Evan A. ButlerSurvey of Advertising / Spring 2014 Professional Interview with Peter Bracegirdle of TBWA

Professional Interview with

Peter Bracegirdle of TBWA

Peter Bracegirdle Bio:By the young age of 19 Peter Bracegirdle knew that he wanted to be in the advertising industry. Peter is from Great Britain and completed his schooling at The University of Bristol. Peter began his career in advertising as a graduate assistant at DBB London. After completing the graduate program at DBB Peter began his career with TBWA in London, spending the first fifteen years of his career there. He then transfered to TBWA New Zealand where for the next five years he successfully led the Pedigree global brand strategy development and implementation. He then made his way to Los Angeles where he served as Global Managing Director for Mars Petcare and Activision Call of Duty. Now Peter serves as the Managing Director for Nissan Americas here from the newly opened Nashville branch of TBWA.

I selected Peter for my professional interview becuase he is the Managing Director of Nissan Americas. Nissan sports cars have played a major role in my life. Ever since I can remember my family and I have always driven and owned a brand of Nissan sports cars. When I was twenty years old and decided that one day I would like to make commercials for Nissan I started researching who was behind Nissans advertising campaigns. To my dismay I learned that it was TBWA/Chiat Day located all of the way in California. When Nissan’s North America headquartes made the decission to move to Franklin Tennessee, I learned that TBWA would follow them here as well and my dreams of working for them was re-vigorated once again.

TBWA is a global company, so their website lists all of their locations and the managing directors for those locations. With a simple e-mail to the creative director listed at the Nashville location, Rob Schwartz, I stated who I was and what my purpose was for reaching out to him. He emailed me back the next business day stating that he was actually located in L.A. but he would gladly connect me with Peter who was at the Nashville office. Peter then connected me with his assistant who cooridinated with me over the next couple of weeks to schedule a time to meet with Peter. I interviewed Peter at the TBWA Nashville office located in Cummings Station on Tuesday March 11th. I used their lare conference room to conduct the interview which has an early model bright yellow Datsun 240z hanging from the ceiling!

I emailed Peters assistant the questions that I would be asking during the interview so that he may have time to prepare. I prepared ten simple questions that would lead to more dialect be-tween Peter and I. Below are the questions:

1. Introduction - What is your title and role at TBWA?2. How long have you worked for TBWA?3. What is the primary function of this particular office?4. Nissan is a giant in the auto industry, was this office opened to stay in the same region geographically with one of your biggest clients?5. How many employees work here at this office and globally for TBWA? 6. What is a normal day like at TBWA?7. As the managing director who do you communicate with the most? Internally and externally.8. What about working for TBWA do you like most?

9. You have a very unique office space...tell us a bit about the overall atmosphere here and the design behind it.10. Explain TBWA’s idea of Brand Disruptive Strategy and disruptive ideas.

Peter and spoke for atleast an hour on the questions that I asked. I videod the interview so that I could engage him while speaking on the topics without having to worry about taking notes on his answers. He spoke very knowledgable about several topics in advertising from positioning and brand management to the process of re-inventing the way a company thinks of their own brands. It was inspiring to me to hear some of the thought processes behind some very well known marketing and advertising campaigns that Peter and TBWA have been behind. Inspiring in the sense that some of my own ideas and thoughts about those same campaigns weren’t far off from

Peters initial ideas when creating those campaigns with his team.

Peter spoke about his time in Los Angeles working as Managing Director for the Mars Petcare campaign. Something that he said that stood out the most to me was that when he started working with Pedigree, the leading Mars Petcare brand, was that they felt that they were in the “dog food business” but Peters team said no, you are in the “dog loving” business. He stated that people don’t own a dog to feed it, they own dogs to love them. Therefore if

you are a “dog loving” company you will behave differently overall as a company. You will then help dogs become adopted, you will provide health insurance for dogs of your employees and allow them to bring their dogs to work etc.

My time spent interviewing Peter was short lived but very valuable in the persuit of my goal of working for an advertising agency. Hearing his insight from the perspective of a twenty-four year veteran in the advertising business is priceless. I hope to stay in contact with Peter in the future for further guidance and advise on getting in and establising yourself in the advertising world.

Screenshot from interview 3/11/14