Kari Simpson

Kari began her career in the directory industry in 1983 and over the last 30+ years has been exposed to every aspect of the business. The first five years of Kari’s career were spent in local sales and local sales training with Old Heritage Advertising & Publishing, Inc., an independent directory publisher.

Old Heritage published approximately 140 directories in 8 states in the Midwest. During the next five years, Kari was the Southeast Regional Director for YPPA (now LSA), representing 14 states. In this position, Kari’s responsibilities included providing training and consultation to all association members in the southeast region (approximately 65 CMRs and 53 publishers) on all YPPA products and services. Kari spent the following five years with Consolidated Directories, Inc., as Vice President-National Marketing charged with increasing national sales. Under her direction, Consolidated Directories’ national revenues grew more than 500%.

Since 1998, Kari has taken DMI from a start-up company with one client to a multi-million-dollar operation representing over 45 utility and independent publishers nationwide and hundreds of local advertisers.

Kari oversees all digital marketing initiatives with a separate digital marketing staff under the Digital Marketing Inc. (DMI) umbrella in collaboration with Randia Wainwright and Bill Simpson, CFO/CTO. The DMI digital team has designed and developed over 450 websites and implemented hundreds of digital programs on behalf of the local and national clients as well as for the publishers and their clients. The digital team includes website developers and designers, a search team including SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as well as SEM (Search Engine Marketing) experts, a content writer and social media manager, a text marketing coach, and an online listings and display specialist.