Bruce spent his first 20 years in the advertising industry working in some of the largest advertising agencies in the world. Among those were Saatchi & Saatchi, Chiat/Day, and DDB Worldwide, teams lauded for their creativity. Bruce made his living by generating supposed "rabbits-out-of-the-hat" magical strategies. These strategies are the unbelievable-the flashy advertisements that catch your eye but don't always correlate with the product being sold. They brought in pop culture and provided entertaining insights on the product, anything they thought people would like. These ads felt like distractions from the product and the company. For some ads, there was no correlation between what they showed, what the product achieved, and what the company stood for. Think about Super Bowl commercials-how often are you sitting through the ad while wondering what product is actually being sold? Businesses spend millions of dollars to score these high-traffic TV slots, only for viewers to struggle to identify the brand.During these advertising magician years, Bruce was part of the Great Marketing Lie. Marketing magic was completed behind a curtain of mystery. There's a lot of drama in the advertising world. If your ad works, everything's great. But if there isn't a significant increase in sales after the ad is released, you shoulder the blame for its failure. Some people love the unpredictable drama of the industry, but Bruce knew there had to be a better approach to successful marketing communication. Bruce's career in advertising took him to Southeast Asia, where he managed the regional offices of large advertising agencies: Singapore, Hong Kong, Vietnam, China, and Japan.
