Culture Is Our Business

If you’re a mass-marketer for the next millennium, you’re either a creator of pop culture or one of its victims.

The new media have created new options. New challenges. New opportunities. “As Seen On TV” will never be enough again. Today your media impressions are likely to be as random as a cruise on the Internet. And in this channel-surfer’s world of ever-expanding media and market options, smart positioning is no longer enough. The mass market is still out there, but it’s a lot harder to reach.

To earn cultural currency, you have to think of yourself as a programmer. Your marketing communications have to create their own cultural context – and “aggregate” an image – with a carefully managed array of media impressions. From broad-band to online. From retail to direct. From personal relationship to public event.

And to hold it all together, you’ll need ideas that are at once simpler, yet more global and compelling, than ever before. Simple enough to cut through the clutter, global enough to be multi-channel, compelling enough to make every impression count.

At Mezzina/Brown, we understand the new marketplace. In fact, we’re helping to define it. We “do” promotion, direct, interactive and advertising. But we’ve made culture our business. Because from here on in, whether you’re a marketer of cookies or computers, cars or cruise lines, culture is your business, too.


M/B prides itself on its out-of-the-box marketing ideas. For example:

Our first creative award was for a matchbook cover advertising campaign.

M/B helped Wit Beer post the first ever IPO on the Internet – spawning the predecessor of www.witcapital.com.

We created www.freeride.com, spun it off as a free-standing L.L.C., and grew it to serve hundreds of big-name marketers on the Internet.

M/B’s interactive group developed the first multi-platform CD-ROM (for the rock group Cranberries).

We’ve concepted and developed dozens of premium items for the Camel Cash Catalog which we design and produce on a quarterly basis.

For Newsweek, we developed the first media trade-targeted Web site posted by a national magazine.

Our interactive unit built the first music-mixers (for the music group Deep Forest) ever posted on the Web.

Our in-market lifestyle event programs helped Camel and Beefeater bond with important brand constituents and helped coin the phrase “experience marketing.”

M/B created the first web-centric college recruitment program for Goldman Sachs to help them attract the “best and brightest.”