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Back in the day, direct marketing wasn't typically a clear career path for recent college graduates. How did you end up in DM?
This month we ask Sid Liebenson that very question. Liebenson is executive vice president and director of marketing at Draftfcb, and recently was named Charles S. Downs Direct Marketer of the Year by the Chicago Association of Direct Marketing.
Upon graduation from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in 1974, he interviewed at Marsteller Advertising and found that his stint writing DR copy for a small agency caught its eye. This led to a position at Marsteller's Schwab/Beatty unit in New York, where he worked mostly on print campaigns, a little broadcast and some back-end collateral materials.
“My adviser at Northwestern said it was a shame I wasn't in packaged goods and I should get out,” Liebenson remembers. “Many of my grad school friends felt sorry for me because I wasn't at a big-name agency.”
By 1977 Liebenson wanted to move into the general advertising world and interviewed, with no luck, at several agencies. Finally one prospective employer turned to him and said, “Stop. What are you doing this for? From what you're telling me, you like direct response. You're good at direct response. There are 50 guys on the street who can sell soap as good as the next one, but hardly anybody knows direct response.”
He took that advice to heart, applied to direct agencies whose work he respected and immediately got several replies — and a job at his first choice, Stone & Adler in Chicago. He's been in DM ever since.
“I feel like I've lived through the modern history of direct marketing in my 30 years at Draft,” he says.
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