Rolling up an Online Ad Agency Powerhouse: AKQA CEO Tom Bedecarre (Part 1)

Tom Bedecarre is the CEO of AKQA, an award winning, privately held ad agency with roots in San Francisco. Tom provided a fascinating interview, and a really good discussion about the emergence of new media and how it shifts the power balance in the advertising marketplace. As is customary, we begin the interview by learning something about his background.

SM: I would like to begin with a bit of your background. Where did you grow up, what was your early career like? TB: I am a Bay Area native. My great grandfather came to San Francisco, so my family has been in the area a long time. I grew up in the east bay, and did my undergraduate at Stanford in political science and economics. Back in the day people went to business school straight out of college, so I left Stanford and went to Northwestern to the Kellogg school of management where I got an MBA in marketing and management policy. I enjoyed that quite a bit and wanted to have an experience working in New York. Although most of my colleagues were going into brand management working for the likes of Kellogg or Proctor and Gamble, I really thought the communications business would be more interesting. I took a position in New York which is where I got to work on the General Foods account on the agency side. I mostly had a background in consumer package goods.

SM: We are talking about a time when advertising was a highly east coast / New York concentrated business. There was no technology industry to speak of that warranted a career in high-tech advertising.

[to be continued]

This segment is part 1 in the series : Rolling up an Online Ad Agency Powerhouse: AKQA CEO Tom Bedecarre
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