Tiffany Meyers, Writer

Sicolamartin: Best Workplace

Advertising Age
A Pat on the Back Just Won’t Do at SicolaMartin
By Tiffany Meyers, September 20, 2010

Agency’s Management Style Keeps Morale High by Rewarding ‘Martians’ With Flying Saucers, Cash, Time Off

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — In ad industry years, SicolaMartin’s average employee tenure of 7.5 years is tantamount to a lifetime. “A lot of us have worked together so long that there’s a personal bond,” said Cherie Cox, president and 19-year veteran of the Austin, Texas-based agency. “We care about each other.”

They have fun, too. Stress will always be a part of business, said Diane McKinnon, senior VP-exec creative director. So a little levity goes a long way in fostering a healthy workplace. “We take the work that we do very seriously. But we don’t take ourselves so seriously. That’s a fundamental truth about who we are as an agency.”

Employees call themselves Martians, for instance, and each of their business cards features a different Martian character.

Read More »

Mckinney: Among Adage’s Best Workplaces 2010

Advertising Age
At McKinney, Nice Guys and Gals Really Do Finish First
By Tiffany Meyers | September 20, 2010

Employees Work in a Renovated Lucky Strike Factory Where Involved Partners, Philanthropy and Professional Development Are Keys to Success

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — If culture is a weapon, then McKinney follows a “no-jerk” policy (they use a stronger word) when stockpiling its proverbial arsenal, hiring talented people who also fit culturally. ”We believe that there are too few great places to work, and that culture can be a competitive weapon,” said Brad Brinegar, CEO, McKinney. “The kind of people we work with matters — and we think that you don’t have to be a jerk to be talented,” he said.

“There’s an atmosphere of possibility,” said Art Director Nick Jones. “It’s about, ‘how can we make your ideas happen?’ instead of, ‘here’s why we can’t.’” In 2009, Mr. Jones was lured from a comfortable freelance life partly because of McKinney’s commitment to training employees to work laterally across media.

At McKinney, employees work among different disciplines and get their own darn mail to encourage interaction.Still more professional development happens at the in-house Blackwell School, named for the Durham-based agency’s street address. Courses include everything from HTML5 to “How We Make Money,” a show of transparency about a topic many companies prefer to shroud in mystery.

Read More »

Building a Biennial

Step Inside Design
The Inaugural Chicago International Poster Biennial
By Tiffany Meyers

In the exhibition space of Crown Hall, Mies van der Rohe’s masterpiece on the campus of the Illinois Institute of Technology, a group of young women weave in and out of the crowd. It’s hard not to stare; they’re all wearing chic, vibrant mini-dresses whose similar A-line cuts can’t be coincidental. They look like a girl gang of fashionistas in coordinated party outfits.In fact, they’re part of the exhibition, which is kicking off the first-ever Chicago International Poster Biennial (CIPB), a free-to- enter, open-call poster competition and exhibition.

On the walls that evening: Award-winning posters designed by the biennial’s 11 jurors, some of the most celebrated designers in the world. On the models: Dresses made of fabric on which a different juror’s poster has been printed.

Here walks Michel Bouvet’s 2007 poster for the Arles photography festival. And there, in strappy heels, click-clacks John Massey’s famous 1978 Eames Soft Pad Group poster for Herman Miller. In all there are 12 dresses, the extra one representing a poster designed for the CIPB itself by Yann Legendre, who launched the biennial with designer and studio partner Lance Rutter. It’s hard to imagine how she pulled it off, but Rutter’s wife Miki Shim-Rutter made the dresses—a silent auction for them brought in just over $3600 that night—in two weeks.

But then, the CIPB itself begs the same question: How in the name of graphic design did these two practitioners, who have a fulltime staff of three (including themselves), manage to draw 1600 entries from 460 designers without a lick of marketing—and despite efforts from the angry gods of fundraising to thwart their goals? In no particular order: Tenacity, freshly forged connections and the kind of blind faith without which no one would ever undertake to do the impossible.

Read More »

Artful Tension

Chicago Tribune
Artful Tension
By Tiffany Meyers, September 5, 2010

Every art lover knows: Creative expression, whether it’s museum-quality paintings or videos by Madonna, is sometimes about making you squirm. Hang a few provocative pieces on the walls of your home, and you’ve got a different kind of challenge — how to incorporate edgy artwork into an interior that’s welcoming and happy; and whether you should take down your precious paintings when mom and dad stop by for a visit.

For Jeanne Landolt Masel, owner of the online gallery shiftartgallery.com, the answers came easy. In the loft home she shares with husband Dennis Masel, she has created a space that puts the couple’s art collection center stage. And she wholeheartedly embraces the reactions from visitors. Masel’s eclectic collection includes work by emerging artists, African masks and contemporary urban art from the likes of Paul Insect, D*Face and Banksy, the British street artist whose identity remains unknown.

In terms of temperament, Masel doesn’t fit the profile of an iconoclast. She’s cheerful and outgoing. She has stuffed animals, for goodness’ sake. But the girl does enjoy a little indictment of contemporary culture. At a recent party, her piece by D*Face, which depicts the Statue of Liberty with a clown nose and makeup, sparked debate among friends, including one whose sense of patriotism it offended.

Read More »

Woman to Watch: Tara Walpert Levy

AdAge Special Report: Women to Watch
By Tiffany Meyers, May 30, 2008
TARA WALPERT LEVY
PRESIDENT, VISIBLE WORLD

Friends of Tara Walpert Levy said she was crazy to leave her associate partnership at McKinsey & Co. to become general manager of Visible World in 2005. She had a different perspective: It “leaped out because it was exactly what advertisers had been telling me they needed for the past decade.”

Visible World’s advanced video-advertising platform delivers intelligent advertising — or “IntelliSpots” — that can be swapped and edited on the fly automatically and from any location to reflect factors such as household profile, time of day, weather and programming.

For all the angst about the TV spot’s demise, she argues that consumers aren’t anti-commercial; they just don’t like irrelevant commercials. “The onus is on advertisers to keep commercials fresh, interesting and relevant. Our technology makes that possible, ” says Ms. Walpert Levy, who was promoted to president in 2006.

Read More »

Woman to Watch: Annette Stover

AdAge Special Report: Women to Watch
By Tiffany Meyers, May 30, 2008 

ANNETTE STOVER
CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER, EURO RSCG, NEW YORK

Growing up in France, where agency logos appear at the end of TV spots, Annette Stover devised a parlor game at age 10, guessing which shop produced each commercial before its logo appeared. Almost always, the petit advertising enthusiast got it right.

Though she investigated other avenues — including a stint in the West Berlin theater industry — Ms. Stover eventually hit New York in pursuit of advertising. “One well-known headhunter told me that because of my French accent, I’d never amount to anything in U.S. advertising,” recalls Ms. Stover, who’s also fluent in German and studied modern languages at the Sorbonne.

Clearly, that crystal ball was on the fritz. Ms. Stover’s first gig: the legendary Scali McCabe Sloves, followed by posts at JWT, Morgan Anderson Consulting and, in 1997, Euro RSCG Worldwide. In 2006, Ms. Stover rose from chief of staff to her current role as chief operating officer of Euro RSCG’s New York office.

In addition to fostering agency culture, Ms. Stover, 43, focuses on operations, communications and new business. In recent years, she was a key member of the teams that won the Charles Schwab, Reckitt Benckiser and Jaguar accounts.

Read More »

Design at Warp Speed

STEP Magazine
Design at warp speed
By Tiffany Meyers 

Designer Dario Antonioni, who has created retail environments for DKNY and Ralph Lauren, among others, aims to tell stories through his spaces. In the case of travel boutique Flight 001, the narrative centers on the legendary Pan Am Flight 001, which circumnavigated the globe in the 1960s.

Antonioni’s clean materials, including Plexiglass, walnut paneling, and Pirelli tiles, recreate the bygone glamour of international travel. But beneath the store’s glimmering surfaces, undertones of wit emerge, like the cash wrap shown here, designed to look like an airport ticket counter.

When asked to name the designers who have most influenced his work, industrial designer Dario Antonioni rattles off a list of figures whose innovations fit more appropriately in airport hangars than on display at the Cooper-Hewitt. They’re people like Howard Hughes, the Wright brothers, and Burt Rutan, the aerospace engineer who decided NASA was moving too slowly toward commercial space tourism so he created his own shuttle, the SpaceshipOne.

Read More »

Culture Mosaic

AdAge
Special Report: Kids and Tweens
Culture Mosaic
 By Tiffany Meyers, March 13, 2006  

“Intraculturalism” a challenge to marketers when kids try on different ethnic identities as easily as they switch their T-shirts.

From urban to “hurban,” there’s no shortage of terms to describe marketers’ efforts to reach today’s culturally diverse youth. Now make room for one more concept: intraculturalism.

The concept comes from consulting company Cheskin, where Exec VP-Partner Stephen Palacios defines intraculturalism as the tendency for American youth to adopt traditions and attitudes of cultures other than their own in “a fluid process of identity formation.” Young people shift back and forth among cultural sensibilities continually-not just from year to year or month to month, but even sometimes from hour to hour.

Think beyond the obvious example of the white, middleclass kid who emulates hip-hop culture. Intraculturalism is seen in young people of all ethnic backgroundsencompassing children, tweens and teens, and is most prominent among Hispanic youth, Mr. Palacios says. A Hispanic child, for example, might speak Spanish at home with his family and English at school. In turn, his non-Hispanic peers of all ethnicities are increasingly “picking and choosing from the cultural sensibilities that they find attractive,” says Mr. Palacios. Intracultural kids “can be Asian at home, bicultural at school and something entirely different with their goth friends.”

This fluid notion of cultural identity differs from multiculturalism, in which distinct ethnicities are celebrated — and in the case of multicultural marketing, targeted — separately.

Read More »

Concept Farm Among Ad Age’s Best Workplaces

Advertising Age Special Report:
Best Places to Work in Advertising and Media
The Concept Farm
Only One Silo, a Real One, Exists in the Concept Farm
By Tiffany Myers, September 20, 2010

A Farmhouse Table, Open Floorplan, ‘EIEIO’ Blog, Zero-Tolerance Policy on Egos and Lack of Hierarchy Mean Farmers Are Free to Sow Ideas

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — When the Concept Farm launched in 1999, the partners used their farm analogy to support a vision for an ego-free, roll-up-your-sleeves culture. “It was about organic thinking and getting our hands dirty,” said Gregg Wasiak, partner-creative director. “Stripping things down and getting it done without silos.”

Eleven years later, employees and partners still check their egos at the barnyard door. At least one partner sits on every account, giving staffers the chance to work shoulder-to-shoulder with executives. When Art Director Robert Singh started as an intern in 2004, his direct report was none other than Partner-Creative Director Ray Mendez.

“An intern is the lowest rung on the ladder,” Mr. Singh said, “but I had the chance to hit the ground running.” These days, he hears about more hierarchical organizations and feels spoiled. “Here, you’re not running things up a ladder and having to wait. The creative directors sit a few feet away, so you can always grab someone for input. I think it’s a luxury.”

The Concept Farm, whose clients include Windstream Communications, BNY Mellon and ESPN, is all about community, starting with open floor plans in which the disciplines mingle. “We do have some doors,” Mr. Wasiak said, “but they swivel.”

Read More »

Adage Special Report: Luxury Marketing

AdAge Special Report: Luxury Marketing
Marketers learn luxury isn’t simply for the very wealthy
By Tiffany Meyers, September 13, 2004 

Purveyors of luxury products increasingly have their sights set on Joe Average as well as Joe Millionaire, and that’s changing the definition of “luxury.”  

The democratization of luxury-variously labeled as the “massification of luxury,” “class to mass,” “new luxury,” “masstige” and even “luxflation”-is taking two main routes: Traditional luxury marketers are expanding their brands to more affordable merchandise, while at the same time the middle class is increasingly willing to, at least occasionally, buy expensive luxury goods.

The latter trend is at the center of the recent book “Trading Up: The New American Luxury,” co-authored by Boston Consulting Group Senior VP Michael J. Silverstein and Neil Fiske, CEO of Bath & Body Works.

“New luxury is not about aristocrats,” Mr. Silverstein tells Advertising Age. “It’s about average Joes on the street who want to buy premium-price products that have real technical, functional and emotional benefits.”

Read More »

Woman to Watch: Lisa Caputo

AdAge Special Report: Women to Watch
By Tiffany Meyers, May 30, 2008

LISA CAPUTO
CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER, CITI
Most marketing executives know a thing or two about office politics. Lisa Caputo knows politics for real. She served as press secretary to Hillary Clinton during Bill Clinton’s first term as president. “Hillary Clinton taught me about grit,” Ms. Caputo says. “She taught me about work ethic and grace under fire.”

Last year, Ms. Caputo tapped those virtues, among others, in leading the strategy to unify Citigroup’s numerous brands into one master brand: Citi. Citigroup previously used Citi as a prefix in many of the company’s businesses — such as Citibank, CitiFinancial, CitiMortgage and Citi Smith Barney — but Citi now refers to the company overall.

Read More »

Navigation

Tweets