Eric Pakurar

Seems there are bits and pieces going in all directions and no one's really seeing the bigger picture. That's why Dirt is here — to figure out how brands should go to market, and to make sure the whole brand experience across every discipline and touchpoint is seamless and awesome. That takes some brains and some hard work, and we're likely going to get dirty along the way. We're not scared.

Take the nerdy bits of G2, where I came from -- the digital, the direct response, the analytics — and add it to the solid shopper thinking of Ogilvy Action and JWT Action, you get Geometry. It's the world's largest activation agency. It's by far the most effective agency in the activation space in 2015 and 2016, if you take Effies wins as any indication. Cool.

If you believe in doing what's right for your clients, if you believe in finding the answer in communications that is objectively right and that will have the most genuine impact on a given business, then it's hard to find a job on the agency side that isn't chock full of hypocrisy. That's why I went to G2. There, we had a business structure that allows for real objectivity: Digital, direct response, shopper, experiential and branding — all under one roof, reporting to one P&L.

At the beginning of 2010, I became head of strategy for the New York office. Pure, objective marketing strategy. I was responsible for the work that the ~30 Naked strategists did, pushing boundaries, and packaging and selling what we do. I continued to lead client business as well — my favorite projects were the inside-out rebranding of NBC, a global communications strategy for Powerade, as well as brand and comms planning work for Coca-Cola and Samsung Electronics.

After long stints in media planning and then brand planning, I always thought my heart lay somewhere in the overlap between the two — context and content together. When I heard Naked was (finally) opening an office in the U.S., I basically beat down their door until they gave me a job. They (mercifully) relented. I was the second full-time strategist hired.

I transitioned into a pure brand planning role for clients like Merck and Subaru, while continuing to play a communications planning role on Cigna and other clients.

At the end of 2001, they sucked the media planning department out of DDB to form OMD. But a small group of us stayed at DDB to start what we saw as a kind of media SWAT team: the context-focused counterparts to the content-focused brand planners. My boss and I invented a tool we called "4D" to facilitate the birth of creative, holistic communications plans, and that tool was eventually rolled out to DDB offices globally. Though it was among the first of its kind in the US, our group fell prey to the recession and the experiment didn't end up lasting all that long.

After a failed start in book publishing after college, I somewhat serendipitously landed in media planning. (Thanks, Paulette!) It suited me — I liked the work, and especially liked the people I worked with. I started as an assistant media planner and worked my way up to be media supervisor. My favorite accounts were the geekier ones: Compaq, Lockheed Martin, and the American Stock Exchange.