30+ years of evolution; always client-centric,
results driven, future focused

Taking marketing to a new level.

For more than three decades we have provided the world’s best research, marketing, creative and advertising services to hundreds of companies in more than 50 countries, large and small.

We have helped clients weather crises and emerge stronger, develop and launch new products, brand and rebrand, sell their products and polish their images.

But the real smartworks story isn’t how long we’ve been around, but how we have continually evolved to provide our clients with the latest and best services.

  • Infocus was started in the late 1980s by Lois Kaufman, Ph.D., then a professor at Rutgers and New York University (NYU), providing public relations, advertising and marketing.
  • American Opinion Research (AOR) was founded in the early 90s to fill the growing need for quality research. AOR now works in more than 50 countries. Along with AOR came CEO Tony Casale, former Pulitzer Prize finalist, winner of the international Robert F. Kennedy Prize for Excellence in Journalism, a founding editor of USA Today, Research Director of Gannett Co. Inc., ad one of the nation’s top market researchers and pollsters.
  • Environmental Research Associates (ERA) was founded to help B2B and B2C marketers understand changing attitudes toward the environment and create environmentally-focused marketing programs for clients including Ford, Dow Chemical, Sunoco, McDonalds, Coca-Cola, 3M, the U.S. Energy Department and many others.
  • The three companies were joined in the mid-90s under the umbrella Integrated Marketing Services reflecting the growing integration of our services. While each company stands on its own, we increasingly blended services (research, marketing, design, digital marketing, and others) forming multi-disciplinary teams with the resources to serve clients from the beginning on a program to the end; from concept to launch.

Now we are smartworks, signaling another evolution of our company. We have always been smart, but now taking marketing to a new standard; a more precise, data-driven approach merging science, creativity, technology and experience in new ways and using new tools, such as augmented and virtual reality, to tell clients’ stories in more vivid, compelling and convincing ways.

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Our history