exploreMedia

Pam Mashburn is the founder and president of exploreMedia, a Montgomery, Alabama-based marketing agency she started in 2006. Her path to agency ownership was unusual: Mashburn holds an Industrial & Systems Engineering degree from Georgia Tech and a Masters of Industrial Engineering from Purdue, and began her career in engineering and manufacturing. She has said that time convinced her that any initiative — internal or external — ultimately depends on how well it is marketed, a conviction reinforced by growing up in a family of marketing and advertising executives.

exploreMedia began with a narrow niche play: a welcome publication for new families moving into the River Region of central Alabama. That first product, Know the Community, seeded a publications group (which now includes CentrAL INC and exploreHVAC & Home Services) and eventually a full-service marketing agency attached to it. The thesis that runs through the firm is local-first: Alabama home-services operators, tourism clients, and regional businesses are better served by an agency embedded in the community and its print and digital distribution channels than by a national generalist.

Today exploreMedia reports serving more than 300 Alabama businesses each year, with a team that spans strategy, design, copy, and analytics, led operationally by Director of Operations and Associate Publisher Jina Miniard. The agency's HVAC and home-services focus is anchored by its exploreHVAC & Home Services publication, which doubles as a lead-generation and brand channel for the contractor clients it also serves on the digital side. The public founder narrative is warm but light on agency milestones beyond the 2006 founding date.