You would have to go back to the Internet’s very early days to beat Office Depot. The office supply company was a pioneer in e-commerce technology, personalization, and marketing when Bill Clinton was still in his first term, and Google was just an algorithm. It was 1994 when the company launched its site as a standalone business that was trying to find creative ways for small-to-medium sized businesses to buy consistently from Office Depot instead of Office Max or Staples.

More than 15 years into its Internet life, Office Depot is in the third week of its “Heroes” campaign. The current TV spot shows a neighborhood barber shop reactive to a fancy hairstylist across the street by getting new signage and better software at the Office Depot because he can’t match the $6 prices. That campaign, in addition to its online and social media efforts, will keep Office Depot in the forefront of online and offline marketing for the chain. We caught up with Monica Luechtefeld, EVP of Direct Marketing, about the brand’s ad plans for the year.

Digiday: You try to address the needs of both Fortune 500 companies and the small-to-mid-sized business communities. How do they have different needs?

Luechtefeld: Well, SMBs are the majority of our business online and offline and we know their needs extremely well. From an operations standpoint big companies may have many office supply contracts and smaller companies enable us to be a one stop shop. From a marketing perspective we have a lot of resources for SMNs and right now we think they need to know that we’re with them in these tough times. That’s what we’ve tried to accomplish in this “Hero” campaign. We have the resources to help them survive and thrive even if some other guy with an enormous signs opens across the street.

Digiday: You also seem to have provided a lot of content over the years for the SMB community.

Luechtefeld:  Sure. Always have. We have the Web Café series which lives on our site and our Facebook page that allows SMB entrepreneurs. We’ve had webcasts on business topics that have attracted thousands of entrepreneurs, and we have whitepaper son topics like hiring and marketing tips that we archive on our website. It’s a way for us to stay in contact with our customers.  We’re on Facebook, obviously, but we also need to use our site to make sure we get to our customers that are not Facebook members.

Digiday: How do you measure your online efforts?

Luechtefeld:  We have our conventional methods of brand awareness, sales, and other performance metrics. When it comes to social media however, we tend to look at the overall affect on customer relationships and the share of customer wallet. We would like to think that our social media efforts strengthen our customer relationships.

Digiday:  How do you see your marketing efforts changing as the year progresses?

Luechtefeld:  I think we’ll do more search and more online display ads. We’re always looking to optimize each vehicle. We do a lot of testing to determine the right balance. Social media will definitely be more important as well.