The most revealing number in the MRS Unlimited portfolio is not 25, the agency’s age, or 2,500, the number of projects it says it has completed. It is 75 percent. In 2024, BMW asked the Jamestown, North Carolina, firm to rethink a familiar object: the printed directory handed out at its Supplier Diversity Xchange. MRS built an app. Three out of four attendees adopted it.
There is a small theory of marketing inside that result. A directory is a container. An app can be a tool. MRS put conference information, schedules, attendee and exhibitor directories, lead collection and a scavenger hunt in one place. The old format had not burst into flames. It had simply stopped expressing what BMW wanted the event to say about BMW: that this was a technologically capable company, convening suppliers for useful exchanges.
That distinction - between putting a message in front of people and giving them something that fits their circumstances - is where MRS has made its home. Larry Fairley founded Marketing Resource Solutions in 2000, after a career that included direct-marketing programs for RJ Reynolds and Nabisco. The name eventually became MRS Unlimited. The proposition stayed unusually consistent: help institutions cross the space between their own language and the lived context of multicultural audiences.
One agency, several kinds of translation
“Full service” is one of advertising’s baggiest phrases. At MRS, it describes a sequence more than a shopping list. Research and consumer insight inform a strategy. Strategy determines the name, message and visual identity. Those choices travel into websites, email, social media, video and live events. The same firm can also work on supplier-diversity programs, inclusion training and organizational planning.
The clients sit in different worlds: Denny’s, BMW, United Methodist Communications, the Arts Council of Greater Greensboro, healthcare organizations and manufacturers. Their shared problem is not simply the need for an advertisement. It is the danger of institutional speech landing with a thud. The audience may not see itself in the language. It may distrust the messenger. Or the campaign may ask for attention without offering any useful exchange.
“We amplify brands through the lens of diversity and inclusion.”MRS Unlimited’s value proposition
The competitive alternatives are easy to name: a large generalist agency, a boutique multicultural shop, an events producer, a DEI consultancy or the client’s own marketing department. MRS’s distinction is that it can join those specialties. A cultural insight does not have to be handed off before the copy is written, the page is built or the event doors open. The agency can serve as an extension of an internal department - or, for a smaller organization, become the department.
The scholarship was the product
Denny’s Hungry for Education program makes the method easier to see. Beginning in 2011, MRS helped the restaurant chain combine two public concerns: childhood hunger and access to college. Students propose workable solutions to hunger; the strongest ideas earn scholarships and can be put into practice. The program has awarded more than $2.6 million in partnership with nonprofit organizations.
The logo began with four plain objects gathered during discovery: stars, a pencil, a fork and a plate. But the important design decision was larger than the mark. Instead of asking young people to admire a corporate cause, the program asked them to contribute an idea. It made participation the center of the brand story.
In 2019, that platform went on the road as the “Ultimate HBCU Game Day Experience.” MRS took the rhythms already present at historically Black colleges and universities - bands, majorettes, cheerleaders, dancers and pep rallies - and built a seven-campus tour around them. Attendees entered through a Denny’s-branded tunnel filled with fog. There were games, a photo booth, talent competitions and a DJ. Email and social-influencer promotion produced more than 100,000 impressions; the agency reported more than one million impressions overall.
This is the amusing part of the portfolio: the agency that talks about cultural strategy also knows that sometimes you need a fog machine. The serious point is that neither works alone. Cultural fluency without production discipline becomes a clever presentation. Production without fluency becomes a branded interruption.
A four-part method worth borrowing
MRS does not publish a single proprietary framework, but its case studies reveal a repeatable order of operations. It is useful precisely because it is less glamorous than “go viral.”
BMW’s tension was the mismatch between a technology brand and a paper-heavy attendee experience. Denny’s needed relevance with minority communities and a credible way to connect hunger, education and restaurant traffic. United Methodist Communications faced a different translation problem: many members did not understand how the church’s Connectional Giving system distributed donations. MRS created “Did You Know?” content that posed questions across social media, websites and newsletters, then sent readers to landing pages for the answers.
What can another organization copy? Start before the creative brief hardens. Name the misunderstanding or mismatch. Bring community partners into the mechanism of the program, not merely the distribution list. Make the audience an actor: submit an idea, collect a lead, attend an experience, find an answer. Then choose the media.
Where MRS fits
MRS occupies a middle ground in the agency market. It is broad enough to handle an integrated campaign and specialized enough to recognize that “the general market” is often a polite name for an assumed audience. Its sweet spot is an organization with a real institutional objective - supplier participation, scholarship applications, donation understanding, healthcare engagement, brand renewal - and an audience that cannot be reached credibly by swapping faces in the final artwork.
The BMW app offers the cleanest summary. MRS had supported the Supplier Diversity Xchange since 2017, designing directories, signage and collateral. Seven years of context came before the digital shift. The printed directory was not discarded because paper is embarrassing. It was replaced because the event had acquired a new job: demonstrate technological acumen while making a complicated day easier to navigate.
A 75 percent adoption rate does not prove every attendee loved every feature. It proves that a substantial majority found enough utility to opt in. In an industry skilled at producing impressions, that is a pleasingly unfashionable result: people used the thing.