SD Marketing

David Morgan is co-founder and Vice President of SD Marketing, a firm he runs alongside President Alex Chavez. Morgan serves as the first point of contact for most new engagements and positions the agency as a specialist shop serving the electronic security industry exclusively. Before focusing on security, Morgan spent much of his career in performance and direct-response marketing for large consumer brands, including stints connected to Experian's FreeCreditReport.com, United Online's NetZero, Adidas, ProFlowers, and Guthy-Renker. That pedigree sits on the data-and-channels side of the business. His partner Chavez comes from the opposite pole — brand, design, and entertainment work for Hard Rock Hotel, Mandalay Bay, MTV, and Ed Hardy — and started his own agency at 21. The two met through their wives, who had been longtime friends, and eventually combined their backgrounds into a single security-focused practice roughly nine years ago. The agency's thesis borrows directly from Seth Godin's 'purple cow': security dealers, integrators, and manufacturers largely market the same way with the same messages, so the route to growth is differentiation rather than spend. SD Marketing operationalizes that through lead generation for integrators and dealers, channel marketing for manufacturers trying to reach the roughly 15,000 security companies in the U.S., and a long-running 'Marketing Madmen' column in SDM Magazine that doubles as the firm's thought-leadership engine. The company reports having worked with over 300 security dealers, integrators, manufacturers, and service providers worldwide, and has partnered with three large dealer programs.