PBN: You’ve scored a string of big clients outside New England, but at
the same time you’re just becoming known to a lot of folks here. It seems like
things have happened kind of backward for you.
ROSA: The whole out-of-town thing happened when my dad turned 70, 10
years ago, and I realized that, ‘Wow, my business is taking off in Boston, but
if I’m going to be working 70, 80 hours a week. I’m never going to see my family
and friends unless I move close to them.’ So I moved down here and my Boston
clients were like, ‘Well, we don’t know whether you’re going to be able to service
us from Providence! Providence, it’s the end of the earth, you know?’ And the
Providence people were like, ‘Well, you did grow up here, but we haven’t seen
you at the Chamber events. We don’t really know what you’re all about.’ So I
went out to Chicago and saw some contacts I had, and ended up building business
in Chicago first.
We’ve always had a presence outside of New England. What’s really exciting
is now people around here are finally going to start seeing our work. We picked
up Cox Communications of New England, so that means I can point to a TV spot
or a billboard and say, ‘See Mom, that’s why I was working late all those years.’
Bank Rhode Island –you know, nothing is more Rhode Island than Bank Rhode Island,
so we’re very excited about working with them. So it’s a very good mix, we’re
very fortunate.
It’s rare for an agency this size to have a national profile, and particularly
to work with so many Fortune 500 companies. You describe it as if that’s been
a happy accident, but that may be modesty. Has it also been by design to some
extent?
Yeah, maybe delusional design at the start. (Laughs.) You know that was always
part of the goal, part of the plan. I always felt that I, and the people who
I wanted around me, had big ideas. And to do that we needed open minds and big
budgets, so we always saw ourselves as working really well with big companies.
People called me crazy back then, when you’re working with Joe’s Auto Body and
General Dentistry. You know, ‘What are you doing trying to get in with Fleet?
What are you doing trying to get in with CVS or Textron?’ And we just kept plugging
away at it, kept feeding them good ideas and recognizing opportunities for them
before they recognized them, themselves. Eventually they just were kind of worn
down and said, ‘Let’s just give them a shot.’
With more and more of your work coming from Chicago, New York, Atlanta,
Boston – do you need satellite offices in some of those big cities?
Yeah, I think we might have to get to that. As we grow, we definitely need
to keep an open mind to that, just to have a physical presence every day. It
all depends on what our clients want. We got where we are by listening to them,
except when they said no. (Laughs.) Once they hired us, we really listened to
everything they said, and if a client needs that level of handling then we’ll
go there and we’ll build around them. You know, that’s what’s worked. So I think
when it comes time for that we’ll know, but the headquarters will always be
in Rhode Island.
You said a moment ago that when you moved your business down here from
Boston, local folks said, ‘We haven’t seen you at the Chamber events.’ At the
same time, a lot of people complain that Rhode Island has an inhospitable business
climate, that taxes are high. I wonder, what are some issues for you, as a Rhode
Island firm on the rise, that you would like the state to address, and why are
you so committed to staying here?
It would be hard for us to stay if we didn’t have a track record with blue
chip companies. I think it would be more difficult to stay here. Our advantage
is, once we can convince people that the talent here is arguably better or just
as good as you have in New York or Boston, we’re at an advantage over even New
York or Boston, because our top rates are competitive. They have so much more
overhead than we do. So from our perspective, we don’t see it as being as difficult
here, as long as we have our foothold with those big companies on a national
scale. It’s when we do business locally – that’s where it’s tough. You know,
taxes are high. One concern that I have right now is that we’re expanding and
we’ve been keeping an eye on the commercial real estate market, and you know
– I’m starting to see graffiti everywhere. I’m starting to see certain things
that may prohibit me from expanding in Providence. We may be looking at other
options, maybe East Providence or somewhere else. We’d love to stay in Providence,
but we just have to see how things keep evolving.
You founded this firm at 25 years old, working out of your apartment with
a typewriter. You’ve said that you were young and idealistic, and hated working
with big ad agencies that were impersonal and had a cookie-cutter approach to
their clients. You vowed to do things differently. Now, as an Inc. 500 company,
one of the fastest-growing companies in the nation, talking about adding satellite
offices in the big cities, do you fear the animal farm syndrome? That you’re
going to become the animal that you set out to slay?
Oh, absolutely. We work really hard to not take ourselves too seriously. It
was a lot easier to be informal and crazy when it was just me and there was
no child, no mortgage – if I screwed up the only person who was going to suffer
was going to be me. Well now I have 25 people who I feel responsible for, and
they have mortgages and families. It’s harder. We’ve had to grow up because
we have more people. So the balance has been becoming more formal but not losing
that informal touch that made us stand apart. As Abby Hoffman said, ‘Sacred
cows make the tastiest hamburgers.’ We don’t want any sacred cows here. We try
to do the same for our clients. One of the big frustrations I have in Rhode
Island is that a lot of the smaller companies we run into are like, ‘Oh, we’re
not going to be an industry leader, we’re just a Rhode Island company.’ That
drives me insane. We have incredible talent here, we’ve got incredible assets,
but people limit themselves. Yeah, we can lead industries! You can go get the
big clients, if you work hard at it, harder than the big guys, believe in what
you’re doing, surround yourselves with people who believe you – yeah, you can
do anything. We can be big here.
Advertising for me is this incredible dichotomy – you’re the ultimate capitalist,
you’re making money for your clients by making people buy products. But at the
same time, your clients come to you because you tap into this whole other world
that is really outside the corporate comfort zone – the creative, the intuitive,
the artistic, even the irreverent. So I wonder whether you’re an artist or a
capitalist at heart?
(Laughs.) Cool. No one has ever asked me that before. Without Mary (Sadlier,
executive vice president of Advertising Ventures), I’m selling velvet Elvises
at the Hess gas station across the street. Yeah, she’s definitely the capitalist.
For me, it’s about the creativity. There’s a reason that my title is chief creative
officer and not CEO.
I know that you once played a drug-crazed, axe-wielding psychopath in an
episode of ‘Real Stories of the Highway Patrol,’ and that President Clinton’s
Secret Service once gave you the code name ‘Spin Doctor.’ Is it unfair to say
that your job kind of resembles a boy’s fantasy?
It’s fun, it’s fun. The best thing about being in advertising is you get to
have fun but you also get to eat. When you’re as big as I am, the starving-artist
thing doesn’t fly – I like food. The other thing about advertising is that it
makes you very interesting at cocktail parties. Yes, I’ve driven in a presidential
motorcade. That was kind of cool. I got yelled at by (Clinton White House Press
Secretary) Dee Dee Myers. She didn’t understand Rhode Island! (Laughs.) I’ve
done lots of neat things to make a client happy. For the Rhode Island State
Police I got to – well, I’ve got to give you the whole story on this one. We
had done some drunk-driving public service announcements, and I was getting
frustrated with the actor because he was doing the death scene from ‘MacBeth,’
he wasn’t being a drunk driver. So I’m like, ‘Not that I know what this is like,
I don’t even drink anymore, but I was kind of picturing this.’ And they used
me in the drunk-driving spot. So after that, Lieutenant Miech, who’s a bit of
a prankster, called up saying that ‘Real Stories of the Highway Patrol’ wanted
to use me. And I said, ‘Yeah right. Send me a contract and I’ll do it.’ And
then this 40-page contract comes from Hollywood and it was a real deal. I thought
it was a joke because he was saying to me, ‘You’re going to play an axe-murdering
psychopath and you’re going to go into a store in Chepachet carrying a hatchet.’
I thought, this can’t be real, please. Chepachet hatchet. But it was.
