Named president and chief operating officer of Los Angeles-based TBA Global in January, Lee Rubenstein is already moving fast. The communications pro is on the road almost constantly, visiting TBA's offices and clients to broaden branding's horizons. Here, he describes how to build better connections:
Q: What attracted you to TBA Global?
RUBENSTEIN: I saw a great opportunity with TBA Global because I believe it is leading the evolution from primarily an "events" agency to a full-service connective communications and marketing agency. This offering addresses critical client demands as now, more than ever, brands must connect with key audiences internally and externally, at more levels and more regularly, with a consistently high-quality experience.
With 19 offices, TBA Global had already assembled tremendous creative and production resources including communications and marketing strategy, event planning, consumer marketing, entertainment and destination management. Our focus now is to connect all these offerings for our clients.
Q: Can you share some of your goals for the company in the next year? In five years?
A: Our vision for the company is to connect brands and people, and we will continue to stay focused on what our clients want and need, so our six-month, yearly and five-year plans will always evolve. Our clients need to connect with key audiences internally and externally, at intellectual and visceral levels. To best accomplish this, we introduced our connective model, which pulls together all our tools and methodologies to create and enhance audience connections to deliver long-term benefits.
Our goal is to build awareness about how we can help them increase the power of the experience they are delivering through TBA as we energize and evolve the industry over time. To that end, we have increased our on-staff expertise to deliver these services to our clients and have added valuable new services. Those additions include our Learning & Performance Improvement group; we design and deliver world-class custom-blended interactive learning programs such as e-learning, classroom and print.
We have expanded our entertainment offering to include a Branded Entertainment group. We still provide corporate entertainment based on our strong relationships in the entertainment industry. However, we also now provide music licensing as well as consumer-focused, integrated, branded entertainment programs, which is an emerging new solution corporate marketers want as part of their brand-building mix.
For the full interview, see the July issue of Special Events Magazine.
Photo by Curt Goodwin
