1896 was a big year – the first modern Olympic Games were held in Athens, Greece; the first x-ray was taken, and, of course, The ADVERTISING Club of New York was born. Located in the heart of Manhattan, The ADVERTISING Club is the industry’s premier venue for networking and creativity and professional development. As such, the club plays a vital role in cultivating advertising professionals of tomorrow and supporting the thought leaders of today.

While The ADVERTISING Club may be best known for the International Andy Awards, which recognize creativity and innovation in advertising around the world, it has garnered its most recent attention for its “I’mPART” initiative, which celebrates diversity within the advertising and marketing industry and works to recruit a wide variety of fresh young voices and talent to the business. That goal is embedded in last four letters of the name – Promote, Attract, Retain, and Train. I’mPART was recently featured in The New York Times, which celebrated I’mPART’s success in making the advertising industry more inclusive and more reflective of the diverse and increasingly global market it is trying to reach.

The Way I See It:

  • I see The ADVERTISING Club remaining an important pillar within the industry, and a symbiotic relationship forming between the older and younger generations. We will continue to see millennials mentoring the older generation on emerging technology and how to best implement it, and the older generation providing seasoned advice that only experience can provide.
  • I see The ADVERTISING Club playing a strong role in continuing change within the industry on the topic of diversity, not just from a race and ethnicity perspective, but a gender one as well.
  • I see The ADVERTISING Club paving the way for young people and creating a more inclusive industry.

The Way The Industry Sees It:

I sat down with Gina Grillo, President and Chief Executive Officer of The ADVERTISING Club of New York to discuss the impact the Club has on both the industry and the members.

The ADVERTISING Club (The AD Club) of New York has been engrained within the industry since 1896, and encompasses thousands of industry professionals. In terms of membership, have you seen members you’ve attracted at a young age stay active within the Club throughout the duration of their career? What’s the longevity trajectory like?

Our membership of four thousand strong includes many legacy members who joined The AD Club as young professionals and have grown up and progressed in their career with us over the years. While the industry focuses on recruiting new talent, we see retention as just as big of an issue and believe it is critical to nurture talent after they have entered the field. Part of our mission as an organization is to support members along their career journey – as they move up the ranks – keeping them active both within the industry and within The AD Club. We also have a Young Professionals group that is designed to help advertising, marketing, and media professionals ages thirty and under grow to become tomorrow’s leaders. It is truly inspiring to see this ambitious, philanthropic, and outgoing group of future industry leaders develop themselves as professionals and people.

It’s no secret that The ADVERTISING Club has a myriad of impressive initiatives. Are there any initiatives that the Club is especially proud of?

Advertising is about experimentation in communication. It is the business of inventing ideas to be discussed, debated, assessed, and adjusted daily. The AD Club exists to support this process through a number of initiatives around our core pillars – access, creativity, professional development, and diversity. We are proud of our efforts in all of these areas, but I am especially proud of our diversity initiative, i’mPART. It’s our belief that diversity of people, ideas, culture, and craft is a major driver of creativity and creates better work in our business. i’mPART is a fundraising effort that aims to raise awareness of the benefits of diversity and support the nation’s leading diversity programs.  i’mPART employs an acronym that represents the four pillars of the initiative – to Promote, Attract, Retain and Train diverse talent. It’s a movement to make diversity a priority and increase accountability for this issue through a ten-year-long benchmarking survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), which will track the progress of diversity programs to ensure long-term success. We are committed to supporting diversity of thought and seek to inspire a diverse mindset in the advertising industry.

Continue Reading Creativity is Poppin’ in New York’s The ADVERTISING Club

On Tuesday night, I attended a fascinating event at The ADVERTISING Club called AD THINK, which is bridging the gap between tech startups and the advertising world.  As the event’s host, founder and partner of Evol8tion Joseph Jaffe, put it – we have seen a lack of creativity in digital advertising and with all of the creativity streaming from the high-tech startup boom, several stellar startups have emerged to bridge the gap between Madison Ave and Mountainview.  The event, which was standing-room only and will be the first in a series, brought five cutting-edge startup founders to deliver presentations on their products and attempt to woo a panel of experts who know a thing or two about successful startups, ad land, and how creativity and tech can work hand-in-hand.  The panel included: Brian Cohen, Chairman of New York Angels and the first investor in Pinterest; Andreas Dahlqvist, Deputy CCO of Global & Vice Chairman of NY for McCann Erickson; Nihal Mehta, Founder and CEO of Local Response (in 2001, he founded an agency dedicated solely to mobile – way ahead of his time); and Catherine Schenquerman, Digital Advertising Head of JetBlue Airways.

Even though I could talk about the all-star panel for a while, let’s talk about the startups – the true stars of the evening.  I was blown away by the creativity of each of these tech companies, and the potential that these startups have for the future of advertising and marketing.  The main theme among them was something we’ve talked about before: bringing data and creative together, as well as using data and analytics to improve and drive creative content for digital and mobile advertising.  I’m excited to see what’s next for each of these companies.

  • One of the founders of social intelligence company Bottlenose presented the analytics tools the platform offers brands, which, among other things, can correlate the volume of trending topics and conversations surrounding a brand on social media with key indicators (i.e., stock price, sales, website visits, Nielsen ratings, etc.) to uncover who and what on social media are driving important activities.
  • The founder of Customer.io started by saying, “E-mail is dead.”  We’ve heard it before, but his technology is actually using data gathered from e-mail marketing to help brands determine what to say and when to say it in order to achieve objectives from their e-mail marketing.  This could really bring e-mail back to life.
  • Continue Reading At the Intersection of Tech and Advertising