If we don’t add value, we’re of no value. At Marketing Drive, we partner with our clients to help them reach new levels of success. I want our clients to see that Marketing Drive is the agency that’s vital, imaginative, and bold. Delivering ideas that matter is the core principle we always adhere to.

I’ve been in the promotional marketing business for 24 years and I’ve always liked it. But I’d like to see it come of age. It has enormous potential as an industry. Too often, people approach the work tactically and executionally. And that’s a shame because when it’s done well it brings together branding and activation.

It’s fairly easy to get a response from consumers if you put a big enough incentive in front of them. But if you do it in a way that doesn’t differentiate the brand, then you are merely undermining it. Marketing Drive is taking promotions to a higher level and we aspire to be a beacon within the industry towards that goal.

We are at an epoch-changing period within marketing because of two big factors. Obviously, we all know about the economy; we could have a period of fairly slow growth for the next few years. At the same time, we’ve got rapid technological change going on.

Combined, those two things are making some marketers take a safety-first approach, which can be challenging. With no rising tide to float your boat, then what better time to break out and stand apart from your competition?

I am a glass-half-full person and I think the best is yet to come for our industry. I definitely think there are enormous opportunities for marketers if they seize them. But we need to have the courage of our convictions to do so.

I see too many people in our industry who are almost hamstrung. It seems they are trying to go forward by looking back. I see them try to protect their current revenue streams while wishing that things were as they used to be, but it’s not going to come back.

At the same time, the more we go forward, the more we sometimes forget core lessons from the past. If you look at the industry as a whole — whether it’s advertising, promotions, digital, direct, public relations, experiential — in some ways we’ve gotten away from truly creative ideas.

I see a lot of television commercials that are technologically amazing, but there is no creative, compelling idea behind them. It’s technology for its own sake. Marketing Drive is orientated around genuinely creative ideas — ideas that matter, ideas that will deliver.

I’ve always been a huge supporter of genuine creativity and empowering creatives. Creatives are not just people who execute visually or verbally; they are people who generate ideas.

When you conceive such an idea, you see it immediately. I want our competitors to look at our work and say “oh, I wish we’d thought of that.” We are challenging ourselves to be fearless and to seek that deeply compelling idea that’s not constrained by a discipline or a medium.

Some of the work I’m most proud of is the Susan G. Komen “Running on Hope” campaign for New Balance. In many ways, New Balance is a hard-core runner’s brand. But in working with the client, we found an opportunity to connect on a deeper, more emotional level with a younger, more female audience.

Our insights led us to an idea that manifested itself in a 20-minute documentary on YouTube that featured a mother-daughter duo that has been directly affected by that great evil of mankind, cancer. It was authentic to the company and its founders and it made the brand relevant to a new audience while raising funds to find a cure for this terrible disease.

On the flip side, we have a lot of drinks clients. We’re tapping into the social aspect of sharing a drink or a cocktail, the camaraderie of friends and family. Then we align that with cause marketing as well as digital and social networking-type activities to take it to a higher level.

I’m also really proud that we’ve also helped make energy and environmental sustainability mainstream through the work we’ve done with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Star program. We’ve even worked with national retailers to make it a priority to promote energy-efficient products. Fundamentally, we believe that marketing should tap into the zeitgeist and be relevant. It needs to be meaningful.

It’s all about striving every day to challenge ourselves and reach for a better answer. The origins of our agency were an entrepreneurial venture called Market Growth Resources, which eventually became Marketing Drive via a couple of corporate takeovers. Today, we’re back to being privately held and that’s unleashed our entrepreneurial spirit.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not criticizing the big, public agencies and holding companies. But I think you have got to have an entrepreneurial spirit about you to grow and flourish. You’ve got to be looking for new solutions and not feel constrained.

Since we went private and joined together with the RiverNorth Group, we’ve gotten our “inner-entrepreneur” back and re-instilled those values. If you ally that with being bold, imaginative and fearless, that’s what we bring to our clients every day.

One of the things I’ve always loved about Marketing Drive is that no two days are the same. No two clients are the same. We are passionate about our clients and their businesses. We are innovative, always looking forward, but also underpinned by sound strategy.

We live in a hyper-competitive world and you have to constantly exceed expectations. To do that you need to be prepared to seek out and do more than is asked, and in many ways do the unexpected.

This is a talent business. It’s all about talented people coming together, working together, enjoying being with each other and doing something that has purpose and that is very important.

For me, a lot of it is about empowering people to feel that they can bring it all. They can challenge and stretch themselves. They can learn more, develop more and bring more. It’s about creating the kind of environment where they feel comfortable doing that.

We live in an ever-changing world which seems to be moving faster every day. We know that our clients’ needs are constantly evolving and therefore we must advance and adapt. But we need to do it in a way that is underpinned by enduring core principles.

No one knows what the future holds, but we should embrace it. We need to see all of the changes that are going on as positive changes. We should put together all of these new tools that are available to us and create something vital.

I’d like our clients to consider the work that we do for them to be vital. I’d like for the people who work on our clients’ businesses to be considered by our clients as vital, as well. I want Marketing Drive to be the agency that the best people want to work for and the best clients want to work with. It’s as simple as that. If we bring that vitality then we can achieve that objective.

Be vital. Be imaginative. Be bold. Be fearless. Bring the unexpected because it’s not acceptable anymore, in 2010, to just deliver what’s expected. You have to deliver ideas that matter.