Nigel Carr Lands at DiMassimo, Adds Name to Door; Independent Agency DiMassimo Brand Advertising Changes Name; Announces Newest Partner, Nigel Carr.

Business Editors

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 7, 2004

Nigel Carr, well known as the relentless and highly successful brand strategist and advocate behind many successful long-running campaigns, has joined independent DiMassimo Brand Advertising, New York, as Managing Partner, Chief Strategy Officer. Henceforth, the agency will be known as DiMassimo Carr Brand Advertising.

"DiMassimo has built formidable brands with long-running, innovative campaigns and that was the deciding factor for me," said Nigel Carr. "I'm thrilled to be partnering with Mark again. We've always had a tendency to finish each other's sentences. He's built a team that's the perfect fit for me and the agency is independent not only in its creative thinking but also financially, which means that the work and the people will always come first."

Mark DiMassimo adds, "During my career, I've had the opportunity to work with the most brilliant brand planners and strategists in the business, and if I were a client, I would hire Nigel Carr every time. He is the original 'marathon brand advocate.' No one I know has the stamina, creativity and passion for brand-building that Nigel has."

Carr was previously Managing Partner and General Manager of KBPwest in San Francisco, an agency he founded under the KBP umbrella and grew to more than six million dollars of revenue over six years. Carr had been with Kirshenbaum Bond for over 12 years, joining as Director of Brand Planning in New York in 1991, six years before moving to head up the company's San Francisco office.

Carr is well known as a member of the original British Invasion of account planners into the U.S. in the 1980's. Carr headed up planning at Chiat/Day New York, where his work won Effie Awards for Glenfiddich and Sara Lee, and his NYNEX Yellow Pages "If it's out there, it's in here" campaign ran for seven storied years and captured the Grand Effie, given by the American Marketing Association for the single most effective campaign of the year - going on to be the first campaign to capture this award twice.

In 1991, Carr got the call from Kirshenbaum, where he renamed the Account Planning discipline to reflect what he felt should be its true focus - the brand. As Director of Brand Planning at Kirshenbaum, Carr would set the strategy for such long-running successes as Snapple Beverages "100% Natural Marketing," Target Stores "Are you ready for a store like this?' and the Effie Award winning seven year "Feeling of Cognac Hennessey" campaign. In San Francisco, Carr most notably helped to massively turn around the fortunes of enterprise software company PeopleSoft with the "People Power the Internet" campaign. While his work for Mother's Cookies, the agency's first San Francisco client, helped increase sales by more than 20% in advertised versus non advertised markets, demonstrating the upside for the brand and positioning the company for acquisition at a premium price.

"It was Nigel Carr's relentless focus on the essence of our brand and his ability to lead KBPwest hand-in-hand with the PeopleSoft marketing team that brought us such a brilliant integrated campaign as 'People Power The Internet'. It cut through all of the Internet chatter to help establish PeopleSoft as the innovative leader in the enterprise software space," said Baer Tierkel, former Executive Vice President, Worldwide Marketing, PeopleSoft.

"Nigel has that unusual combination of creative, innovative and strategic thinking rarely found in a single package," said Patrick O'Dea, CEO of Peet's Coffee & Tea. "If he could draw, he'd be a one-man agency. Mix in some good old fashioned personal character, and that's the reason I've always hired Nigel in the past, not the agency whose name was on his door."

Bernie Bloomfield, former VP of Marketing at NYNEX Yellow Pages, who worked with Carr for his entire seven-year stint at Chiat/Day, said, "Nigel has the rare ability to sift through tons of data, listen to others and provide unique insight into customer behavior. I can sum up Nigel's contribution to the Nynex Yellow Pages ad campaigns very simply. I never decided on a strategy until Nigel provided his thoughts and I invariably chose the direction he suggested."

"Simply put, Nigel has one of the most strategic minds in the advertising business," commented Larry Benjamin, former CEO of Specialty Foods, currently CEO of Ahold Foodservice.

At Kirshenbaum in New York, Carr had earlier developed a close "attached-at-the-hip" relationship with Creative Director, Mark DiMassimo. Their work together included the category-dominating Citibank AAdvantage Card "Or Was It The Miles?" campaign, which ran for seven successful years and earned an Effie Award, as well as successful campaigns for CNBC (for client Roger Ailes), helping to launch the America's Talking television network which was the precursor to both MSNBC and the phenomenally successful FoxNews Channel. Finding that they shared a passion for integrated marketing, Carr and DiMassimo helped K&B to build up an Integrated Creative Group at the agency to over $100 million in billings - over half the agency's income at the time - in just three years.

In May 1996, DiMassimo left to found his agency (DiMassimo Brand Advertising), and the following year Carr left for San Francisco to found KBPwest. Over the next seven years, the two did find the occasional opportunity to collaborate, most notably on a successful pitch in 2003 for the Comcast Cable BrandDirect Marketing business, for which Carr served as lead strategic planner, having referred the prospect to DiMassimo. KBPwest had to withdraw, a week before the final pitch for the business, due to an East Coast client conflict and Carr (with the blessing of K&B) worked with DiMassimo to complete the pitch-winning presentation. The business is still at DiMassimo Carr.

During the same eight years, DiMassimo and his partners - including Doug Ray (Integrated Marketing and Media Services), Lee Goldstein (Business Development and Operations) and Carla Hall (Executive Producer) - built DiMassimo Brand Advertising. The buzzy independent built on early brand-launching success to launch some of the dot-com boom's most notable successes, then became the rare independent to survive the dot-bust and grow to $150 million in billings, by creating long-running integrated buzz-generating campaigns for such long-term clients as The Plaza Hotel, Crunch Fitness, The Island ECN/INET and Instinet. In addition, the agency ultimately won prize assignments from giant marketers such as Comcast and Pfizer in the past year in addition to Peter Morton's Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

DiMassimo and Carr say they'll pursue business opportunities within their existing client relationships, limiting outside pitches to two or three a year.

"The best new business program is to Love the brands you're with," says DiMassimo, adding that Carr has already brought value to the agency's clients.

DiMassimo Carr Brand Advertising will be launching a new website at: www.dimassimocarr.com.

About DiMassimo Carr Brand Advertising

DiMassimo Carr Brand Advertising is an independent, fully integrated communications agency dedicated to energizing the brands they manage with innovative programs that generate buzz. By creating inventive branding, advertising, direct marketing, interactive advertising, media planning and public relations solutions, the agency reaches consumers in ways that are both unexpected and highly effective. As a brand consultant and independent agency, DiMassimo Carr Brand Advertising has become the secret and not so secret weapon to clients including Pfizer, The Plaza Hotel, Crunch Fitness, Instinet, Comcast Cable and High Speed Internet services, HBO and the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino. Additional information can be found at www.dimassimocarr.com.

Mark DiMassimo and Nigel Carr are available for interview.

NOTE TO EDITORS: Photo of Mark, Nigel, Doug, Carla, and Lee available upon request.