I grew up in an Advertising family. My Great Uncle, Morris Jacobs started Bozell & Jacobs with his partner Leo Bozell in 1921. My father began working there and eventually became CEO. All of this before I was ever born so maybe you could say I have marketing in my blood.
Watching my dad, I learned many things about advertising, marketing and PR. A cool ad isn’t actually a good ad if you cannot name the product being promoted. But my father surprised me when he said he didn’t think I should get into advertising. “You’re too nice”, I remember him saying. I wasn’t terribly disappointed as I wasn’t necessarily thinking that way anyway and very soon thereafter my true love came to me.
My best friend’s mom worked as a teacher and one weekend she brought home a Commodore PET, one of the first personal computers that was being used in classrooms. We were fascinated with it and it just so happened to also have a great Monopoly game, which we played incessantly. The PET was fine, but it was no Apple //e. That was THE machine to have at the time. Somehow I talked my parents into getting one and the moment I connected the modem, my world changed. One of my friends was into the technology of the machine and he became a programmer. I didn’t care about all of that but the fact that I could connect with bbs’s and even larger systems like CompuServe and The Source was what lit my hair on fire. The communication and connection ability of the machine is what I loved.
That’s the foundation for what I am today. A fusing of the marketing of my youth and the technology/communications of my teen years. Long before it was fashionable I was the business guy who knew tech and the tech guy who knew business. I straddled both worlds. Steve Jobs famously said Apple lies at the intersection of Technology and the Liberal Arts. He wasn’t wrong and it was the same intersection I was standing at.
My career has spanned many companies in differing industries. I started in the belly of the Silicon Valley and have worked up and down the west coast as a Digital Marketing Manager or Specialist.