Akamai Marketing Group is a leading local media company meeting the changing needs of consumers, advertisers and local businesses.

We keep consumers connected to the best restaurants, bars, shops, spas, professional services and local businesses across North America with our innovative local marketing programs and technologies.

Akamai Marketing Group is a marketing firm dedicated to the development of next generation gift, loyalty, rewards and fundraising programs. Our technology and proven marketing concepts work to synergize the convergence of digital media, social networking and cause marketing. We work extensively in the small to medium sized business sector helping to increase sales and frequency throughout the surrounding community.

Independent locally-owned businesses are essential to a vital local economy. They use the goods and services of other local businesses, serve as community hubs, and are vital components of healthy neighborhoods and strong city centers. They're where the locals go. They're owned by our friends and neighbors, or maybe even by you.

Akamai Marketing Group is dedicated to helping communities and independent businesses to thrive. We work closely with local business owners to offer great deals on products and services to their local communities.

Help Your Local Economy

Akamai Marketing Group encourages citizen engagement in community social, cultural and economic well being by involving them with the backbone of the community, their local businesses.

When local business thrives, communities thrive.

Maintaining Community Character

When asked to name our favorite restaurant, cafe, or shop, it's typically a unique local business. Your local paper's "Best of" poll is proof. Those businesses define our sense of place, but we often forget their survival depends on our patronage.

Homegrown Businesses, Not Global Chains, Build Community Prosperity

While mega-corporations and their entourage of think tanks and public relations firms persuade us of their benefits, the benefits of doing business locally often go unappreciated or ignored while the monies leave our communities.

We have much to gain personally from the knowledge, personal service, and quality offered by independent businesses, but the economic benefits are less obvious. Independent local businesses typically hire local designers, sign makers and attorneys to get started. Whether employing people in-house or hiring other local firms, they create opportunities for insurance brokers, computer consultants, advertising agencies and others.

In contrast, global chains typically open a clone of their other units. Locally, they employ many clerks and cashiers, but provide few higher paid jobs and use minimal local goods and services. Meanwhile, profits exit town to corporate headquarters. Thus, local independent merchants recirculate three or more times as much of each dollar in the local economy as big box stores, a multiplier effect that drives economic growth far more than attracting outside entities.

Further, local businesses also return a greater percentage of sales to civic events and community causes, though you don't often see them photographed with table-sized checks to call attention to themselves.

Understanding the multiplier effect and the benefits of supporting a local business is crucial to intelligent, sustainable development in our communities.

Our Goal in Each Community

Akamai Marketing Group will work to raise awareness of the power of consumer purchasing decisions, publicize the full value offered by independent businesses and shift consumer spending to local busineses by:

• Increasing community awareness of the value of doing business with locally owned independent businesses through new stories, editorials, broadcast interviews, cooperative advertising, Presentations to civic groups and educational institutions and other promotional efforts.
• Marketing member businesses to the public through the Ispotrewards Incentive Programs that provide shoppers with an easy way to find local businesses that sell needed goods and services.
• Building recognition of the Ispotrewards name and logo to help consumers identify independently owned businesses in their community.
• Building rapport with key media and government officials to make future reporting and local policies more responsive to the needs of locally owned independent businesses.
• Organizing group purchases and cooperative promotions and negotiating affordable advertising rates with participating marketing companies.
• Working cooperatively with government officials when laws or government plans threaten the interests of locally owned independent businesses.
• Nourishing the local community through participation and organization of public events.
• Supporting the community organizations that nurture and provide service and goodwill to our community.
• Working toward the prevention of the mass displacement of community-based businesses by national and international chains.

The Akamai Marketing Group Mission

Akamai Marketing Group strives to support and sustain quality of life within local communities around North America. We do this by helping to prevent the displacement of locally owned, independent businesses, ensuring ongoing opportunities for entrepreneurs, and advancing citizen engagement in directing the development of their local community.

Our unique, business is based on a proven business model, and consists of both citizen members and local, independent business owners. Akamai Marketing Group is an organization of men and women who believe it's vital to keep independent business alive and thriving in North America.

Akamai Marketing Group is based on a nationally proven Independent Business model that enriches and empowers locally owned independent businesses, their employees and owners through three core tenants:

1. EDUCATION. Ispotrewards informs citizens of the value provided by community-based businesses and their importance to the local economy, culture and the social fabric of our unique country.
2. GROUP IDENTITY. We do promotion, advertising and marketing to elevate the collective profile of our community-based businesses, which helps level the playing field and brings them some of the market advantages that corporate chains and non-community-based businesses enjoy.
3. RELATIONSHIP BUILDING. Ispotrewards creates strong relationships with local governments and the media to influence local policy and decision-making by giving a voice to the locally owned independent business community.

Akamai Marketing Group seeks to improve the long-term sustainability of the local, independent economy by promoting the region's attractiveness as a culturally diverse, recreationally unique community. It does this by communicating the great importance of supporting locally owned, independent businesses to both residents and visitors. It also encourages earth-friendly business practices. Akamai Marketing Group achieves these goals by developing and/or suggesting viable solutions, which strengthen the functionality and spirit of the independent business throughout North America.