Earl Cox: Martin Agency

This Thursday our advertising class has the opportunity to get more insights for our projects from another guest speaker. Earl Cox, a Virginia Tech alum, graduated from Tech with a degree in communications and received his MBA at the University of Virginia for marketing. He is currently the Chief Strategy Officer and Partner of the Martin Agency. The Martin Agency is a very successful advertising agency based out of Richmond, Virginia. Martin Agency works with companies such as Geico, Hanes, American Cancer Society, Wallmart, and Pizza Hut just to name a view. In 2010 they received US Agency of the Year from Ad week magazine and are responsible for coining the phrase "Virginia is for Lovers". As you can see this is a pretty impressive agency with a lot of success to back it up. Earl for the Martin Agency oversees the Strategic Planning department for the consumers forensics group and the data analytics. He is also the author of the book, "Wraparound Planning: Non-Linear Approach Makes Better Ads". Obviously Earl has represented Virginia Tech and the Pamplin school of business very well with his success in the ad industry. I see this as a great opportunity to see what our group can squeeze out of him to boost more ideas for our project. I know I have thought of a bunch of approaches and hopefully will get some one-on-one time with him to see if we are headed in the right direction. Especially working with Uni-Qlo we are going to want to make the Ad personal for the consumers and at the same time make it memorable. I think the good thing with dealing with clothes is that it leaves a ton of opportunity for creative ideas. I believe the trouble will be getting our ideas to be concise and to the point for the ads. Hopefully Earl can shine some light on different ways to avoid running into problems.