When D.J. Allen walked across the Thomas & Mack stage to accept his diploma, he knew exactly what he wanted to do with his freshly earned degree.
“I wanted to be a play-by-play guy for a professional baseball team,” he says. “Ever since I was 5 years old, listening to Vin Scully on the radio, I knew that that’s what I was going to do with my life.”
And Allen was adequately trained for his chosen career. A Henderson native, he’d worked as a sports reporter throughout college and landed a job as the director of media relations for the Las Vegas Stars and Las Vegas Thunder right out of college.
But then, during Major League Baseball’s winter meetings, Allen had an epiphany. “Here I am sitting on the edge of a bed in a cold hotel room in Boston, and I come to the realization that this isn’t what I want to do,” he says.
Finding out that his childhood aspiration wasn’t quite what he hoped didn’t prove devastating, though. That same night he dreamed up his next step: Imagine Marketing.
“By working in such a variety of positions so early on, I learned all aspects of media and business,” he says. “I realized that a lot of small and medium-sized businesses needed help with marketing, and that’s where I wanted to focus my efforts.”
What started in 1999 with a couple of local accounts, has since blossomed into an organization that employs 10 full-time staffers servicing more than 80 accounts in Nevada, Utah, and California. “I think marketing in the 1990s went too far to the creative side of the pendulum, leaving sound business sense behind it,” Allen says. “I wanted to establish something in between.”
He turned back to his alma mater for employees: Jeff Jensen, ’95 BS Hotel Administration; Ehsan Kaveh, Megan Lane, and Amber Schutz, all ’03 BA Communication Studies; and Melissa Rothermel, a current communications major. “We want people at Imagine who understand the market we live in, and where better to get these professionals than UNLV,” he says.
Allen also acknowledges the role that UNLV has played in his success. “I think when you graduate, you don’t realize the impact you’re going to have in your community,” he says. “Now, as I get older, I’m beginning to see more and more how important UNLV was to me as a person and as a professional.
“No other community in the nation is exhibiting so much growth, which means we as graduates can enter and help shape where we live, right now.”
