamic customization with store-specific addresses, names, offers, and creative, dedicated budget allocation ensuring each store receives fair representation, multi-level reporting from individual store performance to franchisee and corporate rollups, and brand compliance through locked creative libraries with pre-approved campaigns.
Rapid Implementation and Enterprise Custom Feature Development
What distinguished the nCentiv partnership was the collaborative innovation that extended the platform's capabilities specifically for the Verizon program. IMM's team worked directly with nCentiv's engineering team, which Jauregui finds to be “the best engineers” he’s ever worked with. The partnership enabled rapid iteration on critical features:
“As technologists we love solving business problems using technology,” said Seth Temko, co-founder of nCentiv. “Agencies tend to be highly capable of using technology but lack internal resources to build their own. IMM helped us create enterprise capabilities that solved problems for a Fortune 40 company, generated healthy revenues, and created a unique value proposition that Verizon values. That’s a win - win - win and helps us build differentiated high value technology.”
Innovating Beyond Simple Radius Targeting
Perhaps the most significant innovation was moving beyond traditional radius-based store targeting to advanced geographic and demographic segmentation. Instead of drawing circles around store locations, which creates overlap, internal competition, and wasted spend on irrelevant areas, IMM and nCentiv developed custom targeting zones using block group data, demographic information, and income levels. Jauregui explains the approach: "We've been able to use maps and add other data layers that we've pulled in from public databases, to understand demographics of neighborhoods, and then build out different targeting sectors that are not circles, that are more like rhombuses and not centered on the stores but instead the most attractive neighborhoods." This creates hyper-targeted "virtual stores" that map to actual customer density and demographics rather than arbitrary geographic circles, ensuring campaigns don't cannibalize each other while targeting the most relevant audiences for each location.
Delivering Speed, Scale, and Operational Excellence
With nCentiv automation, IMM transformed campaign launch economics from impossible to profitable. What could have taken thousands of manual hours to execute now takes minutes, fundamentally changing the agency economics of local store marketing. "What will take hundreds, if not thousands of hours to do, nCentiv is able to roll out within a matter of minutes," Jauregui notes. "You just start seeing the campaigns popping up line by line and it's really incredible." This year alone, IMM has launched over 3,000 local digital campaigns for Verizon stores through the nCentiv platform. By eliminating low-value, high-effort campaign creation tasks, the agency can now profitably deliver small-budget campaigns that generate meaningful results for individual stores. The programs run two different formats tailored to store needs:
Business Outcomes for Store Owners and Franchisees
Individual store owners now have access to sophisticated local digital marketing that was previously available only to major brands with large marketing budgets.
Each campaign is customized to the specific store with proper address display, phone numbers, Google Maps integration, and store-specific offers. Weekly performance reports go directly to store owners, franchisees, and corporate stakeholders, providing transparency at every level.
For franchisees investing co-op and MDF dollars, the program delivers critical peace of mind: their marketing investment drives traffic exclusively to their location, not to neighboring stores. The advanced targeting ensures budget efficiency by focusing on the most relevant geographic areas and demographics rather than wasting spend on arbitrary radius circles.
Campaign performance metrics demonstrate the value. While specific CTR and conversion numbers vary by location and program type, the sophisticated targeting and automated optimization consistently outperform traditional local marketing approaches, justifying continued investment from both individual store owners and corporate MDF programs.
A Partnership Model for Agency Success
The IMM-nCentiv partnership demonstrates how agencies can profitably scale programs that seem economically impossible through strategic technology partnerships.
"Us caring for the franchisees makes them happy," Jauregui explains. "And you know, it builds a relationship and true partnership. It's like we figured out how to build something that's going to sustain them long term."
By automating low-value, high-effort tasks, nCentiv enables IMM to focus on high-value strategic work: advanced targeting strategies, creative optimization, performance analysis, and client relationship management. The technology handles campaign execution at scale while IMM focuses on the strategic thinking that drives results.
"We've seen really great results with nCentiv for our clients," says Jauregui. "Being able to launch 100 unique campaigns with different messaging and creative, and see the platform generate them all with a high level of accuracy, has been monumental."
At nCentiv, we value our customers and know how integral they are to our success. That's why we are eager to connect with you and hear your feedback.
We are committed to providing the best possible support and resources to help you succeed. So let's work together to increase your customers.
