/adam Nuggets, bits, bobs, and other unseemingly disconnected dots.

I’ve been hanging around the digital marketing space for nearly 15 years, starting back in 1994. In Pittsburgh, PA, I worked for a company called The Internet Group, and once had the email address adam@internet.org (don’t try that one now – it won’t get to me). Spending time with a bunch of really smart computer science people from Carnegie Mellon University was a lucky thing to have happened to me. While I was there we built the very first ever release of MapQuest. I still remember working with the designer on the logo, when we decided that a font called “Cheap Motel” would look really cool. We had no idea. Lucky move #1.

I then met a woman (Lucky move #2), and five weeks later got engaged. A year and a half later, we got married, and moved to Boston so she could finish graduate work at Harvard (I married her because she’s smarter than me, and I didn’t want to have to compete against her). I was asked to interview for a job at a direct marketing company, and almost didn’t do it, thinking it was all about coupons. But I did, and it turned out to be Bronner Slosberg Humphrey, the original name of what is now Digitas. Lucky move, #3. Years of working on IBM, and like everyone who’s worked at Digitas, spent time on American Express.

I had a brief stint at Cambridge Technology Partners, before realizing they’d never quite re-tooled from the glory days of client/server applications and rapid application development. I (and my wife) moved to New York, and I ended up at iXL, which became Scient, which became SBI & Company, which became SBI.Razorfish, which became Avenue A/Razorfish, which is now owned by Microsoft. Phew. I left right about the SBI & Company time, which was more than three years after I started there. I joined Agency.com, which some people couldn’t believe was still around. I spent the next three and a half years working with some of the most talented people in the space, helping to rebuild the agency into one of the most critically-acclaimed and results-driven shops in the market. Then I left.

The same week I left, I found out my wife was pregnant (Lucky move #4) with our first child. Talk about game-changer (all good, just to be clear). I landed at a company few had heard about at the time, iCrossing. When i joined in early 2006, the company was 160 people. Today, iCrossing is nearly 600 people, in 10 offices in the US, and four in the EU. It’s been an amazing ride, fueled primarily by an obsession with making clients very, very happy by creating marketing programs that are measurable, and actually deliver a return. Lucky move #5.

So here I am, father of my first child, Caius (pronounced “kay-us”), still happily married to my wife, living in the ‘burbs outside NYC, and working as the chief strategy officer of iCrossing.  What an absolutely crazy, lucky, and wonderful ride of fifteen years. And believe it, or not… I’m more excited about things then ever. I just can’t wait to see what the next fifteen bring.

/adam