BRAINSTORM IDEA
Ann Egelhoff started out with an idea. To advertise cell phones in the 1990s, before everyone and their dog already had a cell phone, you needed to put cell phone brand names on the headsets of NFL coaches at Monday Night Football games. Literally, just an idea that sprang from her team during a brainstorm over a simple problem.
Ann Egelhoff is a Rockhurst College grad with a BA in Comms, and she got her first career-track job at Marketing Associates International running the nationwide partnership between NFL and Sprint/PCS in the 1990s and is in charge of managing a floating hosted activation and promotional offsite event, with lots of different partners and plenty of moving pieces each and every Monday night in the fall.
“SprintPCS had this big block of newfangled cell phones they wanted to sell, so on Mondays we had Sprint sponsor a talk with a speaker. Usually a football VIP, great people and really interesting speakers like Tony Dorsett and Lynn Swann, who would tell stories and sign footballs and pose for selfies, in a time before there were selfies.”
Nobody had thought of this before, and voila, she put her team on it, created the B2B Luncheon Series to share Monday Night Football activation with local Sprint/PCS stores and partners, corporate suites included.
And it worked, the new marketing legwork she was carrying out. It did what happens when the past changes into the future within the confines of one spoken sentence. Sales shot up for SprintPCS because having that same logo phone from TV in your pocket on the back nine on Saturday made it look like you are talking to the scouts up in the booth with the supercomputer, the instant replay and the binoculars.
And SprintPCS sales found plenty of opportunities to work together with Ann in this brand new field of then-versus-now. Because now we think of all this digital infrastructure around us as more or less kind of normal. Smartphones. Uploading photos. Social media. Meals in silence. Cars drifting and swerving. Live audiences apathetic and scrolling.
But back then it was cool to walk up to a kiosk and send a text message for free to one of your friends. The one who could afford monthly charges for a cell phone. That was hi-tech Neo in The Matrix stuff back in the 1990s. People felt all woozy at the experience, and texted crazy things to each other for the first time ever in the freefall ether of maximum overdrive cyberspace.
“I’m proud of the work we did. It’s hard to believe that was just the beginning.”
Her name is Ann Egelhoff, and she’s from the Midwest. She still hangs on to that but it’s no secret she went on to conquer the NFL, conquer Los Angeles, conquer America’s college students, and then settle her bones in talent incubators at home in the New Orleans festival atmosphere she has come back to every year since she was 19.
SUPERBOWL 1999
In 1999 Ann headed out to the Miami Superbowl a month early to set up her masterpiece at the NFLX, an interactive pop-up space at the leading edge of this new way to reach people.
On a wide-scale footprint in Miami, Ann and her team built a great big activity area with plenty of kiosks to let folks come up and try fancy new cell phones from Sprint PCS. Celebrities in the run-up to the football game gave interviews in the branded pavilion, fans posed for photos, and curious people could stop and play interactive games to find fleeting enjoyment in their south Florida winter’s day.
For two years she led this charge to pioneering success.
“Then came overages and layoffs and a huge severance, and after traveling the country for a couple of years I decided to move to Los Angeles. No job, no idea, just a room in a house with some girlfriends who had come to California before me.”
VIRGIN RECOMMENDS
Within a day she was housed and cozy and in touch with old friends, one of whom invited her to a low-key LA gathering at Soho House. So she kept with the low-key theme and rolled up casually in jeans only to find hipster billionaire Richard Branson and just a handful of guests standing on the patio all mingling in the golden light of a mythical southern California evening.
“Richard Branson! The Virgin CEO, the guy with the record label and the private island and the phone company and the airlines and all the entrepreneurial ideas. My friend didn’t mention he would be there. In hindsight I would have dressed for the event.”
But Ann Egelhoff is nobody’s fool, and when Branson mingled his way round to her midway through the gathering, she told him who she was and said she’d really like to work for him. With a Midwestern smile that affirmed at her creative solution capacities.
“Well, with a smile like that you should have a job with us in no time,” Branson said politely, and in a short time Ann began the next phase of her crossroads career as a contractor at Virgin’s downtown LA headquarters.
But Ann Egelhoff had not quite considered what a job at Virgin Entertainment Group might entail. Branson, a billionaire, never spends his own money on corporate promotions. Instead he hires marketing people like Ann Egelhoff to partner with other brands and use their assets to promote the Virgin brand. Not an usual business plan, but one that requires a lot of personal care and attention.
And not a long way off from Ann’s SprintPCS experience, where she leveraged creativity and corporate networking against the eyeballs of millions of viewers who watched the NFL’s marquee prime time broadcast event every Monday.
In Virgin’s case their valuable asset turned out to be a physical network of giant 90s-era box stores selling hard copies of pre-Internet digital entertainment. A crossroads of culture and commerce with excellent and spacious parking lots.
“There was no marketing budget, no money to buy physical infrastructure and build things. So I took a look at our assets and it was clear to me what was most valuable: Virgin Megastore foot traffic,” Ann said.
“So I went out and found sponsors again, under the guise of ‘Partnership Marketing’. A way to sell a million pairs of eyeballs every day to existing partners and try to find new ones. Something Virgin had never done before,” she said.
Triumph Motorcycles took up the challenge, bringing in custom display models for customers to admire. The fledgling video game industry behind the massively popular Call of Duty titles built kiosks in stores to allow patrons a test play. When HBO came to sell boxed DVD sets of their hit series ‘The Sopranos’, it was Ann Egelhoff who guided their creative effort to build a full-sized replica of the set inside the megastores.
“Pontiac cars came in when they saw how productive these efforts were, so did Big Red gum. Everyone wanted to get their products in front of people, except my coworkers really did not like to pull used chewing gum off the floor after that particular promotion,” Ann said.
COLLEGE TOUR
Ann’s Los Angeles office life at Virgin is something she looks back on with great fondness, particularly the weekly lunchtime events for employees that brought in unknown rock bands along with established stars, to entertain staffers and build cohesion among coworkers. But she felt the need to return to the road and jumped at the chance to try something bold and new.
The Virgin College Media Tour proved a step up in Ann Egelhoff’s career, as her proposal to bring musical performances and an interactive customer experience to college campuses was quickly approved and steered into development as a change for the better.
“It made no sense to just drive the Virgin Bus to a college campus and hand out trinkets. Why not recreate the in-store partnership marketing and the Lunchbox Heroes gigs we saw at the headquarters? Why not a music tour?”
By day, Ann Egelhoff’s team transformed the placid quadrangles of higher institutes of learning into an expo village, with a Dentyne Gum singing booth that made custom CDs, and a Monster Energy pavilion that showcased the brand’s high-flying sport stunts, and a full-sized replica of the newsdesk and studio from the hit comedy film Anchorman.
By night, Ann Egelhoff’s team then turned the expo village into a music festival, showcasing new hit artists, local bands and headliners for thousands of happy college students forever imprinted with a positive Virgin Megastore opinion.
“On an annual budget of $1 million we toured 20 campuses a year for four years and cleared a total profit of over $400,000. Again, nobody had ever done this before, and it felt great to break new ground. I had a great team around me and the corporate ethic that Branson has created really made it all feel like one big Virgin family,” Ann said.
For her Virgin College Media Tour Ann Egelhoff was recognized as Virgin’s Most Brilliant Employee of the Year. She says the friendships she built in those years are to this day some of her most lasting.
NBC RATINGS CHALLENGE
“One thing I can say about moving to and living in LA for the duration is that over time my wardrobe got much better. And you get savvier with contacts, cultivating a network of talented and smart people who can do things that you can’t. And everyone drives everywhere and there are no bad cars,” Ann said.
Across the street from Virgin’s headquarters stood the EMI Records building, and with nowhere to go but up, moved her partnership marketing skills, albeit briefly, to EMI’s marketing group. Success followed, so did opportunity.
Ann quickly found herself at none other than the NBC Universal behemoth, at NBC’s creative partnerships innovation group, launching giant blocks of entertainment content nationwide. This was Ann’s next stop, and this job launched her into the stars.
“I knew nothing about TV, but it was a fantastic job in a brand new industry for me, and I came in to help them learn how to create branded content and face their ratings challenge at the network,” Ann said.
Way back at the beginning of the broadcast industry, national companies with things to sell across the country used to rely almost entirely on 30-second television commercials to move the dial on their products. In a population of more than 200 million consumers at the time, limited to just three television channels, this was effectively an eyeball monopoly.
But sometime in the mid 1990s an increase in cable channels and the proliferation of remote control devices began to splinter Big 3 audiences and chase away ratings. Either the customers were watching some other content on a minor niche channel or else they flipped idly during commercial breaks in a neverending deathgrip doomscroll.
“The real reason I was hired was that at NBC there was a panic about keeping media-buy money at the network,” Ann said, mentioning the back-office contract negotiations that a network’s sales department would conduct with the marketing arms of giant conglomerates.
“In effect, I came in to join and build a SWAT team for the sales department, to package the incentives for media-buys and learn to co-create advertising content with shows,” Ann said.
At the extreme, this meant Ann and her band of merry workers were needed to join scripted show production teams and come up with commercial content that could run during a show’s air slot. It also meant tangling repeatedly and out of necessity with NBC lawyers.
“We started with things like a block of commercials for Lexus to run during episodes of the show ‘Community’. We got access to the show’s talent and producers, then shot and edited the materials, and then ran it during broadcast. Tina Fey worked with us, so did Joan Rivers. Tori Spelling was deeply involved during her reality show. In effect I became a very large project manager with a lot of moving parts, and for this I was promoted to VP,” Ann said.
COMING TO NOLA
There are those who come to Los Angeles in search of a rather narrow dream. They mythologize the epic fortunes of the lucky few who are scouted in an ice cream shop or wind up on stage at a comedy club the night a national talk show host is in the audience. These people are far and few between.
Most people who arrive jobless in Los Angeles kind of just roll around in the flat parts of the city until either their money or their patience runs out. They never make it, their dreams of stardom are interrupted by a lack of talent and in the end they pack up and go back home.
Not Ann Egelhoff. When it came time to leave LA she was a VP at NBC, and she left entirely of her own free will to get to New Orleans, a place she has returned to annually every year since she was a 19-year old back in Kansas City.
“LA will eat you alive if you can’t hack it, and you have to learn to survive. But I never wanted show business, I just wanted to make a living. What happened for me I put down to luck, persistence and a strong Midwest mindset,” Ann said.
And Ann’s reliable marketing acumen held no obstacle for her progress. She kept contact lists, she kept in touch. She made friends and connections in every interaction, and emphasized in each work project the relationships she built.
“I’m a human collector, and a connector. I still talk to the College Tour folks from Virgin, still keep in touch. My dad was that way, a really likable person. He would call people on their birthdays, he was charismatic and people enjoyed him as a person. He had a million friends and always said ‘Be good to your contacts, and keep networking for later in life’,” Ann said.
Still, leaving Los Angeles was a major step, but Ann was bound and determined to live in New Orleans, a place she first visited with a stolen plane ticket.
“Well, not stolen. Not theft. It was during my first job in Kansas City, I was an intern for a radio station and I drove the van into parks so the guy in the mascot costume could walk around and hand out promo material to people who could answer trivia questions. This was in the time of paper airplane tickets and no ID check,” Ann said.
And so Ann and her friend in the mascot costume figured that a few tickets falling off the back of the truck wouldn’t be missed, and at New Year’s Eve at just 19 flew to the craziest North American city of New Orleans.
“It was the beginning of my life-long love affair with the city. The music scene, the people, the food, just the whole atmosphere. It was everything I wanted, and I moved there after what felt like a lifetime of dreaming,” Ann said.
Her five-year long distance relationship with a trombonist, joining him on tours, talking on the phone and generally living apart, turned into a shared house just off bustling St Charles Avenue, where for the past eight years Ann and Craig have built their New Orleans life.
But moving to a new city in adulthood is often more challenging in real life than dreams would ever suggest, and Ann spent many frustrating hours trying to position herself into a satisfying job that would encompass her many talents. The Old Boys Network likes things the way they were, not necessarily the way things could be.
Then, like the proverbial needle in a haystack, Ann found GUMBO Live, a Think Tank in downtown New Orleans that had been founded to inform media buyers on the brand habits of Millennials.
“It’s still a changing environment to find valuable trends that appeal to people in their 20s. Millennials are a tough group, and GUMBO Live was a big, successful experiment in keeping up with trends,” Ann said.
“GUMBO Live was an offshoot of the giant New York agency ‘Momentum’ and I booked an interview with the CEO. I really wanted this gig because it checked all my boxes: New Orleans, unconventional marketing, teamwork, strategy. And then I found out that one of my best friends from way back in Kansas City was a close mutual friend, and there was an old photo of the two of them playing hackey sack together that I had seen on my friend’s wall. This was a giant networking victory!”
Ann Egelhoff got the job at GUMBO Live because she was the best qualified applicant. She was the best qualified applicant because for her entire professional life Ann Egelhoff has put other people first and managed her contact network with meticulous care and judicious messaging.
GUMBO Live occupied several floors and the roof of the JAX Brewery building in the historic French Quarter, with a rotating cast of young creatives rolling through the office, literally, on roller skates and skateboards sometimes, as Ann Egelhoff handed out brand briefs from client companies to commission white paper research from her staff.
“A millennial commune, a magic carpet ride. GUMBO Live was a home for all of these amazing kids I was the den mother for. We built a diverse group of smart young people who helped bring creative ideas to marketing departments in a time of great media uncertainty and falling ad buys,” Ann said.
NOT IN KANSAS ANYMORE
Ann Egelhoff knew Dale Frommelt and Mike Schmalz from back in Kansas City and kept in touch for over 30 years. When Mike came down to New Orleans on St Patrick’s Day one year to install and manage infrastructure for a client, the festive atmosphere and happy vibes helped to reconnect and realign their lives.
“Most people shed others as they get older. It’s pretty normal. But I’m a Midwest gal, and that’s important to remember,” Ann said.
Over successive visits in a stretch of a few years, Mike convinced Ann to join Unimarketa and to bring her unique skills to the company’s bold business plans. Her plain-spoken administrative solutions to starry-eyed creative projects throughout her career have brought her praise, prestige and plenty of experience. Her buoyant good humor backed by a strong work ethic and boundless empathy have produced winning and profitable interactive customer experiences and helped pioneer a scaled up version of guerrilla marketing that captures eyeballs and leaves an imprint on the mind. In three different industries spanning more than three decades.
“I’m from the Midwest, still just a Midwesterner, despite all the years away. We work hard. We like people. It’s not like these things can’t exist in a New Yorker or a Southern Californian.
But folks in the Midwest make sharing the work the goal.