Reid Carr, CEO and Executive Creative Director at Red Door Interactive, runs a 23-year-old agency that’s figured out how to stay relevant in a market that chews up shops and spits them out. The San Diego-based operation didn’t get there by chasing trends or pretending to be something it’s not. It got there by understanding that complex organizations need more than clever ads—they need someone who can create alignment across stakeholders, integrate tactics that actually work together, and deliver performance that matters to the business.
Red Door works with conglomerates, healthcare systems, universities—the kind of clients where everyone has an opinion and the marketing has to serve multiple masters. “We work with brands that have many different stakeholders that want to see their perspectives create some alignment, but also want to see their perspectives show up in the work,” Carr explains. It’s the kind of challenge that would make some agencies run for the hills. Red Door built a business model around it.
The agency has 15-plus-year client relationships, which don’t happen by accident. It happens when you’re constantly adapting to what the business needs and making sure marketing actually supports it. “If you don’t sell internally, you’re not sticking around,” Carr says.
How Red Door got from Navy town to 23-year agency
San Diego isn’t LA, and that’s the point. Red Door operates from what Carr calls “a Southern California perspective that’s not LA.” It’s a navy town. It’s right across the border. It’s got influence from other cultures baked into how people think. “I think we really try to adapt to a culture of inclusivity, a culture of mixed perspectives,” Carr says.
That geography shaped how the agency approaches integration—not just of tactics, but of perspectives. When you’re in the corner of the country that everyone assumes is flip-flops and surfing, you either prove you’re serious or you don’t survive. Red Door proved it. The leadership team has been together for 15 to 20 years, depending on who you’re asking. That kind of stability doesn’t happen at agencies that treat people like interchangeable parts.
The name itself originated from a belief that has been held for over two decades: you need to start interacting with your consumers, because that’s where the insight lies. “It’s in conversation,” Carr says. When they named themselves Red Door Interactive, digital was still a novelty. The “interactive” part wasn’t about technology—it was about engaging with people and genuinely listening to what they had to say.
What Red Door is known for: making complexity work
Red Door thinks in terms of solution sets, not services. The first one is customer acquisition—brand-first thinking that moves down through the funnel using integrated tactics. The second is for clients who already have a strong brand perception and need optimization tactics throughout, essentially a bottom-up approach. The third is what they call tech scaffolding: data, technology, and all the pieces that support smart decisions throughout the funnel.
But here’s what ties it together—alignment. How do you integrate all these tactics effectively while maintaining consistency with the business’s actual needs? “We put a lot on what we call our business managers,” Carr says. Other agencies might call them account executives, but Red Door gives them real accountability for presentations, selling internally within their clients’ organizations, and ensuring everyone believes the work is driving performance.
That POST framework they use—positioning, objectives, strategy, tactics and targets—isn’t just consultant talk. Every metric ladders up. If something’s green in one category and not in another, it means either the tactics are wrong or the stuff’s not working. Simple structure for complex problems.
Three things Red Door does differently
First, they treat performance marketing as just marketing. “All marketing should perform,” Carr says. The only difference now is better exposure to how it’s performing, so you’re managing to that performance. Everything ultimately connects back to two key factors: making more money or reducing costs. If you’re lucky, both.
Second, they focus on finding insights that were already there. The wow moments happen when clients say, “I never saw ourselves that way,” because Red Door talked to their best customers and found something meaningful. It’s not feeds and speeds. It’s not features and benefits. It’s telling clients something about themselves that their customers value, then finding a clever way to articulate it.
Third, they’re not chasing Super Bowl spots—though they’d take one. The most powerful work often comes from micro-targeting that creates a groundswell movement. “You found something out to the right, maybe even small group of people that just mattered so much to them that they want to tell other people about it,” Carr explains. Find that, nail it, watch it spread.
The power of being indie (and staying that way)
Independence for Red Door means flexibility and accountability, rather than bureaucracy. They’ve been hybrid since day one—all 23 years. “Be where you need to be to do the work you need to do,” Carr says. It’s about adult conversations. If you need someone to come in, you ask them and plan ahead.
But it’s also about ownership of relationships and speed of decision-making. When you’re working with complex organizations, you need to move fast while keeping everyone aligned. That’s easier when you don’t have to run everything through three layers of approval from holding companies. The work gets better when the people doing it have direct access to the clients, who can say yes or no.
That independence extends to how they think about growth. Red Door isn’t trying to be the biggest. They’re trying to be the best at solving the specific problems their clients have—the ones that come from being large, complex organizations that need marketing to actually work across multiple stakeholders and business units.
Why brands should work with Red Door
If your organization has multiple stakeholders, competing priorities, and a pressing need for someone to create alignment without compromising everything, Red Door has been doing that for 23 years. If you need customer acquisition that actually moves people through the funnel instead of just looking pretty, they’ve built a framework for that. If you need performance optimization that aligns with business objectives instead of vanity metrics, they know how to connect everything.
However, what might matter most is that they’ve figured out how to balance brand work with performance enhancements. “If you just play at that bottom of the funnel, you’re really never introducing yourself to new people,” Carr says. The insights come from conversation. The brand positioning comes from understanding what makes you different and why that difference matters to the right audiences. The performance comes from the professionalization, scaffolding, and technology that support all of it.
Plus, they’re not going anywhere. Those 15-plus-year client relationships mean they’re adapting with you, not just showing up to pitch the next shiny thing.
Why talent chooses San Diego (and Red Door)
Red Door has learning and development specialists because they want to prevent people from leaving to grow their careers elsewhere. The leadership team has been in place for 15 to 20 years because the environment encourages them to stay. “We have really talented, smart people that want to be here and have been here for a long time,” Carr says.
It’s a team environment, but not in the corporate team-building exercise way. One of their core values is “100% you.” It means bringing yourself to work. If you have a different opinion, people will respect you for that different opinion—even if it’s the only different opinion in the room. “That’s what’s going to make our work better,” Carr says.
You also get to work on very interesting brands. Not always the biggest, but you’ll recognize them. You get to work directly with the most senior folks at those organizations and have a direct impact. They’re looking for clever solutions, not blunt force advertising. And if you need to be hybrid, they invented that before it was a thing.
Plus, there’s San Diego. If you’re going to work hard—and you have to work hard to afford the lifestyle—you might as well do it somewhere with incredible tacos, a thriving food scene, and weather that makes other cities cry.
Underdogs with a 23-year track record
“I think we’re underdogs,” Carr says. They’re in the other part of Southern California, the one that sometimes gets overlooked unless you’re going on vacation. However, they possess incredible talent, clients, capabilities, and breadth. They’ve also got misfits and weirdos within the halls—the kind of people who help produce great work and make the team what it is.
That combination lets them punch above their weight. They can go head-to-head with bigger shops because they’ve spent 23 years figuring out how to make complex marketing actually work for complex organizations. They can move quickly because they’re not bogged down in holding company processes. They can retain talent because they invest in people, rather than treating them like line items.
Being an underdog in San Diego means proving yourself every single day. Red Door has been doing that for more than two decades. That’s not underdog anymore—that’s staying power.
Dear Delta, United, Alaska: Red Door has thoughts
Carr’s dream category is airlines. “I love complexity,” he says. Highly commoditized in perception, with very fine lines separating most carriers. Route challenges, diversification challenges, massive amounts of data, and opportunities to be inventive about packaging and brand story. “What route am I going to take? Do they have the route that I need?” It’s all the same NaCl, just like that salt brand they worked on once. Everyone’s offering the same thing.
But the opportunity is in understanding the consumer so well that you find the nuance that makes your product work better for their life. Or creating brand identification that makes people choose you even when the price is comparable. Airlines have all the ingredients for the kind of work Red Door does best: complexity, data, commoditization, and multiple stakeholders who all want their perspectives to show up.
So if you’re running marketing at Delta, United, Alaska—any of the major carriers—Red Door has been thinking about how to solve your problems. And they’ve got the 23-year track record with complex organizations to prove they can actually do it.
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