New York, New York (big city of dreams…and really smart people)
After selling the small marketing company I started six years earlier with my great friend Steven Roberts, I went to work in the advertising big leagues in my favorite building in the world, The Chrysler Building. I say big leagues because Bates Worldwide, my new employer, was owned by Saatchi & Saatchi Holdings, one of the top three largest advertising conglomerates in the world at that time. The Saatchi brothers of London were legends in the business and created a monstrous global network of agencies reminiscent of the British Empire. It must have been fate mixed with luck that I walked through the doors of that iconic Art Deco structure in December of 1993 and saw my name listed in the lobby on the building directory of one of the most recognizable buildings in the world (in white plastic letters pushed into a black background – this was before the computerized flat screen building directories common today). Robert Mazzucchelli, President, Bates Promotion Group. At thirty-one, I had made the starting lineup on a major league advertising team and couldn’t wait to get in the game.
In addition to being a divisional president, responsible for one of the newest and fastest growing areas of the business, I was also one of the youngest members of the executive committee of Bates North America, which gave me a up close look at the inner workings of Madison Avenue during some very formative years of my career. Prior to that, my small agency worked in a mostly consulting and project management capacity with some great clients, but we had a tiny staff and no departments full of experienced people like I now had at my disposal. One of the first things I learned at Bates, besides the fact that I was going to have to deal with some monumental egos, was that the place was filled with really smart people. In almost every meeting I attended during the first few weeks, I was impressed with the depth and breadth of thinking. This was the agency that coined the term “Unique Selling Proposition”, had made the famous Coca Cola “I want to teach the world to sing…” commercial, had built the Miller Lite beer business with the celebrity athlete-filled campaign “Tastes Great, Less Filling”, had built Avis Rent-a-Car with the slogan “We Try Harder” and was working on hundreds of great brands and campaigns around the world when I joined the company. Many of the older executives were around when those iconic campaigns were created, so it was like getting close to a bit of the magic of a great era in advertising. It was very inspirational and a bit intimidating at times. But I loved it.
The biggest lesson I learned in those early days at Bates was that being around lots of smart people every day, meeting after meeting made me better. There was no place to hide. You either raised your game, or got left behind. You either delivered great ideas, or they found someone else who could. I loved the high energy, pressure cooker environment that kept you on your toes all the time. My first twenty-four months in that job were some of the biggest professional growth years of my life, and while dealing with the bureaucracy of a giant $2 billion global company was sometimes frustrating, the learning opportunities far outweighed the inconveniences for an ambitious thirty-something executive.
New York was certainly my big city of dreams, and I thank all the smart people who forced me to up my game. I might not have made it without you.
P.S. Special points to anyone that knows the song reference in the title of this post. Hint: 1983
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