My name is Matt Fischer and I am the chief creative officer and chief operating officer of a 75-person ad agency, named WonderGroup, located in Cincinnati, Ohio. Our website is www.wondergroup.com for those of you who are interested. My aim for this blog is to share my thoughts and experiences as I work to steer my agency, with the help of some very talented people, from a traditional agency model (TV, print radio with a little interactive mixed in) to one I think the future will demand (definition of that will be saved for a later blog). It's a brave new world and we are thinking and executing differently. So are our clients. Hopefully, this can be a forum for expressing and sharing ideas.
Matt 1.0
The first 21 years of my career was spent in various ad agencies in New York (you can see my career on LinkedIn http://www.linkedin.com/in/mrfischer) doing what every creative did for their clients, thinking in 30 second increments, throw in a print ad or two, maybe a radio spot, and then move on to the next client, campaign or whatever. Nothing ever changed. Then came the dot.com meltdown. At the time I lost my job I was an EVP, Group Creative Director, at FCB New York. The creative account I was leading at the time was Tropicana. Tropicana is owned by Pepsi. FCB's holding company, True North, was bought by Interpublic, a Coke agency holding company. Someone thought these two companies would get along working with separate agencies under one holding company. Pepsi felt otherwise and fired us. I was fired on a Friday. 911 happened the following Tuesday. To say that that changed everything would be an understatement. Instead of playing golf all Fall and finding a similar job just after Christmas, I realized the world had changed profoundly and I wasn't prepared to compete in this suddenly foreign agency landscape. To make a long story short, I freelanced as much as possible while I looked in vane for a similar job in NYC. Then in the Spring of 2003, I was presented with the opportunity to joined a small 5-year old agency in Cincinnati (with about 25 employees at the time) to lead the creative department, help grow the agency and develop an agency culture. VISUAL: OPEN ON A MOVING TRUCK BACKING UP TO A HOUSE IN NEW JERSEY
to be continued...
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