My work passion is creating irresistibly engaging, highly differentiating, enduringly indelible brand experiences and experience marketing programs that drive business growth through the roof.
I've had the privilege of doing this for and with an incredible array of very talented people and leading brands, both B2B and B2C. I've done it in small agencies, inside a Fortune 500 company (EMC), and in a really large agency -- actually the largest and leading experience marketing agency in the world -- George P. Johnson, where I've been since 1999. GPJ is ranked #1 in the Event Marketing category by Advertising Age. I'm fortunate that I've had the chance to do ground breaking work with lots of the best, largest and most exciting brands on the planet.
Depending on the state of the world economy, I'm on the road anywhere from 50 to 90% of the time, working, learning, and sharing. It's inspiring collaborating with some of the best and brightest minds all over the globe and seeing the results play out in the marketing dashboards and balance sheets of some really cool companies. The real high though comes from knowing that we're not only growing businesses, we're doing it by putting really useful products and services into the hands of people who value them because they improve their businesses or personal lives. (I never have subscribed to the idea that sales and marketing is about convincing people to buy things they don't need.)
We've implemented the largest global agency of record event marketing program for IBM, and won lots of awards for it. I was privileged to lead the strategy work on that account for the first three years of the relationship and drove results improvements across all business units, including one where we increased return 10 fold.
I've spoken at a huge number of marketing and event industry conferences and academic institutions, and have been quoted in many of the usual marketing industry and business media including Ad Age, Forbes, Fortune, USA Today, etc.
Experience-driven engagement marketing is so new that it's not really taught anywhere as a full discipline. So this has been -- and continues to be -- a great adventure in self instruction, collaboration and innovation.