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Birth of a Creative Giant
There's a small advertising museum in a hallway at Arnold's headquarters in Boston, where the company fills eight floors of pricey real estate in the Back Bay. A battered green lounge chair sits against one wall. A black body bag lies near another. The green chair was last seen in one of the agency's iconic Volkswagen television ads: Two guys pick up a chair on the curb, drive around until they realize it smells and then dump it on another curb. The body bag appeared in an anti-smoking spot.
"Our industry is about where business and creativity meet," says Hamlin. "We're idea oriented. It's all about finding the core idea and being able to express it."
In 1946, Arnold Z. Rosoff founded an advertising agency in Boston and named it after himself: Arnold & Co. In 1988, Rosoff sold the company, which went through several ownership changes until it was acquired in 1990 by current CEO Ed Eskandarian, who sold control to a French holding company called Havas.
The agency became known for amusing commercials, such as its "Drivers wanted" Volkswagen ad campaign. (In 2005, Volkswagen abruptly ended its decade-long relationship with Arnold and took its business to rival Crispin Porter + Bogusky.) Arnold also won an Emmy for its 2004 Super Bowl ad that mocked the tobacco industry for marketing dangerous products -- a campaign that was followed by a 22% decline in smoking among young people. In 2005 Advertising Age magazine ranked Arnold, which has revenue of $114 million, as the 19th-largest U.S. ad agency.
But with the proliferation of social networking sites and blogs over the past few years, the advertising game has changed rapidly, expanding the challenges and opportunities. "Technology has had the most profound impact on marketing," Hamlin says. "You used to express a brand's message six or seven ways when I got into this business. Today there are thousands of ways. We use technology to analyze the results of our marketing. Clients are really looking for ROI marketing."
The Technology Lag
When Folsom was offered a job by Arnold in 1996 as a network administrator, he unexpectedly found out that his current employer wanted him to continue working for several months. Folsom explained the problem to his new boss at Arnold, who told him to come in one day a week until he finished his obligation.
"That's just the way the company works," Folsom says.
Arnold might have had a cutting-edge, creative and flexible culture, but Folsom soon discovered that its technology infrastructure was decidedly lacking. "It was laughable," he recalls. "We had a dozen dial-up connections. There wasn't any tape backup or alerting features. When a server went down, no one knew until a phone rang at the help desk. The meat and potatoes that the company needed were missing."
Folsom became data center manager, responsible for all back-end systems, including email, file storage, backups, Internet access, information security, connectivity to partners and vendors. He worked with Arnold's first CIO, Jorge Abellas-Martin (whose business card read "Head Geek"), to upgrade the agency's infrastructure.
When the company renewed its lease and a lengthy telecom contract expired, the duo seized the opportunity to replace Arnold's creaky networking gear with a state-of-the-art data center that had a multiple-gigabyte backbone as well as a new Voice over Internet Protocol phone system.
In 2005, Abellas-Martin left the company and Folsom, now director of IT, took over as acting CIO. Folsom finished bringing Arnold up to enterprise-class standards by creating a robust business continuity plan to preserve the agency's 12 terabytes of data.
With VMware, the IT shop cut its number of servers from 45 to 12, making it easier to replicate its Boston storage area network at its New York office with 12-to-1 compression and tapeless backups. Arnold also added a server in New York to mirror 2.5 terabytes of ad work. "It's been a huge investment," says Folsom, adding that he's now looking at tools to bring to the business. "Our goal is to be proactive. I think we could do a lot better job at that."
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