OfficeMax and TiVo have signed Direct Impact for marketing campaigns.

“Basically, our point of differentiation is our ability to develop and create marketing database, but more importantly, using analytics to help provide knowledge and insight to guide all marketing activities, whether direct mail, interactive call centers or whatever they may be,” said Tracey Brown, COO of Direct Impact. “That's our bread and butter, so for OfficeMax it's a very classic example of an organization that understands the value of analytics and insight.”

Growth is key for the OfficeMax campaign. Direct Impact will look at customer data to help the company decide which types of customers to chase, who to cross-sell and up-sell to and which customers should be retired.

Chosen by the DVR provider for its expertise in interactive branding, Direct Impact will deploy an interactive campaign for TiVo in early 2008. Its work with TiVo will revolve entirely around interactive media.

“We developed expertise on interactive games to drive and deepen relationships with existing customers and also to drive acquisition,” Brown pointed out. “TiVo read and heard about that and contacted us to see if we had any ideas of unique, fun, interactive games that we could develop for them.”

Brown went on to say that though TiVo has a strong existing subscriber base, it is constantly trying to acquire new customers. “We had tons of ideas of how to use interactivity with a game to meet two goals: to strengthen relationships with their existing customer base and make them more loyal, and to use a cool game to drive acquisition,” she said.

The interactive game is a new strategy for driving customer loyalty, Brown said, but TiVo has used interactive promotions, such as sweepstakes, for acquisition in the past.

Interactive will also be involved in the OfficeMax marketing. That campaign will deploy a mix of interactive, direct mail, Web and telemarketing.