“At last.”

I remember BBDO’s Phil Dusenberry addressing an international meeting of Pepsi-Cola marketers and telling us all that those were the two most overused and least motivating words in advertising. Some twenty years later, I can tell you that they mean a lot to me; this site was almost as long in the making (not quite, but it feels that way). It’s the classic cobbler’s kids story: clients take precedence over “house” work – first, last and always.

We launched a placeholder blog called Authenticities two years ago, thinking we’d have our “official” site up in three months. I think we’ve started, almost finished and then binned, at least three iterations of what you’re now looking at over the past two years. Nothing was hitting the mark. So our placeholder blog lived on, and on, and on. I can’t thank @amandamooney enough for being its primary contributor over the past year. She’s incredibly good btw, and we’ve migrated many of her posts here.

I killed V2 about nine months ago, and a small team of us decided to take a 180. The voice of reason and rigor throughout it all was Greg Lipman, our Creative Director in Chicago. He took my rather loosely defined vision (i.e. give me something different) and he brought it to life. Then, working with our global technology guru, Ming Yee, and Greg’s creative team of Kenny Roa, Derek Van Horne and Jim Kopeny, they made it real. That was last August BTW –just as our business was taking off on a trajectory that continues today. Greg was a great noodge, and he made it his point to remind me how close we were with amazing regularity, passion and no small amount of patience.

Fast forward to about three weeks ago. @applegirl, aka Suzanne Marlatt comes on board as our Community Manager. We sat with @armano, looked at the site, looked at the calendar, saw SXSWi and picked our launch date. Huge shout-outs to each of them, and a final one to Shawn Jones, our TD in Chicago, for working their collective magic on structure, content and bugs over the past few weeks.

It does take a village (and apparently, a lot of time). I’m biased, but – thanks largely to the efforts of the folks mentioned above – we finally have a site that’s equal to the quality of the work our teams do for some amazing clients worldwide.

See you all at #sxsw.