What’s Next for The World’s Largest Advertising, Marketing, and Media Industry Summit
A Conversation with Advertising Week’s Chairman, Matt Scheckner
Matt Scheckner founded Stillwell Partners, a boutique consulting firm that has produced Advertising Week since 2004. Under Matt’s leadership, Advertising Week has become the world’s largest advertising, marketing, and media industry summit. The Week is now conducted in New York, London, Tokyo, Mexico City, and Johannesburg. For twenty years, Stillwell has also produced the annual Nathan’s 4th of July Hot Dog Eating Contest, broadcast live on ESPN. In 2022, Matt and his long-time partner Lance Pillersdorf sold Stillwell to Emerald Holdings, an NYSE publicly traded company that is a big player in the trade and exposition industry. Matt is staying on as Chairman of Advertising Week.
The Continuum talked with Matt about Advertising Week, hot dogs, his popular podcast and his many philanthropic endeavors.
We know that you just sold Stillwell Partners – and its flagship event, Advertising Week – to a larger company, and we’ll talk about that in a minute, but first, can you tell us about your early career and how you got to Advertising Week in the first place?
To quote, or at least paraphrase, the movie Love and Death, my journey began with inadvertent serendipity. My career accelerated when at age 23 I was appointed as the first Executive Director of the New York City Sports Commission, and I did that for eight years with our winning bid for the 1998 Goodwill Games as our crowning achievement. After that, I was a serial entrepreneur, and much of what I did was around the live experience. Particularly memorable was a lot of live production work under the Radio City Music Hall moniker including the opening of Arthur Ashe Stadium in 1997 and Pepsi’s Centennial in Hawaii in 1999 featuring Ray Charles and the Rolling Stones. And along that journey and same time period I produced an off-Broadway play about Patsy Cline with Opryland in Nashville – one of my favorite projects.
Then, in 2002, I got a call from someone I knew at DDB on behalf of the 4As (The American Association of Advertising Agencies). I didn’t even know what the 4As was at that time, but learned they were looking for an idea to galvanize the industry, address chronically poor morale, restore some sparkle and help on the all-important young talent challenge. After a few months, which began with a meeting with the late 4A’s Chairman Ken Kaess in the legendary Roxie Suite at Radio City, the 4A’s hired me as the first Executive Director of Advertising Week.
Over time, it made sense to run it as a business, so we created that opportunity, and it really took off with London in 2013 and then eventually expanding to just about every continent.
We’ve been running it since 2004, and I’m really proud of what it has become. Beyond the business, Advertising Week has evolved as a platform and catalyst to tackle issues which transcend the industry. We’ve created partnerships with global groups like Red Nose Day, Project Everyone, the United Nations, Product (RED), the Nelson Mandela Foundation, the National Urban League, Hispanic Star, and Education Africa.
You and your team recently sold Stillwell Partners and Advertising Week to the event company Emerald. Can you tell us why you did that and what you think will change as a result?
Well, I always had an ambition to sell the company because I want it to be here ten, twenty, or even thirty years from now. To make that happen, logic tells us it has to be part of a larger ship.
I’m very proud of how we managed through the pandemic; as you can imagine, event-based businesses struggled during the pandemic. Truthfully, most of the ones that were our size and didn’t have a parent company behind them or private equity backing them got smaller or disappeared during Covid – we didn’t. We kept all our people at full salary for the length of Covid. And then, coming out of the pandemic, we emerged in a solid position, firing out of the gates when we relaunched live at Hudson Yards in the fall of 2021. Covid or no Covid, what did not change was the basic notion for the future of the business - if we wanted the business to hang around for the long term, selling it to a larger company was the way to go.
I’m staying on, and so is our leadership team, and I think we will continue to grow. Being part of a publicly traded company makes running the business a little different. In a four-quarter football game, you know that if you score seven in the first half and rally to score twenty-one in the second half, it’s not a problem as long as you win the game. In a publicly traded company, however, they prefer predictability and sort of 7-7-7-7. It’s a great challenge which we relish.
Going forward, I think you will see us continue to elevate our game and break new ground. There are some new market opportunities that we're looking toward to keep expanding our global footprint, and I want to see us better leveraging the content and partnerships we have now.
“Beyond the business, Advertising Week has evolved as a platform and catalyst to tackle issues which transcend the industry.”
How have the topics covered at Advertising Week changed over the years and what do you think marketers want to talk about right now?
We’ve always been a blend of the timely and the timeless. Think of how much has happened in the years since I started doing this. Advertising Week is coming up in October, and I can tell you that most of the topics on our thought leadership stages didn’t exist twenty years ago. In 2004, Facebook was only on the Harvard campus, and there was no Instagram, iPhone (2006), YouTube (2007) or Snap (2010). Not so many years ago, we had a track called Mobile. Another called Social Media and way back when, another called Digital. That would be ridiculous now as all are so seamlessly integrated into our lives and the tech platforms and devices that we carry around.
I think marketers want to talk about emerging technologies every year, but they also know that the fundamentals of advertising—those big thirty thousand-foot views of building relationships with consumers—don’t change. The enduring allure of creativity and power of storytelling also don’t change. We will still have these kinds of conversations at Advertising Week.
Is there anything that you're especially excited about for the coming Advertising Week in New York?
I gravitate towards the stuff that touches the broader arena of popular culture and social issues. We're working on a big effort around the climate crisis with British screenwriter and producer Richard Curtis, who has become a dear friend. And through our partnership with UTA, we're working on something with Hilarity for Charity, the charity that Seth Rogen and his wife Lauren Miller have set up for caregivers of people with dementia. Lauren's mom had dementia, and my mom did, too, so I’m very sensitive to that.
That’s great. You actually do a lot of philanthropic work. Can you tell us a little about what you’re focused on now? Also, what would you say to brands and agencies that want to make a difference?
All of us have the opportunity every day to make a difference. I’ve been very involved with the Nelson Mandela Foundation for many years, and one of the things he said, and I’m not quoting it exactly, is that ‘the way you fill your own cup is to fill the cups of other people.’ I don’t think we do enough of that. We are now a very me-centric country. Much of social media is about pointing the lens inward at yourself. I think this industry, where we've got people who understand the art and science of influence and image and brand and communications, has an opportunity and an obligation to fill other people’s cups.
We’ve used Advertising Week to try to make a difference. I told you we are doing something on climate change this year. A few years ago, we had Emma Stone on our stage talking about her challenges with mental health, which was the first time she ever spoke publicly about them. We’ve had the Surgeon General and Nikki Sixx talk about the opioid epidemic. We had a Parkland Dad on stage about Gun Safety . . . and on and on.
Our response to George Floyd’s murder brought us to the iconic Apollo Theater in Harlem. We brought Mary J. Blige and others to discuss how we could all come together and made it a fundraiser for the Nelson Mandela Foundation. If Mandela can spend twenty-seven years in prison and then devote five years of his presidency and the rest of his life to reconciliation and forgiveness, maybe there's something we could learn here, perhaps we could do a little better. And as is our style, we gave everyone a great show.
And I’m also really proud of our work with Education Africa and the Masibambane school in South Africa. Last year, during Advertising Week in Johannesburg, we brought Kevin Hart to this school in a rural township called Orange Farm. It was a great visit with no press and no photographers, and we asked them what they needed. We didn’t just want it to be a good day with a celebrity; we wanted to leave a permanent legacy behind.
They said the school, which is on a huge property, needed a security fence to keep the students safe. We made that happen, and I recently went back to see the fence.
It’s all built, I took a little scrap of fence I found on the ground, and it sits on my night table.
We’re making a tangible difference and my advice to the industry—both agencies and individuals—is simple. Stop saying you don’t have time to help. You have time. And together, we can really make a difference in a real way.
“I think this industry, where we've got people who understand the art and science of influence and image and brand and communications, has an opportunity and an obligation to fill other people’s cups.”
You also host a podcast called Great Minds where you’ve interviewed some really interesting guests. Can you tell us a little bit about it and some of your favorite interviews?
By the time we finish this season, we’ll have over three hundred episodes. It’s a blend of people you’d expect from the business, like agency leaders, CMOs, CEOs of holding companies, and great creatives mixed with people from the broader arena of popular culture. Over the years, I’ve interviewed Graham Nash from Crosby, Stills, and Nash; Steve Cropper, who is the lead guitarist in Booker T. & the M.G.s; the filmmaker Werner Herzog; and Sir Giles Martin, who oversees Abbey Road and all things related to the Beatles catalog and library. I interviewed Barbara Eden, who we all remember from I Dream of Jeannie, and Barbara Feldon, Agent 99 in Get Smart. She’s ninety now and so funny.
I love doing this because they’re very open-ended conversations. We do our homework but never know exactly where it will go. Drives the PR people a little whacky, but we have not missed one yet.
There’s one more pop culture topic we have to discuss before we go: Nathan's Famous International Hot Dog Eating Contest. Is it true that you’ve been running it for years?
It’s true. The contest has been an annual Fourth of July tradition in Coney Island for over one hundred years, but it didn’t used to be a big international event. I remember going to it in about 1994. I thought it was a big phenomenon and convinced my wife to check it out. We took our son, who was less than a year old at that point (he’s twenty-eight now). I was surprised it was just a little event in an alley behind Nathan’s. I just knew this thing could be so much bigger, so I contacted the PR guys running it, and we took over the production the following year with an expansive vision.
It kept getting bigger and bigger, and then ESPN came in, and now it has a huge live audience with a vast global viewership. People call the Kentucky Derby the most fantastic two minutes in sports. We like to refer to this as the greatest ten minutes in sports.
In fact, this is how Stillwell Partners got its name. Nathan’s is on the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues. It’s been a joyful part of my life to be a part of this.
September 13, 2023
