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Robert Albitz, IDSA George P. Johnson Executive Vice President, Creative Worldwide
		Education: Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan BFA, Industrial Design. Graduated with honors University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan Two Years, Regents Scholarship Recipient Favorite Quote: “Go Big or Go Home”		Inspirational Figures: Hands down, my father.  Although I was always drawing stuff as a kid, my school counselors weren’t dialed in to the art scene and instead encouraged me to pursue the sciences…namely chemistry and calculus.  So I was on the path of a double major at University of Michigan for a couple years.  It was my father who knew better, and inspired me to follow my heart and pursue a future in design.  So I snapped out of it, changed majors, and I’ve had a blast over the past 35 years doing the left and right brain tap dance.

Short bio of career path:
I’ve been working in Creative with George P. Johnson for more than 25 years, and in that time I’ve had the opportunity to work on many high profile and interesting creative challenges. Recently I spent nearly a year in Beijing helping clients execute trendy experiences and pavilions at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, then caught my breath back home in Detroit for a few months, immediately followed by 18 months living in China, working on three pavilions for the 2010 Shanghai World Expo.

My career has tracked very closely with the evolution of Experience as a marketing discipline.  Marketing has evolved from being execution focused around pure design and brand architecture to where we are today, which is all about creating big, integrated ideas and sustained brand experiences through both physical and virtual engagement.  GPJ has been a key player in defining Experience Marketing, the next evolution, and this is something I have been very fortunate to be a part of.

Define your leadership style and the feel of the agency:
You can sum up both with one word: Engagement. My leadership style centers around coming up with ways to keep the troops motivated through engagement, mainly through fostering new ideas and collaboration amongst creative and strategic people.
 
Throughout the agency, you can feel the passion that comes from being engaged with the issues, challenges and opportunities our clients are facing. We work hard to break down the walls between the creative teams and our clients’ worlds. When you can get a diverse creative team that really engages with a client, and can internalize their issues as well as their opportunities, the result is something really special.

Toughest challenge overcome in your career?
From an ongoing perspective, aligning 12 creative studios and more than 100 full-time creative professionals, worldwide can be a daunting task.  Ensuring that each individual has the room to personalize and explore has kept Creative as the hallmark signature to our brand and helped us persevere through the recent challenges of economic uncertainty. However, this freedom is balanced with guardrails that ensure delivery of a flawless product for our clients. This balance is a difficult one to maintain, but we’ve learned to weave a lot of safety nets around our studios to encourage innovation and a thirst for “firsts.”

The speed and complexity of working on multiple pavilions at the Beijing Olympics and Shanghai World Expo definitely represented the toughest challenge in my career to date.   I highly recommend that all creative individuals take on challenges in foreign countries if the opportunity presents itself.  Trust me, it’s a good thing to have the cheese moved.  Your career will thank you for it.

What was your defining moment at your agency?
The Beijing Olympics, immediately followed by the Shanghai World Expo, were both watershed moments for me. GPJ has been in Asia, on the ground and full-time, for about a decade now, but the Olympics and Expo showed first-hand all the energy and resources of the region mobilized around these one-of-a-kind global events. The opportunity to attend the Beijing Opening Ceremonies was an experience that will be hard to top.

Your vision of where we will all be in 10 years (non-apocalyptic):
I see experiential continually moving to the center of marketing, powering every other discipline ranging from advertising and PR to digital and mobile. In the face of technology and new ways to engage, educate and entertain, consumers and business audiences are seeking out what is true, relevant and meaningful.

Behind this trend is the technology innovation and social shifts that are taking place among consumers and business customers. Smart, human-centered design is driving everything, from product development to packaging and of course, the marketing mix. Our job as designers is to understand the evolution taking place and put our clients smack in the middle of it, leading to more personalized, relevant and meaningful relationships between brands and their audiences.

The Shanghai World Expo showed me a glimpse into the future.  Every day we used innovative technologies to execute in cutting edge ways to ensure success. The demands that technology and changing audience behavior place on creative teams is extraordinary, but so are the opportunities for us to re-define brand interactions.

Best describe your agency:
GPJ is the #1 ranked experiential agency enabling B2B and B2C marketers to create and execute integrated campaigns worldwide leveraging physical events, sponsorship, digital and mobile device-driven communications. We are a Project: WorldWide agency, a new kind of independent, global agency network that isn’t born from the advertising-centric thinking of the past.

GPJ and its sister agencies focus on engagement as the new measure of marketing success: not just reaching audiences but measurably engaging them to create and deepen brand relationships to drive short term behavior such as product purchase as well as longer term brand loyalty.

Why do clients choose your agency and how have you been able to maintain such long relationships?
Clients work with us for any number of reasons, some operationally-driven, others creatively-driven, and in most cases a combination of both. Operationally we bring tremendous purchasing power to the table as well as 25 full-time, wholly-owned offices worldwide, enabling lower costs and the option to execute worldwide campaigns consistently and measurably.

On the creative side, we’re constantly pushing the envelope, innovating and bringing new technology and new ways to communicate into the experiential model. GPJ is unique in that we come up with big ideas and have the means to produce and execute them, keeping clients on the cutting edge.  Ultimately, we’re comfortable about taking risks to shake up the status quo, while delivering smart and creative business solutions that are on brand, on budget and on time.

Advice for those entering into the space from college?
I would point recent graduates in the direction of strategy and digital, two disciplines that are increasing in importance in every aspect of the agency business. The simple fact is that without strategy, experiential is one-dimensional and a commodity. Graduates looking for a career in experiential – either on the client or agency side - should seek out opportunities to immerse themselves in a strategic approach to marketing.

And of course, digital is increasingly integrated into everything we do in experiential. Both from a technical perspective as well as just general understanding, the more recent graduates can do to familiarize themselves with digital marketing as it relates to experiential, the better their long-term career prospects.

Specifically, find a major that trips your trigger…be it film, digital, mobile and social, interactive, theatre, design, storytelling (preferably all of the above), and round it off with marketing, strategy and writing…and while you’re at it throw in some psychology and anthropology to keep things interesting.  And if you’ve still got time on your hands, consider a minor in Mandarin.

Advice to the smaller agency owners in this tough economic climate?
Focus in on a niche and an under-served marketplace. There’s no better way to create and grow a business. By being targeted and specific you can carve out opportunity and growth.

How do you use and define experiential methodology?
My take on experiential, and this finds its way into just about everything we do at GPJ, is that experiential represents a “point of acceleration” for marketers. Today’s brand marketers are launching new products, entering new markets, combating fierce global competition and are looking to customers as low-cost R&D and sources of new ideas.  Smart marketers realize the value of selectively handing over the reigns of the brand to their customers to help chart the future course with relevance and differentiation.

Experiential, executed physically as well as across digital and mobile, is the most efficient route to engaging and activating customers. Experiential works across any medium, as long as there is individual or community  involvement. These relationships can propel the brand forward in any number of ways: from insight on improvements to purchasing to personal recommendations of the brand. 

Mastering the brand experience is becoming the number one priority for Chief Marketing Officers and other marketing leadership, it is imperative that brands get it right. Experiential has a pivotal role to play in that scenario.