W
hen Michelle Palmer joined The Marketing Arm in 2000, the Dallas-based marketing agency employed fewer than 30 people, and the number of women working in sports was relatively small. Palmer’s previous hands-on experience with sports marketing had been limited to a single deal, one in which she helped secure Tim Duncan for an SBC endorsement during his rookie year.
Michelle Palmer
THE MARKETING ARM,
PRESIDENT, SPORTS AND EXPERIENTIAL
Fast forward to this year, when Palmer was named president of sports and experiential at TMA, which now employs around 700 people, handles some of sports’ biggest spenders, and has grown from a sports shop to a full-service agency that even has a number of Super Bowl ads to its credit. Clients include State Farm and AT&T.
“We’ve grown as sports have,” Palmer said. “Sports are so big now they can be relevant for most brands.”
She’s advanced at TMA, and in the industry, from a rather inauspicious start. She was late for her first job interview at TMA and didn’t order what her interviewer suggested at lunch. She also suggested that her knowledge of sports marketing wasn’t good enough to do the job at what was then solely a sports marketing agency. She had acquired brand knowledge in her previous stops at agencies GSD&M and Bates, and at SBC/AT&T in corporate advertising, along with some genetic coding for the telecommunications industry. (Her father worked for Western Electric, a principal supplier to AT&T, a brand for which Palmer is still carrying the flag).
“Marketing isn’t something you can do singly,” Palmer said. “It has to be about unifying people as much as it is knowing a particular category. I like to think about a lot of things in new ways, and here I work across a lot of brands and lots of solutions. That’s fun for me.”
— Terry Lefton
