Archive for June, 2008
Friday, June 13th, 2008
We merged once more, this time with Eurocom (the other France-based agency group from my HCM days) and its New York agency Della Femina McNamee, and became Messner Vetere Berger McNamee Schmetterer (MVBMS) Euro RSCG. A couple of years later I was asked to become chairman and CEO of Euro ...
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Thursday, June 12th, 2008
A few years passed. We were reunited with clients from our former lives (yes, including Volvo). We connected with new ones, among them Nasdaq and New Balance. By age nine, we had grown to 16 partners and 350 other really talented people, and a lot of people had written about ...
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Wednesday, June 11th, 2008
Soon MCI had such a solid relationship with its customers that it could offer what I would consider the first long-distance brand ever: Friends & Family. That invocation of intimacy was possible for MCI. For AT&T? No way.
This account was significant for another reason: It defined the way we work ...
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Tuesday, June 10th, 2008
As we grew, our offices even looked different from those of our competitors. We had a computer on every desk. We were, I think, the first agency to use e-mail. We certainly didn’t have to; there were only 10 of us—we could have yelled across the room! And we were ...
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Monday, June 9th, 2008
The man on the phone was Ron Berger. In 1986, Ron and two of his colleagues from Ally & Gargano, Tom Messner and Barry Vetere, had joined with Wally Carey Jr. to found Messner Vetere Berger Carey. Ron, Tom, and Barry had not only shared responsibility for creative direction at ...
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Friday, June 6th, 2008
In the fall of 1984 I left Scali McCabe Sloves and began a journey into the “real” world of advertising. It was a wonderful, eye-opening experience. Another inflection point. The realization that the world of creativity is really that—and that what was happening in London and Paris and Brazil was ...
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Thursday, June 5th, 2008
During those years, I also had three different experiences of what agency life is like—working in a small agency, a midsize one, and eventually a big one. They all had the same name: Scali McCabe Sloves. In 1974 Advertising Age named Scali Agency of the Year,2 and I moved from ...
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Wednesday, June 4th, 2008
For 13 years at Scali, from 1971 to 1984, I worked with a legion of brilliant colleagues and a stream of great clients: Castrol, Conair, Continental Airlines, Data General, Maxell, Nikon, Olivetti, Perdue, Pioneer, Playboy, Sharp, Singer, Sperry Corporation, Texas Air, Volvo, Warner Amex Cable. Creative colleagues included Ray Alban, ...
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Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008
That is how I found myself standing on a chicken farm in Salisbury, Maryland, listening to a curious-looking man named Frank Perdue tell us about the excellence of his flock. He impressed on us that his chickens were better than all the others, and that meant he could charge a ...
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Monday, June 2nd, 2008
I asked myself: All other things being equal, where can I do something that matters, something that suits my ’60s sense of social responsibility? And I kept coming back to Volvo, a company with social responsibility in its DNA. Sweden should not be able to support a car company—the entire ...
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