adam&eveDDB’s NYC Whirlwind

“It has been a whirlwind in the best possible way,” says James Rowe of his time up to now as managing director of adam&eveNYC. The agency, one of London’s most loved and successful, officially launched in the United States in January 2017 after it was invited to pitch on – and eventually win – Samsung’s North America business.

James has been in the adam&eveDDB family since January 2013 when he joined as an account director. “It was one of those things that I think we’d always wanted to do,” he says of the agency’s ambitions to expand its footprint to the US. It was a case of finding the right time and the right client and Samsung turned out to be exactly that. James also had a bit of a niggling dream to live and work in New York too. “It’s always been something I’ve wanted to do, growing up in the ad industry,” he says. “New York is the market. It’s huge, it’s all those things that I think people get excited about. The sticking point for me was I didn’t want to leave adam&eveDDB… so the stars aligned in that respect.”

Since those early days of 2017, adam&eveNYC has been on a roll. The first year was about bedding in and focusing on doing good work for Samsung. That all went to plan. At the beginning of year two, James and the team were invited to pitch on Jim Beam, arguably the most quintessential American bourbon (although Jack Daniels fans may have a thing or two to say about that). That account was won. This year there have been wins for JetBlue and Peloton. The agency placed in the top 20 agencies in the US for the One Show and adam&eveDDB was named international agency of the year by AdAge.

To put some of that in concrete business terms, adam&eveNYC has experienced roughly 25% growth year on year, every single year since it launched in the market. From the two people that arrived in New York in 2017, the agency has expanded to almost 60 people. “Even when we [adam&eveDDB] got big [in London], we still went after everything and pursued every brief, every client, every opportunity as if we were a startup and we never lost that hunger,” says James, who believes that mentality has proved successful in the States too.

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