Interactive Financial Marketing Group Announces New Additions to Management Team

Fresh Talent Brings Over 35 Years of Experience Working in Auto Retail, F&I

RICHMOND, Va. – August 10, 2011 – Interactive Financial Marketing Group (IFMG), a division of Dominion Enterprises, today announced that it has added two automotive industry veterans to its company leadership in a move that augments its ability to support its dealer partners.

Nicole Diamond joins IFMG as Dealer Relationship Manager, taking over special financing for Interactive Financial Acceptance (IFA).  Diamond has spent 16-plus years in consumer and automotive finance where she supported car dealers through both prime and subprime lending. As a result, she is well-versed in F&I process and will be focused on offering dealers situational lending in the 26 states that IFA covers.

Chris Smith comes to IFMG as its National Sales Manager for the Carloan.com Dealer Network. He brings nearly 20 years of experience in sales management, with the majority of it in running a regional automotive sales operation. Smith’s primary area of focus will be working with Carloan.com dealers to maximize the success of their marketing programs.

“These additions to our team add to our strong heritage of serving the dealer community,” said Tom Feary, General Manager of IFMG. “Nicole and Chris have been in the trenches as dealers or with dealers for most of their careers.  We expect a high contribution towards the superior service that our industry demands.”

About Interactive Financial Marketing Group:

Interactive Financial Marketing Group (IFMG) is a pioneer in lead generation, validation and management services for the automotive industry.  By focusing on innovative approaches to lead generation since its inception in 1989, IFMG has developed a family of brands that includes hundreds of the most recognized Internet addresses and vanity phone numbers such as Carloan.com, Autoloan.com, 1-800-CAR-LOAN® and 1-800-AUTO-LOAN®.

Interactive Financial Marketing Group is a division of Dominion Enterprises. For more company information, contact IFMG at 800-222-8374 or visit www.interactivefmg.com. For more information about IFMG products and services, visit www.carloanco.com.

About Interactive Financial Acceptance:

Through its network of dealers and lenders in 26 states, Interactive Financial Acceptance (IFA) has the resources necessary to facilitate situational lending for customers who might otherwise be unable to find an automotive loan. Based in Richmond, Virginia, IFA is a division of Dominion Enterprises. For more information on lending guidelines and rates by state, visit www.ifalending.com or call (866) 229-5744.

About Dominion Enterprises

Dominion Enterprises is a leading marketing services company serving the automotive, enthusiast and commercial vehicle, real estate, apartment rental, travel and employment industries. The company’s businesses provide a comprehensive suite of technology-based marketing solutions including Internet advertising, lead generation, CRM, website design and hosting, and data management services. The company has more than 60 market-leading websites reaching more than 20.9 million unique visitors monthly, and more than 280 magazines with a weekly circulation of 2.4 million. Headquartered in Norfolk, Va., the company has 3,300 employees in more than 186 offices nationwide. For more information, visit www.dominionenterprises.com.

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Amy Taggart is the Marketing Manager for Interactive Financial Marketing Group

Interactive Financial Marketing Group Processes Five Millionth Auto Loan Application

Milestone marks eight years of growth in auto finance lead generation

Richmond, VA – February 1, 2011 – Interactive Financial Marketing Group (IFMG), a division of Dominion Enterprises, today announced it has distributed 5,000,000 online auto finance loan applications to its Carloan.com dealer network.

The key to achieving this significant accomplishment is the diverse network of auto finance web sites and partnerships that IFMG manages, combined with a proprietary lead routing system. Given the efficiency of its robust routing engine technology, IFMG has validated, screened and distributed an average of 625,000 car loan applications per year since the launch of the system. It achieved this historic level despite the recent economic downturn that has adversely impacted both the automotive and finance industries.

Prior to building the online marketing systems that it currently uses for lead generation, IFMG kicked off its operations in 1989 using vanity phone numbers. Customized 800 numbers like 1-800-CAR-LOAN and 1-800-AUTO-LOAN generated auto finance applications that were then delivered to its dealer partners. The 5,000,000 application mark does not include applications that were received and processed before IFMG made the leap to the Internet in 2002.

“This is a landmark event in the history of IFMG,” said Tom Feary, General Manager of IFMG. “It reflects the trust that car buyers have in our auto finance websites such as Carloan.com, and the level of service our dealer network provides to those seeking a vehicle through financing.  We’re looking forward to many more strong years connecting dealers to car buyers ready to be financed.”

IFMG invites auto dealers to visit Carloan.com at booth #2046S at the NADA Convention and Expo, Feb 5-7, 2011 in San Francisco to learn how they can join the Carloan.com dealer network.

About Interactive Financial Marketing Group:

Interactive Financial Marketing Group (IFMG) is a pioneer in lead generation, validation and management services for the automotive industry.  By focusing on innovative approaches to lead generation since its inception in 1989, IFMG has developed a family of brands that includes hundreds of the most recognized Internet addresses and vanity phone numbers such as Carloan.com, Autoloan.com, 1-800-CAR-LOAN® and 1-800-AUTO-LOAN®.

Interactive Financial Marketing Group is a division of Dominion Enterprises. For more company information, contact IFMG at 800-222-8374 or visit www.interactivefmg.com. For more information about IFMG products and services for car dealers, visit www.carloanco.com.

About Dominion Enterprises

Dominion Enterprises is a leading marketing services company serving the automotive, enthusiast and commercial vehicle, real estate, apartment rental, and employment industries. The company’s businesses provide a comprehensive suite of technology-based marketing solutions including Internet advertising, lead generation, CRM, Web site design and hosting, and data management services. The company has more than 40 market-leading Web sites reaching more than 17.6 million unique visitors monthly, and more than 280 magazines with a weekly circulation of 2.4 million. Headquartered in Norfolk, Va., the company has 4,900 employees in more than 186 offices nationwide. For more information, visit www.dominionenterprises.com.

Tom is IFMG's General Manager. When he's not noodling through honest spreadsheets, he's at home with his wife, two girls, and BBQ. Comment on his posts and he'll share a recipe. You can follow him on Twitter @tomfeary.

The Beauty of a Generic Collection

We’re all about providing relevant content to our visitors at carloan.com, and recently I was tasked with creating a windows service to provide car loan related news for our website from a partner. Our programming environment is a mixture of C# and VB.NET, mostly VB.NET, and while this doesn’t usually cause issues in this project it did.

It turns out that C# does not like the VB.NET idiosyncratic “Optional ByRef” argument (and neither does Kevin) which several methods in our SQL library use, so I decided to create a new data reader method which would forego the Optional ByRef argument and also utilize a Generic List instead of a Sorted List.

What is so special about a Generic List? Listen closely because I am only going to say this once: it is a strongly typed list of objects.

The purpose of a data reader method is essentially to get data out of a database. We accomplish this deep in the bowels of our code by passing some parameters to a stored procedure and executing it. Easy. Programming 101.

In the original data reader method those parameters are stored in a Sorted List like this:

And then this collection is passed to the data reader, which processes it like this:

There is nothing inherently wrong with that implementation, but see how much cleaner (and prettier) it is to use a Generic List of the SQLParameter object.

Ok, so, maybe this is only cool to me, but how about another example? The original scope of this project was to process an XML feed of news articles. In the old, really old, days of development we may have processed the feed and dumped the results into an array, probably even multi-dimensional. Looping through that array later on to save to a database or perform other operations on individual rows was messy and prone to errors. For example:

In the previous example, not only can it get complicated fast, but if you’re not making sure that articleId and categoryId are in fact numeric before passing it off to your database then you’ll have problems.

Fast-forward to 2010, where the multi-dimensional array has been banished to a deserted island in the Pacific, we can handle processing this feed in a type-safe, object-oriented manner. Case in point:

No, it’s not quite that simple, a bunch of cool stuff happens in the Save method that I have chosen to omit for brevity, but pretty close, and most importantly, it’s pretty.

Andy Gagne is a Web Developer for Interactive Financial Marketing Group.

Over the past couple of months we have introduced you to some of our awesome team here at Interactive Financial Marketing Group. In case you missed any we have listed them below with their Employee Spotlight posts. We look forward to posting more spotlights as we grow. Enjoy!

Management:

Tom Feary
Brian Guillano
Amy Taggart
Dorothy Juntunen

Development:

Kevin Boylan
Andy Gagne
Sangeetha Bagathi
Dinesh Prakashchand

Operations:

Scott Siefert
Zenaida Burnette
Rosa Gallegos

For profiles on our sales team click here.

Rosa Luciano is the Marketing Coordinator and blogger extraordinaire for Interactive Financial Marketing Group. Follow her on Twitter @RozaLuciano

“Don’t Make Me Think” is one of my favorite books when it comes to designing websites. The book talks about how to design websites that are easy to understand and navigate. With our website, we exercise a lot of the ideas in the book to help our consumers find information like our car loan calculator, car loan news, and local car loan advisors.

When designing a website, the ease-of-use is a great feature, but providing useful content is just as important. To provide useful content, Carloan.com uses IP detection algorithm to detect consumer’s location to match them up with the nearest car loan advisors so they can get the best deal. We use AJAX, WCF, and other cutting edge technologies like Google map API to display car loan advisors dynamically.  We are constantly updating and testing our sites so that consumers have a better experience navigating our sites.

One thing that we pay careful attention to is the security of our consumer’s information. We use 128 bits encryption technology and also encrypt their information to ensure that their information is safe and secure when they are applying.

So, what’s next for us?  We are always working hard to improve our sites and we will be upgrading our Carloans.com and Autoloan.com sites in the future to provide more features and services to our consumers. We have many new ideas for our sites and anticipate implementing them soon.

Stay in touch! We recently published a car loan news section where users can subscribe to our news feed through RSS as well as read content we post on Facebook and Twitter.

William Lee is part of our development team here at IFMG.

Will Lee is a Web Developer for Interactive Financial Marketing Group.