It's a very loaded question. Um, I've been doing this for 30 years, so, um, I guess to be relevance. I started in college. I was in advertising, major. I chose the career because I m I was always had a creative bone in my body. And I wanted to be in a creative field. I'm a writer. I've always enjoyed writing. So in high school, just taking writing classes, greater writing classes, etcetera. Um, and I ended up going thio Syracuse to the Newhouse school. Syracuse, which at the time anyway, was considered the best communication school in the country. Um, and, you know, my I didn't know what I wanted to do. I didn't really understand all that much about advertising and marketing, but I knew that I wanted to be in a creative field. Um, and I was very active in college and part of different, you know, community organizations and whatnot. I did some internships in big advertising agencies. Gray, uh, it's called Bozell Jacobs, which doesn't exist anymore. Andi, it really gave me great insights into how the world of advertising works. Um, in my junior year, um, I was recommended by one of my professors, um, to be featured in an article I add week at We put out a periodical four times a year called Winners on this particular issue. They were focusing on the top talent coming out of communication schools. I was only a junior. Everybody else in the, uh, in the article were seniors from different schools around the country. But it got me thinking, as I'm sitting there talking to the reporter that maybe I'm more maybe I have more talent than I thought I did. So I spent my entire senior year really focusing on building a portfolio. Um and, uh, that's what launched my career. That would when I came out of college. Um, I had a lot of connections through school, through family, etcetera. But it was very hard to get a job, which I would imagine will be the case now. Very competitive marketplace. A lot of professionals on out on the street. So I would imagine it's gonna be a similar situation to a lot of the students that are listening to this. Um and so what? I did waas. After months of interviewing everywhere I could applying to every program every every intern program Every job opening for a junior copywriter. I took the summer off, traveled Europe just, um, which hopefully, next summer. Many of you can aan den. When I came back, I e took a job as a secretary in a creative department and McCann Erickson on di did that just to get into the in the doors. I knew that if I was, you know, inside an ad agency that I could, um could work my way into the job that I wanted. And so I went on a job interview my very first day at work. It was late to my first day at work because McCann Erickson told me flat out, If we're gonna hire you as a secretary, that's what we're That's what you're taking. The job is, um and I wanted to be a writer s. So I went and interviewed, Um, I was a secretary for three months. I completely overhauled my portfolio while I was there. I if I was working in the creative department, so I worked for five different creative directors and associate creative directors. I took every brief that they worked on for Coca Cola, Brooks Brothers, Nabisco, Black and decker. Whatever they were working on, I took the breeze home. I worked on the I worked on them at home. I'd come in and I would show them my work. Um, and I also took classes at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, which is a great portfolio building school. Andi, In three months time, I overhauled my portfolio. I think the portfolio that I graduated college with probably 70% of it was new. Um, and then I got a writing job and never never looked back. Um, and I just I was tenacious. I've always been tenacious. I always looked at what I do as a career, not a job meaning I'm willing to put in the hours. I was willing to do the grunt work. I was willing to take somebody else's idea. And right there, copy. Um, my first commercial. Um, I was able to do because I got the brief. It was it was a commercial for a T. N T. It was a really quick turnaround. It was right around this time of the year. I remember we were at our Christmas, our company Christmas party and the head of the of the account for A T and T came over to my boss and said, We just got We just got in the Simon A. T and T wants a commercial on the American Music Awards at the end of January. This was the middle of December. Eso we need to We need to do something really quickly. And my my boss, my supervisor and his partner um they took the brief. They wrote a couple of commercials. They were presented to the client client was like, great. And I had an idea and I wrote the script and I showed it to my boss. And my boss is like, you know, when I pulled in an art director and I said, Can you just storyboard this so I could just show it to the boss? And she did. And we took it to the to the book to our boss, and he's like, This is great. Let's bring it to the client. We already bought an idea, but, you know, maybe they'll do this down the road. And at the end of the meeting, my my boss, my boss was like, Hey, we have one other thing. We just wanted to show you, and we we kind of played a little video that we had done showed them the script and the client is turned. Everybody said That's the commercial we're making. Um, and that commercial actually ended up on the Super Bowl that year. Unbeknownst to me, uh, A T and T somehow was able to buy remnant time on the Super Bowl. So I'm at a party and then all of a sudden there's my commercial. That was my first commercial, my first experience. But that's an example of just being tenacious. Not not accepting. No, always, You know, not being not backstabbing. There's plenty of back stabbing in this industry, Um, but looking for opportunity, creating your own opportunity and it's really willing to be willing to put in the hours. And that's carried me through my career. So I would say, you know, this is a very transient industry. Ah, lot of people move from agency to agency, you know, it's hard to find people in this business that have been in the job for 10, 15, 20 years, Onda. I'm one of them. I've moved around a lot, but what to find my career Very early on was I found my mentors. I found that people who cared about me and looked out for me and I moved with them. So I worked for the same people for the 1st 18 years of my career on DSO When they left and went to run other agencies, they brought me with them on. Guy had opportunities to stay where I was. I had opportunities to go to other agencies. And I remember talking to the chief creative officer of Ogilvy and Mather where I was working at the time. And, um, I said, What do I dio? You know, like you guys air countering and offering me to stay here and give me a promotion or a raise? I got another agency offering me a non opportunity. Actually, my my bosses who went over the McCann Erickson are offering me less money. What doe, ideo and my and I remember distinctly, the chief creative officer said, Do you still have things to learn from from those from those people? And I said, Yeah, and these and he said, Then go with them now. This is a guy that was countering and, you know, and saying yes, Stay here. We love you. We love you to stay here. But he also is a human being. And he was also looking after my career, and he recognized that sometimes it's not about the money. Sometimes it's about the people that are gonna nurture you and grow, grow you and care for you and catch you and you fall. And so I did. I took the lowest opportunity of the three or four opportunities that I had. Um, and those people did exactly that. They cared for me that continued to nurture me. Three years later, my boss got promoted to, actually, Five years later, my bus got promoted to be the worldwide creative director, and he turned around and he promoted me above six other people who were had a higher title than me to become the creative director of the New York office. Andi did it because I had earned that right. I had I had one more awards than anybody in the office. I had one more business than anybody in the office, and nobody amazing thing is when I look back on that, none of the six people that I jumped over to become their boss. None of them quit on me. They all. They all stayed with me Onda again. That's a testament to and it's hard to find. It really is. But you gotta look for it a place where people care about each other. I was very, very fortunate in my in my early days of working for people that just good people, hard working people, nurturing people, Andi, it molded how I behave as a manager and leader. To this day, I always say that my strength is my weakness. I care about my people. I care about them and their personal lives and what's going on and sometimes to my detriment. Because I'm not hard enough on them that I should be sometimes, um so. But I encourage everybody toe toe Look for opportunities like that where there are plenty of assholes in this business. Um, it's a very high stress business. Um, and so if you can find a place that actually is filled with good people that want to do great work but don't want to kill you, um, jump at that chance. Um, yeah, that's kinda and, you know, and so I just worked my way. Um, from there I e was executive creative director FCB um And then, um, after a merger in the mid two thousands, I went over to shy a day, which is a great, great creative agency. And I was executive create director there. And then I got approached by an executive recruiter about a digital agency that I had never heard of. They really weren't even an agency. It was a private, a private company called Rosetta. Um, and they were looking for their first global chief creative officer. So there's an opportunity for me to step up to that next level of leadership. Onda Hardest. Four years of my of my life. It was really not an ad agency as much. It was like a strategic consultancy, and the founder wanted to make it into a full service digital agency. And e don't know how, but we But we did. And, uh, in 2011 at age called us the number one agency toe watch. So they have a watch list of the fastest growing or the or the hottest agencies. And Rosetta was the number one agency that year. Um and they called out the creative product is one of the main reasons why on before I got there, people didn't even know that the agency did creative. But I brought that kind of collaborative mindset to the organization. And so that was That was a great experience. Then we sold it to a holding company. Publicists, um, in 2000 and 13 on Ben, You know, I bounced around a little bit. I went to Ah, great. Uh, regional creative shop called Arnold Worldwide. They're the guys that do progressive insurance and Jack Daniels and other, you know, other great brands they used to do Volkswagen. Andi. I worked there for a while. I had always in my career, um, work on some health care brands, so I always enjoyed healthcare. I found it really interesting. Eso i throughout my career, I had, like, 1 ft doing, you know, whether it was pharmaceutical products or over the counter products or wellness products on den the other foot in automotive. You know, I ran GMC trucks for many years. Telecommunications A, T and T Verizon sprint. Um, you know, big brands, global brands, ups, MasterCard. I worked on all of those. I didn't run those, but I worked on them, which was great. Um, and then I got approached to be the chief creative officer of the healthcare division of Gray. Um, in the mid around 2016. Andi, I thought, you know, health care is, Aziz said. It's a really interesting place. I think it's a growing place. It's the rest of the industry is very volatile. Everybody needs healthcare. And certainly I think a lot more people in the last 10 months have had a whole new perspective of what health really means. Um, not just physical health, but even emotional and mental health and what cove it is doing. Um, but I also found healthcare fascinating because I think it's the most, um, innovative industry of all industries. If you think about look at the companies that are getting into health care. You know, Apple is a health care company now, Um, right with the help with their with their health kid, Google started a whole division called verily, which is a health division to make make product. Uh, companies like under armor are making wearables that can read your biometrics. Um, automotive companies are building cars that consents my car right now. consents. If I am tired and I am swerving too much and then it will recommend you know the nearest rest stop if you know so those are all connected to your health. Your mindfulness eso. I've I jumped 2 ft into health care in 2016. Onda haven't looked back that in a nutshell, my career bat. I talked a lot. I apologize.

I am one of four people who run the company. I report to the president of CBM Princeton. C. D. M is Princeton is part of a global network C D m where in offices in New York and London in Milan, Barcelona, Tokyo, Buenos areas, Montreal, Uh, each access its own individual office. We have our own clients, our own leadership team. Um um, but we report our finances at the end of the year how much revenue we make, how much growth We report that up to our parent company, C d M. In which, which then reports up to our holding company, Omnicom. Omnicom is the second largest communications company in the world. Um, and so agencies in our network that you may have heard of B b d o d d b t b w h i A day um good be Silverstein partners. These are all owned by Omnicom, the holding company. Um, and they own advertising agencies, PR agencies, pure digital agencies, research companies, etcetera, etcetera, eso My responsibilities are I mean, first and foremost, I run the creative department. Eso the buck stops with me, so to speak, in terms of the quality of the work. Um, I am on a day to day basis. I am. I am looking at any number of projects that we are working on. I'm giving feedback on the quality of the thinking, the quality of the writing and the quality of the design things that you know, um, that I think should change. Um, I am running pitches when we three advertising industry is a very antiquated, very broken, Um, uh, industry. When it comes to how you grow your business, how you grow your company, you pitch business, you give away ideas for free on most people on the outside world. Look at that and say what the what? But yeah, clients will come to us and say, Hey, we wanna you know, we're looking for a new agency for this product, this products, or we're gonna launch a new product, and we need somebody to help us launch it. Um, give us your ideas, and so we will give them a whole strategic point of view. Way will give them multiple creative ideas of how to bring that those stretch those strategies toe life will give them all kinds of tactics. Print ads, TV, commercials, websites? Um, APS, uh, guerilla marketing stunts. You name it all these all these things, and then maybe they hire you, and maybe they hire somebody else on. They don't pay you for all of that work. Um, but I my job is to is to is toe, you know, make sure that the creative for for those pitches are on strategy. Um, And then outside of the creative day to day, as I said, I'm responsible for the health and well being of the agency. It's making sure that we're, um, you know, financially healthy, that are creative. You know, the creative product is subjective and it's organic, and it's not just you just don't press the button and all of a sudden you have a great idea, and you could spend a lot of time and a lot of money getting to a great idea on dso you have to balance that with, you know, where is the break even point where, like all of a sudden, we're losing money because we're spending so much time and energy trying to come up with a great idea. Eso that's part of my job as well, making sure that we're being smart and efficient on have the right people addressing the problemdifferent in co vid than, uh, pre cove it on. Probably the world. It's a very different post coded pre co vid. Um, you know, it was, uh, 9. 32 6. 30 again. You know, if you're if you're a junior, you're right out of college. You you might be working longer hours. You're gonna have to expect to do some grunt work. Um, you're gonna have Thio if you finish your work. The expectation is that you're gonna turn to your boss. Can I help you with anything that anybody need? Help with anything. So you might take on additional projects outside of your own if if you have bandwidth, so you could be, you know, absolutely. You could be working to 10. 11 o'clock at night. Um, it shouldn't be the norm if its norm. That's a problem. You're working in a sweatshop, and you should not be doing that. But absolutely. You know, the average is, you know, and 8 to 10 hour work day. Um, during a pitch, you could be working 12, 14 hour days for a very finite period of time. You could be working weekends periodically. Um, you know what I'm While I'm, you know, I'm a creative, creative director, and I think about this through the lens of creative. Same thing applies to the, you know, my colleagues and other parts of the business. You know, they're they're putting in those kinds of ours as well. You know, it's a little bit more with, um it's a little bit more with with creative because we make the widgets. Right. So after all the great thinking goes into the strategy and the tactics and all of those things, um, we have to make it and we have toe, you know, show what a print ad might look like. Or show what the home page of the website might look like. How do you know? Ideas don't become really until you make them real, right? So how do you know? So that takes time, especially if you're in art Director, You have tow, go find the artwork or create the artwork. Eso You know, those hours could be very long

Cove. It is huge pain point, um, working, you know, in A in a business that is designed to be a people business designed to, you know, sit around a table problem solving together, bringing different points of view, different experiences to the table, to look at it. Look at a marketing challenger, a business challenge from different angles. It's very it's a lot more challenging in this virtual world. Um, that said, you know, we've discovered tools, you know, platforms that allow us to collaborate, obviously things like like teams and WebEx and those kinds of things for video chatting, but even more like virtual white boards that allow us to like put up work and commented on it in real time so that you can see it evolved. You know, if we were in the office and we were working on a project, I probably you know, have people printing out things and throwing it up on a on a wall. And as as we went, you know, myself for some, my creative directors would be marking it up, right? Changed this visual, make the change. The fonts, you know, would write a new headline Whatever on Dwork would evolve over the course of hours and days. Um, much harder to do in a virtual world that we found digital platforms that allow us to do. That s so that's been a lot, um, a lot better. Um, you know, the working with clients in this environment can be very challenging again because we're very much It's a people business, and you earn you do great work by turning your clients trust Onda. Lot of that is getting to know them as people. You know, Um, I have not been in front of a client physically since February. It is now the end of November. Um, normally, you know, we go out, we take our clients out for drinks or for dinner, or, you know, we have in person meetings. I I'd fly wherever my clients are. Can't do that now. So really hard, Thio, especially with new clients, to to build that kind of trust in that kind of relationship, because my job as a creative director is to push the work as far as we can push it right is to differentiate our clients brands from everybody else on that sometimes means taking risks and doing things that the organization hasn't done before. The brand hasn't done before. And if you're gonna convince somebody to take that risk because it's their job on the line, if if we're wrong and we fail, maybe they lose their job. Eso very hard to find clients that are willing to take those risks and you have tow. You have to earn that trust, Andi. It's just so much harder to do that in this environment.everything is tainted by by by covet. Um, so in this environment Ah, lot more. One on one calls. Um, you know where they could be? Could be talking to the CMO or the brand manager on a monthly basis or a bimonthly basis. How are we doing? What's working? What's not working s O that we can make a course correction, You know, they're not happy with the copy. Okay, Great. You know, what is it about it or they? They think the ideas were kind of flat. Okay, great. Let's talk about it. And And why is that? Is the problem coming from our end? We're not pushing you enough. We're not thinking big enough. There is a problem coming really from your end. And it's really your day to day brand people who are in brave enough to take the ideas. And I've had both situations right where we've presented big, bold, really aggressive ideas, and the day to day clients were like, Oh, no, you know, our organization, we can't do that. And then it gets up to their boss and the boss is like, these ideas are boring. These ideas, like everybody's doing this. Where's the exciting stuff, you know, and then you have to have an uncomfortable conversation with him. Well, here's all the ideas that we presented to your team that they said no to that we think are pretty exciting and could really impact your brand. Um, so those were those were, like, real conversations that happen on day. And you don't want to get into that. You you really don't wanna get into that situation because you never want to make any of your clients look bad, especially in front of the boss, right? Our job is to make our clients look great. Our job is to help our clients move to that next stage of their career eso that they're gonna go somewhere else. They're gonna be the brand manager of another brand in the organization and a different organization, and they're gonna turn around, say, Hey, we wanna work with those guys on. That's how you get organic growth. I tell you, without pitching, you just get handed business. Um, I did. I did a pitch once when I was at sh i t v w A. Um and it was brilliant. I mean, to this day, like one of my favorite bodies of work that I put in front of a client. Um, and we didn't win the pitch. Um, six months later, that same client called us up, said, I want to hire you for a different product and without a pitch, that e wanna hand you the business. And when we when we I asked him, Well, you know why? Why don't you hire a six months ago he's like, You weren't the right agency for that brand team. That brand team didn't want those kinds of big ideas that you scared them. This brand team that I'm going to give you wants big, bold ideas. When I walked into that client's office for the for the first meeting until get downloaded on their brand, the ideas that we presented six months earlier we're sitting in his office, so he never forgot. Um, that's great, you know, like that's what you want