It was a busy day at Michael's last Tuesday when Greg Stuart and I met for lunch. At the next table, Billy Joel entertained his very young girl friend; Liz Smith held court with Barbara Walters and a group of notables; Christopher Walken hung out until 3 PM; Susan Lyne chatted quietly with Jeff Sagansky.
At other tables were George Stephanopoulos, William Lauder, Stanley Jaffe, Joe Armstrong, Lifetime's Carole Black with UPN's Dawn Ostroff, Nick Verbitsky, publishers Larry Kirschbaum and Tony
Hoyt, 60 Minutes' Steve Kroft, Marshall Cohen with Jesse Kornbluth and Wendy Goldberg, Robert Halmi Jr., Anne Sutherland Fuchs, Grace Mirabella, and Nan Talese, just to name a partial list.
But Greg, who is president of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, and I were too engaged to notice most of the hubbub around us. The IAB hosts its major annual conference this week in New York with 2,100 registered attendees and forecasters predicting several years ahead of robust double digit growth
for online advertising. Greg has good reason to be enthusiastic. His journey to the IAB and to a Lunch at Michael's has been a fascinating one, beginning with a bus ride across the country from his home town of Seattle to New York City, arriving on a Wednesday morning in 1983 just in time to get an early
jump on the Village Voice apartment listings. Exiting Port Authority on Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street, Greg was confronted by images he'd never associated with New York and he momentarily feared all of New York would look like the red light district that then surrounded Times Square.
Greg, the oldest of three boys and the only one in his family to attend college, graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in economics and a fascination with advertising. After he personally visited all 65 ad agencies in the Seattle area without receiving any encouragement that a
job might be forthcoming, he considered joining a new private airline company opening near Seattle, in Puyallup. "I was so horrified that I might consider working in Puyallup that I decided I had to go to New York if I was going to get a job in advertising. I found an apartment on East 77th Street and after
three months of looking (with one month rent left in my bank account), I was offered a job at William Esty as a print traffic coordinator, earning $10,000. If you really want to be in New York, you can be here," Greg mused, "but you really need to be committed."
Greg's passion for computers began at Esty when the account people managing the Nissan account acquired two IBM personal computers. Every night, he went from his fifth floor office to the 18th floor
executive office with his 5 1/4 inch floppy disks (this was before computers had hard drives or networks) and programmed his work. He recalls that Minolta had a $15 million print budget that required hundreds of insertion orders and every time there was a change, which was frequent, it would take an
assistant a full day to review the impact of the changes and create a new spreadsheet. Greg loaded the information onto the computer and the same work was completed in ten minutes.
After two years at Esty, he moved to Jordan, McGrath while working primarily on the Procter & Gamble media account he wrote the agency billing program and he then moved to Levine Huntley Schmidt just after they were named agency of the year. Unfortunately, the honor was a curse, as the agency lost two key accounts and
closed it doors. Before the doors were actually shut, though, Greg had two months with little to do, so he wrote a white paper on single source research. "Advertising has done a bad job of proving that we really understand the reasons for the decisions we make. What do we do with the next dollar we spend and what was the value of the last dollar? I thought if I could understand how research
could make a connection between media and actual sales results, I would have an edge in getting my next job. It's ironic," Greg adds, "that I was a champion of single source data and now I'm a champion of cross media optimization at the IAB."
After a stint at Wells Rich Greene working with Michelle Buslik and Barry Fischer, Greg moved to the Wunderman Agency, Young & Rubicam's direct marketing shop. He held his thumb and forefinger less than an inch apart to describe how much he knew at the time about interactive, "but I knew more
than anyone else, so they asked me to figure out what was happening in interactive media." That was 1993 and the Internet was born in 1994. "I was at the right place at the right time," he says. "Wunderman grew a huge interactive business and I traveled the world preaching the gospel of interactivity."
After a "humbling experience" with a failed Internet start-up company in New York, Greg moved back to the West Coast to join Flycast just weeks before its successful IPO, and he stayed three years until the company was sold to Engage, a part of CMGI. Flycast, an advertising network of websites, had $40 million in ad revenues at one point and a $5 billion market valuation, Greg recalls
with amazement and laughs as he adds, "that's how I got to Bridgehampton." Greg is a reflection of the new age of being able to live where you want and still work effectively. He lives in Bridgehampton, Long Island, returning to New York (flying this time) after the Flycast sale and the subsequent collapse
of the Internet economy. With his wife, Pamela and twin four year-old daughters (with a son due any day), Greg lives just a few minutes from the beach and commutes weekly into the city, working 15 hour days at the office four days a week and working online each Friday from home.
"I enjoy being the lead pitch man for the online industry," Greg says. "My dad was a minor league pro baseball player, a pitcher, and he always said 'why would you be any position other than a pitcher?' I was a
terrible baseball player, but I always interpreted my dad's comment as a lesson to be a leader in whatever I did. One of our estimates suggests that the IAB efforts have directed an additional $200 million in new online revenues through our work. The nine marketers who have allied with us for cross media studies are now spending over $50 million online versus less than $5 million when we started. We have an opportunity to increase online advertising effectiveness with video, larger ad sizes and behavioral
targeting, one hundred percent at a minimum and as much as one thousand percent from where we are today. But," Greg cautions, "if agencies don't produce ads that work, none of it matters. As publishers, we need
to continue to improve advertising effectiveness. But we also need to teach marketers and agencies how to produce better creative. We need those bigger than life creative individuals to help define online creative the way the great creative leaders helped build television."
In addition to being the lead pitchman for the online industry, Greg is also its perfect role model. He recently purchased a used Range Rover online, sight unseen, from a New Jersey dealer. "The dealer was highly rated
on eBay, and the car was exactly what I wanted at the right price. I asked if the
dealer would deliver the car to me in Manhattan and he agreed." Where was the car delivered to Greg? Where else, but right outside Michael's on West 55th Street! Michael's may be packed daily with industry notables and celebrities, but I doubt anyone else has ever picked up their new car during lunch.
