E-Mail order: Susan White, a refugee from corporate marketing, finds action in new media with the formation of a company dedicated to internet advertising
Author: Los Angeles Business Journal

WHEN Susan White was marketing jeans for a major label a few years ago, she considered a magazine advertising campaign successful if it got a 4 percent response rate.

"When that happened we would take a month off and go to Kauai to drink mai tais," she joked.

That was before the Internet and the prospect of targeting ads directly to people's inboxes.

White discovered the wonder of Internet marketing after retiring as vice president for the jeans and underwear units of Calvin Klein in 1998, when she moved to Malibu from Connecticut and started a small consulting practice.

Working with the producers of the syndicated show "Xena: Warrior Princess," White built an ad campaign around e-mail that carried video clips promoting the show.

The response blew her away: an unheard of 24 percent.

In late 2000, White formed Whitespeed, an agency specializing in e-mail promotions. Despite the inauspicious timing for starting a dot-com, she managed to get backing from Interpublic Group of Cos., the holding company of advertising giants McCann-Erickson Group and FCB Group, among others. While she wouldn't specify the investment, she said Interpublic has a 25 percent stake in the business and funneled General Motors Corp., a client, to her to help get it going.