for members of the alumni association of the uniVersitY of nebrasKa–lincoln sPrinG 2011

Nebraska – The Family busiNess sTaTe | WriTiNG CONTesT | The PiTCh maN

“You were born and raised on the West Coast and now you are leaving for Nebraska?

Why would you do that?” asked a friend of mine as my family and I prepared to

make the move four years ago.

NEBRASKAMAGAZINE 15

“I really feel like it’s a unique business

opportunity, and it will be good for my

kids,” I replied.

Unconvinced, my friend shrugged and as

he walked away I couldn’t help but wonder,

What is in Nebraska for us anyway?

What I have found in Nebraska has

surpassed my expectations and I am now

convinced that Nebraska has the potential

to become THE Family Business State. Let

me explain:

If you had to point to one defining

characteristic of Nebraska’s economic

stability and success, you would have

to look to family businesses. Family

businesses come in all shapes and sizes, but

they all share a unique desire for creating a

product or providing a service that brings

value to the customer and honor to the

family name. Whether the business is a car

dealership or a hog farm, they share some

of the same challenges.

Family business is about creating a

legacy, and during the last four semesters

in UNL’s College of Business, students

have been privileged to interact with some

of Nebraska’s finest family business leaders

in the new Family Business Management

course.

The class went from idea to reality

with the vision and generosity of Jim

and Mary (B.S. ’77) Abel, of the 102

year-old NEBCO Inc. NEBCO is one of

Nebraska’s largest and most successful

construction materials companies with

vertical integration from mining to ready

mix plants.

Jim Abel speaks of his son Jack’s time

in the class by saying, “This experience

at an early age has definitely piqued an

interest in Jack learning more about our

family businesses. It’s gratifying seeing him

participate more regularly and go from

being a silent observer to having a place

on the agenda and even presenting to the

board.”

Jack’s take on the family business class?

“This experience is something that you

don’t typically receive in your standard

business class,” he said. “It helped me

begin my understanding while I’m still in

school of what it will take to become truly

valuable to my family business.”

The family business class highlights

the unique opportunities and challenges

that families in business face. Most of the

students relate to the material because

about 80 percent come from families that

own businesses. Nebraska alumni and

friends of the university give graciously

of their time, serving as guest speakers

to share their unique stories of setbacks

and triumphs with the next generation of

family business leaders. Although they

converse with students on many different

topics, they all share legacies of innovation,

success and giving back to the community.

16 spring2011

Jim Abel shared one of NEBCO’s innovation stories of taking a bi-product of coal-fired electric generating plants and turning it into a useful material. They began testing the use of fly ash as a part of their concrete mixtures. Before this time, fly ash was seen as a useless bi-product that was dumped into landfills. Jim views his companies as stewards of the land and has even converted an old rock quarry into a golf course, Quarry Oaks. Golf Digest referred to it as, “one of America’s 100 greatest public golf courses.” Innovation, creativity and a desire to build for the future all motivate these family enterprises.

Dave Specht lectures the Family Business Management class at UNL and is a consultant to multi-generational family businesses. To learn more about his work you can visit his website at www.davespecht.com or contact him at (402) 470-7416.

Legacies of innovation

The course aims to instill in the students the need family

businesses have to be innovative in their thinking. Success

and even survival may depend on the ability of leaders

to think of standard products and processes in new and

original ways.

Jay Wolf, a proud grad (B.S. ’80) and president of

Wagonhammer Cattle, conveyed this principle to students

with his father’s vision and foresight to purchase land in

the Sandhills that others thought could not be productive.

Through perseverance, ingenuity and a partnership with

experts at UNL, Wolf’s family now has transformed the

once barren land into a productive 35,000-acre cattle ranch.

BRANSCOMBE, ABEL, SPECHT

NEBRASKAMAGAZINE 17

Legacies of successeradicating the stereotype that big time businesses only come from big places is also an important objective. Exemplified by Angie Muhleisen, who is on the College of Business Advisory Board at UNL and is now president of Union Bank & Trust, students learned how a small operation with a solid foundation can have limitless potential. When Muhleisen visited class, she spoke of her father, Jay Dunlap (’52; J.D. ’56), owning a small bank in Milford and how they were able to leverage that success, expanding to more than 29 bank locations and a publically traded education finance company in NelNet. “I grew up hearing my father talk about banking around the family dinner table,” Muhleisen said. “Even though I didn’t realize it at the time, these conversations taught me a lot about banking and were the catalyst for my lifelong interest in the profession.”

Carson Smith (B.S. ’77) from Speedway Motors shared

his family story that begins in a garage with his mother and

father selling parts for racecars. That company is now

known for being “America’s Oldest Speed Shop.” Betsy

Branscombe (B.S. ’07), daughter of Carson Smith and Jane

Branscombe (B.S. ’76), completed the family business class

and said, “There are so many questions you face when

considering returning to a family business that it makes the

class absolutely invaluable.”

The Smith’s Museum of American Speed is one of the

best-kept secrets in Nebraska. It is a 120,000-square-foot

building dedicated to telling the story of American racing.

People come from all over the country to visit it, while

many locals don’t even know it exists. Don’t tell the

Dunlaps and Smiths that success can’t be found in Nebraska!

Legacies of giving Back

One thing all of these featured companies have in

common is that their next generation of family leaders

have participated in the College of Business’ Family Business

Management class. In addition, senior generation leaders

from each family have returned as course presenters after

their sons and daughters completed the class. It is this spirit

of giving back that makes Nebraska family business leaders

unique.

As I think back to my friend questioning my judgment in

moving from the West Coast to Nebraska, I now have

evidence that the legacy of innovation, success and giving

back really is a differentiator here. It’s now clear to me that

because of the people, work ethic and values, Nebraska has

the potential to truly become, “The Family Business State.” n

30 spring2011

Glenn Blair Stracher is a pioneering American geologist and an internationally recognized expert in coal-fires science. He’s also an intrepid explorer who loves to go where few of us would dare to follow: into the smoldering and deadly precincts of surface and underground coal fires that can burn for decades and sometimes hundreds of years.

For the usually calm and cool Stracher, however, walking on red-hot coals is simply a way of life. His strategy, when the temperatures around him approach 1,000 degrees (F) and the toxic smoke begins to crush his windpipe: “Just try to ignore the heat and discomfort as best you can – and focus on getting the job done!”

By Tom Nugent

NEBRASKAMAGAZINE 31

It happened on a cool, overcast afternoon in August of 2004 ... as the widely published and nationally renowned geologist, Glenn B. Stracher (M.S. ’86; Ph.D. ’89), traversed a smoldering coal field in rural South Africa.

Stracher, a world-class expert on underground and surface coal fires and the toxic pollutants they generate, had come to South Africa on a research grant to study the gigantic fires that were slowly consuming the famed Witbank coalfield, located about 50 miles northeast of Johannesburg.

All day long, the heavily gloved and booted Stracher (pronunciation: STRAH-ker) had been slowly walking across and carefully observing a glowing, smoke-shrouded landscape that resembled something out of Dante’s “Inferno.”

Armed with a stainless steel instrument designed to measure the temperature of nearby rocks and soil (a device known as a “thermocouple probe”), the gutsy geologist and editor/author of nine books on topics ranging from chemical thermodynamics to coal fires, was doing his best to collect minerals that had been “nucleated” from the noxious gases as they were emitted by the underground conflagration and reacted with nearby rock.

Stracher, whose pioneering work in identifying the byproducts of combustion created by burning coal in long-abandoned deep and surface mines has alerted the world to the pollution hazards from such fires, was determined to collect a wide variety of minerals that nucleated with the coal-fire gas. Once gathered, the rogue

minerals could then be transported back to Stracher’s college laboratory in Georgia ... where he intended to analyze them to his heart’s content with the assistance of his colleagues.

But the daylong search for the crystals had not been easy.

Because the labyrinth of coal and waste rock that snakes beneath the surface of the Earth at Witbank is slowly being consumed by fire, it is vulnerable to a sudden, massive collapse at any time.

One false step and Stracher knew he could disappear into a fiery sinkhole – a blazing, quicksand-like pit that would quickly swallow him and then scorch the flesh from his smoking bones.

And what about the heat? At one point, around three o’clock that afternoon, Stracher found himself struggling with a surge of gathering fear.

As he limped across a smoking pile of oxidizing coal tailings – the miners call these smoldering hunks of fossil fuel “gob,” or “boney piles” – the rattled geologist could feel the rubber soles of his boots beginning to go soft. Looking down, he could see that they were actually beginning to melt.

Almost at the same moment, he noticed that the polyurethane handle on the end of his long

thermocouple probe had begun to smoke ominously. The damn thing was burning ... and beneath his three layers of fire-retardant gloves, Stracher could feel the thousand-degree heat gnawing at his vulnerable hands.

What to do?If he turned back now, he might never be

able to collect samples of the beautiful crystals that nucleated on the rocks around him. And without that evidence, Stracher would find it extremely difficult to prove his latest groundbreaking hypothesis – his widely debated assertion that these underground coal fires were responsible for creating large amounts of highly toxic mercury, one of the world’s most hazardous pollutants.

Make no mistake: Glenn Stracher didn’t want to cut and run.

But he was badly frightened now. The heat from the fires was clawing at him with maniacal intensity; for a terrible moment, he wondered if his thinning hair and bushy mustache might suddenly ignite. Should he turn back?

“That was a pretty difficult moment, no question,”

Stracher recalled. “There I was, engulfed in toxic fumes and smoke, with my boots melting

beneath me. And I’m asking

myself:

‘What if the ground opens up right now and I fall into oblivion?’

“I looked down, and the digital-temperature gauge for my thermocouple probe was going wild. But I staggered forward and began to stick the probe into a series of gas vents. I’ll give it another five minutes, I told myself, and then I’ll make a run for it.”

Somehow, he continued to crab-walk across the red-hot terrain. And then, at the very last moment ... he suddenly noticed a fine dusting of an intriguingly suspicious white powder on the surface of nearby rocks. Moving with the speed that is born of terror, Professor Stracher whipped a few sample bottles from his laboratory belt and brushed the white powder into them with a couple of stainless-steel laboratory spatulas.

Then he turned.He fled.His boots were a gooey mess by now,

and the handle on his gauge was seared and charred.

But he’d gotten those samples!After returning to his geology lab at East

Georgia College (about 80 miles west of Savannah), he examined the sample in polarized light with a microscope. He also scrutinized it with the help of the electron probe laboratory at the University of Georgia in Athens ... after which he began to confirm the crucially important findings he’d made that day at Witbank.

The white powder did indeed contain mercury – and is now undergoing complete quantitative analyses in Stracher’s lab.

After months of tireless effort, and after risking his hide in the smoke-

belching environs of Dante’s fiery “Inferno,” the once-upon-a-

time UNL geology graduate student had proven that mercury nucleated in minerals from the gas of coal fires at Witbank ... and that the substance represents a major toxic hazard for anyone within close proximity to it.

32 spring2011

“As a geologist, I’ve always thought that the earth is saying, ‘Okay, I’m going to tell you a little bit about me, but I’m not going to tell you the whole story. I’m going to leave most of it a mystery, so you can wonder about it.’”

– Glenn Blair Stracher

lthough they have received little attention from scientists, there are now thousands of out-of-control coal-mine fires burning around the globe, both at the surface and underground.

As this valuable natural resource is consumed, enormous volumes of the toxic byproducts of

combustion – including gas, creosote and solids – pollute the air, soil and water. These fires destroy floral and faunal habitats and may adversely affect human communities with

respiratory and cardiovascular diseases. They sometimes turn cities into ghost towns, while rendering large tracts of land unstable, uninhabitable and pock-marked with sulfur-coated sinkholes.

These raging infernos from a powerful geologic force, fire, may exceed 1,400 degrees (F) as

they release greenhouse, ozone-depleting and carcinogenic chemical compounds into Earth’s systems. Some scientists have quantified and are attempting to quantify mercury and carbon monoxide emissions –

as well as global-warming carbon dioxide and methane and other gaseous emissions from coal fires burning near cities. Thus far, the news has not been good ... with toxins reportedly exceeding EPA and OSHA safety limits.

Coal fires can burn for thousands of years underground and at the surface for

hundreds of years in abandoned strip-mining pits and in mine-tailings waste

piles, known also as “gob piles,” “culm banks” or “boney piles.” The fires often occur as the result of lightning strikes, forest fires and spontaneous combustion ... but they can also be triggered by human activities such as burning trash in an abandoned mine or on a gob pile. Fires can also result from mining activities, including welding, cigarette smoking, etc. They have even occurred in abandoned underground mines where people distilled whiskey.

One of the world’s most famous underground coal fires is the inferno at Centralia,

Pa., which has been burning since 1962. During the past 45 years, Centralia’s population has dwindled from more than 1,000 residents to only a handful – making it the most notorious “coal-fire ghost town” in America. The town’s spooky environs have often

been portrayed in documentary and feature films ... and Time magazine helped make Centralia a well-known landmark in 1981, with the publication of a hair-raising feature profile entitled “The Hottest Town in America.” n

NEBRASKAMAGAZINE 33

Born and raised in Albany, N.Y., Glenn Stracher grew up as the son of a “roofer and sheet-metal foreman” who’d come to America from a small town called Kolchin in Russia at the age of 15. Bernard Stracher’s family – Russian Jews in flight from the pogroms and relentless persecution of their people – had somehow ended up in the wrong city in America: Philadelphia. Soon thereafter, they’d found themselves transported to New York City and then to grimy, heavily industrialized Albany, where they reunited with Bernard’s father, Samuel Stracher. (Samuel had left Russia 10 years before to seek employment in America – so that he could bring his wife and children to the U.S.)

“My father had come to this country as a boy during the Russian Revolution,” the famed geologist recalled, “and he really struggled. I can remember him taking me out on roofing jobs during school breaks when we worked through bitter-cold winters and hot, humid summers. He would look straight into my eyes and say: ‘Glenn, this is a tough job, isn’t it? I don’t want you to ever have to do this for a living.’”

As he describes the moment, Stracher’s green eyes are suddenly wet with tears.

“My mother, Lillian, she was the same way,” he recalled. “She read to us [he has two siblings] day and night, and both my mother and father constantly encouraged us to study, study, study.”

The hard academic work soon began to pay off, however; by high school, Stracher was already developing a deserved reputation as a science and math whiz with a penchant for rapidly solving problems in chemistry and physics. And when he set sail for the University of Washington in 1980 (“I wanted to explore the amazing world of the Cascades and the Pacific Northwest”), he already knew that he wanted to major in the science of geology.

After four years of studying rocks and climbing through the mighty Cascades, Stracher applied to several graduate schools in order to continue his studies. And when the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Geology Department responded to his inquiries with a personal letter that made him feel like “they were interested in me as a human being, and not just as a number,” he decided that his next career-stop would be Lincoln.

Arriving on campus in the fall of 1982, the youthful rock analyst moved into Selleck Hall (home to UNL graduate students) and began taking courses in geology, chemical thermodynamics, metallurgical engineering and engineering mechanics.

“That was an amazing new world for me,” Stracher remembered. “Really, I felt like I was so thirsty for knowledge that I couldn’t stop drinking. And my professors liked that; they were eager to fill my head with as much information as they could and with countless ideas.

“Whenever I walked into their offices, they were never too busy to see me. I got lots of help from a long list of dedicated professors, including Nancy Lindsley-Griffin, John Griffin, Samuel Treves, Ronald Goble, David Watkins, Robert Nelson, David Loope, Donald Rundquist and Darryll Pederson. I also remember some terrific engineering professors such as Donald Johnson, Richard DeLorm and Russell Alberts. They were never too busy to talk to me and help me with research-related questions, and sometimes we just enjoyed friendly conversations about the Earth, about engineering, people and life.

“That left a very big impression, you can be sure. That’s the same model I use today with my own students at East Georgia College – and it also served me well when I taught graduate students for four years at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.”

Assigned by his UNL professors to study the history of “rock deformation” in

34 spring2011

a billion-year-old region of the southeast Adirondack Mountain Highlands in New York State (and under the guidance of New York State Geological Survey Geologist Philip R. Whitney), the gung-ho Stracher spent months at a time wandering through the wooded terrain that flanked the towering mountains. “I was deep in the woods, bushwhacking,” he remembered with a bright gleam of nostalgia.

“Except for one cold and snowy winter, this was in the summertime. It was very hot, and you’d be dripping-wet with sweat from the humidity as you headed out into the field by seven in the morning. I was swarmed by hordes of hungry black flies, deer ticks, horse flies and mosquitoes, and I occasionally ran into angry swarms of hornets and paper wasps that seemed to come out of nowhere and bite me. And then there were the snakes: a horrific feeling.

“You’re walking through a fog of steam ... and you’re about to start a long day of geologic mapping and collecting rock samples for structural, petrographic and geochemical analyses. You’re walking up Death Rock Trail ... and you just do your best to suppress all the negative stuff and focus on the research. And then you suddenly come upon an outcrop of metamorphic rocks, and you realize that these giant stones are a billion years old.

“Really, it was just enthralling. I would sit down and stare at the landscape, and it was just plain amazing. And I would tell myself: ‘It looks as if the hand of God smashed through these rocks a thousand million years ago. What must that world have been like?’”

With his UNL Ph.D. now in hand (geology and engineering mechanics), the budding geologist soon landed the teaching job he still holds today as a professor of geology and physics at the 3,000-student East Georgia College in Swainsboro.

During the past two decades in Georgia, Stracher has been increasingly devoted to the study of coal-mine fires and the pollution products they dangerously emit. He said his passionate interest in the subject was born during a visit about 20 years ago to “the hottest town in America,” Centralia, Pa., where an out-of-control underground coal fire has been raging since way back in 1962.

“I got out of the vehicle at Big Mine Run Road, and I saw a valley completely engulfed in smoke,” he recalled. “Sulfur covered everything: the trees, the bushes, the rocks. And there were all these fiery sinkholes everywhere. I looked around ... and I saw all these minerals nucleating from the vented gas.

“I said, ‘Ah-hah! I wonder if I can derive an equation using the thermodynamics I learned in engineering school at UNL? Can I create a pressure-temperature stability diagram for the nucleation of the gas?’ And that’s what I did, eventually, and then I was able to go on and publish a paper about the topic in the International Journal of Mathematical Geology.”

During the next two decades, Stracher would in fact conduct symposia, and edit, write and publish more than 60 scientific articles and nine books about thermodynamics and coal fires, including his four-volume classic work “Coal and Peat Fires: A Global Perspective,” Elsevier Science. Increasingly, the prolific author also was called upon by mining companies and engineers from around the world ... with most of them wanting to know what they should do to protect people from the toxic effects of

these renegade coal-mine blazes and how they might

be extinguished.

Stracher is frequently quoted in the national news media as an expert on the science of coal fires and has made two movies with National Geographic about them: “Wildfires” and “Underground Inferno.” (The latter film has won several international film-festival awards.)

Stracher said he’s convinced that learning more about the dynamics of surface and underground coal fires will be an increasingly important area of scientific inquiry in the years immediately ahead. As he often points out, the number of scientific papers about coal fires in peer-reviewed journals has increased recently as never before.

“Professor Stracher is a terrific scientist who’s obviously broken new ground in his geological specialty,” said East Georgia College President John Bryant Black. “But just as importantly, he’s a passionate teacher who never stops trying to help students learn more about the wonders of geology.

“We’re very fortunate to have him teaching and doing research on our campus.”

Married for the past 23 years to wife Janet, an amateur geologist who accompanies him on all field expeditions (she’s also the registrar of East Georgia College), Stracher said he loves to “repair old cars from the 1950s and 1960s” and work on his “O gauge model railroad,” whenever he isn’t hunkered down in his lab running tests on gas-generated minerals.

Ask him why he likes to wander among the smoke-jetting vents and glowing “red dog” burnt rock (also called “clinkers”) of guttering coal fires, and Glenn Stracher will sigh with wonder as he tries to explain.

“Geology? Why do I love it so? Well, I think it’s just the wonderment, the bewilderment of creation. How things came to be ... how these ancient forces made the rocks and made the critters [evidenced by their fossil remains] that are locked up inside the stones. Whenever I think about geology, I start to imagine an ancient ocean ... a world where no humans walked the earth. The wonderment!

“It’s hard to explain. It’s just something in my soul.” n

“You have to plan everything very carefully and think everything through. The gases are deadly and the land could suddenly collapse beneath you. You tell yourself: ‘Look, you can be productive here – just stay alive!’”

– Glenn Blair Stracher

NEBRASKAMAGAZINE 23

or Greg Andersen, the CEO at one of America’s top advertising agencies, the five-month quest to land the $270 million Cadillac account had been “a roller coaster ride like

nothing any of us had ever experienced before.”

Could the youthful Andersen – still in his early 40s but already a veteran of 20 years in the brutal New York City advertising wars – actually convince General Motors to

radically change the focus of its Cadillac ads?

It was time to find out. After months of non-stop creative effort by Andersen’s pitch-team – and after more than a dozen trips back and forth between New York and

Detroit – General Motors was about to announce its long-awaited decision... .

By Tom Nugent

THE Pitch Man

24 spring2011

he long-distance phone call was from Detroit, from the world headquarters of the General Motors Corp., and the caller wanted to talk with Greg Andersen.

The CEO at Bartle Bogle Hegarty didn’t hesitate.

This is it, he told himself as he reached for the phone. It’s now or never.

“Good morning, Greg,” said the director of procurement at GM. “If you have a minute, I’ve got a couple of questions for you.”

The former UNL advertising major took a deep breath.

After five months of working nearly around the clock, he and his team of advertising execs at BBH were about to learn whether or not their pitch to GM had landed them one of the juiciest accounts on Planet Earth.

Cadillac!The account billed at least $270 million

– worth millions of dollars in agency fees, a staggering sum for a mid-size ad firm like BBH. But the money was only the most obvious prize to be won or lost today.

Cadillac, after all, was what’s known in the advertising industry as an “iconic brand” – a marketing juggernaut that would bring instant, soaring prestige to any agency fortunate enough to land this international symbol of automotive excellence.

After months of relentless effort, BBH CEO Greg Andersen (B.A. ’90) was convinced that his New York City ad agency had the inside track at Cadillac.

Working with a BBH team of more than 20 strategists, copywriters, designers, technologists and the creative directors who supervised them all, Andersen had led the effort to build a new “brand identity” for GM’s 100-year-old flagship vehicle – the blue-chip icon that proved the genius of American automotive engineering.

The team’s new vision of what was easily one of the world’s best-known luxury cars was based on a simple but exceedingly daring “advertising idea”: the image of Cadillac as an object of “automotive audacity” – a high-performance, sleekly designed pleasure-machine piloted by a new kind of owner.

NEBRASKAMAGAZINE 25

The BBH game plan called for the new Cadillac to be aimed at a new breed of “bold and assertive” drivers who weren’t afraid to be seen in a car that radiated confidence and self-reliance. The brashly independent-minded Caddy owners, in short, would sit proudly behind the wheel of an American luxury car that was just as maneuverable – and just as well-engineered – as anything the Germans and other European manufacturers were putting on the road.

Instead of presenting the usual status-based hype for GM’s prestige brand (the big Cadillac pulls up to the country club, with the stylishly dressed corporate executive and his glittering wife beaming from the front seat), the work featured a helmeted race driver zooming through the hairpin curves and labyrinthine twists of Germany’s Nurburgring test track. At high-spirited and unpredictable BBH (where the company slogan reads, “When the world zigs, zag!” and the company logo is a stylish-looking black sheep), the proposed shift in Cadillac’s advertising direction seemed to be right in character. (To watch one of the team’s ads: http://wn.com/competition_featuring_the_cadillac_cts-v_sedan.)

It was also a huge gamble on Andersen’s part, of course. But would it succeed?

At BBH New York, under the leadership of the newly appointed CEO from Millard, Neb., the betting was that General Motors would bite on the move away from staid, status-oriented luxury ... toward a bold image of unapologetic self-assertiveness.

And now, as he listened to the GM procurement director – on this icy winter morning in January of 2010 – Andersen knew that the next two or three minutes would decide the fate of his Cadillac pitch once and for all.

“I don’t think there’s any doubt that this was the premiere advertising account-pitch in the United States at that time,” said the 43-year-old Andersen. “This pitch was for Cadillac, remember ... and landing that account would change the future of our entire firm.”

But the BBH pitch was also complicated by an enormously complex and troubling problem: the fact that GM was at that moment struggling to stay afloat financially and had only recently been awarded an unprecedented $6.7 billion “bailout” loan by the U.S. Government, in order to avoid a devastating corporate bankruptcy.

Given the swirling uncertainty that surrounded what had once been the world’s largest and most successful automaker, the BBH team’s “audacity pitch” seemed especially daring and risky. Would the hawk-eyed graybeards at the top of GM’s tottering command structure really be willing to switch its Cadillac advertising focus from the “country club luxury” motif to the “intrepid test-track driver” theme that Andersen and his BBH colleagues had been putting together in recent months?

With his knuckles slowly whitening against the telephone, Andersen listened to the telephonic voice of the auto executive at the Renaissance Center HQ of General Motors in far-off Detroit.

“The procurement director didn’t waste any words,” Andersen remembered during a recent interview with Nebraska Magazine at BBH’s offices in the Tribeca section of Lower Manhattan. “She just told me flat out: ‘We’re very interested in appointing you to be our advertising agency. Please stand by; we’ll be back to you in an hour or so.”

He waited. And waited.The clock ticked ... slowly ... agonizingly.

And it was two hours, not one, before the phone lit up with another call from Detroit.

This time the caller was the Cadillac marketing team.

“They wanted our entire agency to gather around,” Andersen recalled. “So we put the phone on speakers and everybody gathered in one large room – more than 100 people. And they said: ‘You’re the new agency for Cadillac!’ And everyone went crazy. There were cheers, and people were jumping up and down, and it was just a very joyful moment for all of us.

“Those are the moments that make this industry so wonderful. We looked at each other, and we said: ‘We did it! We did it!’ It was like going to the Super Bowl – and we immediately shut down the office and headed off to the bar across the street.”

***Incredibly enough, however, the story of

the Great BBH Cadillac Pitch doesn’t end there.

Only a few days after BBH’s supremely successful triumph in Detroit, in fact, the entire deal began to come apart at the seams. Within a few weeks, the rumblings out of the Motor City could be heard across the land – as the bankruptcy threatened auto giant went through a series of internal earthquakes that resulted in what the UNL grad now describes as “a huge storm of chaos.”

“What you had at GM was a series of tectonic shifts,” said Andersen with a mournful look of remembered dismay. “There were several major changes in leadership at the highest levels of the company, and those changes soon overwhelmed our counterparts at Cadillac.

“Within 45 days, the entire client team that had hired us was dismissed or reassigned,” said Andersen. “They brought in all new people to manage the brand, and as soon as that happened, we knew our days were numbered.”

It was awful. Day by day, Andersen and his colleagues at BBH watched in anguish as the Cadillac account slowly drifted away.

“By late May, GM had an entirely different group of people managing the Cadillac advertising account, and we knew it

26 spring2011

was over,” he said. “It was an extremely difficult time for us, and I had to ask myself: ‘How am I going to manage this company now – and how am I going to do it in a way that will protect our staff?”

By the middle of June, the formal announcement had taken place in Detroit: BBH was out as the ad agency for Cadillac.

“It was brutal,” Andersen said with a wince of pain. “Within six months, we’d gone from the heights of euphoria to watching it all slip away. And there was nothing we could do. And when it was finally over, all we could do was shake our heads and get back to work.

“But it was an amazing ride, for sure. I think we probably redefined the term ‘roller coaster’ during those six months. But we got through it somehow – mainly by hanging onto our sense of humor, I guess.”

It was exhausting, but Andersen and his colleagues at BBH eventually managed to ride out the storm. How? “We simply went back to doing what we do best,” he said, “which is building brands and helping clients to add value to their business.”

Fortunately, better days were ahead. By the end of the year, BBH showed a 20-plus percent increase in revenues during 2010. The U.S. division of the international, London-based firm also doubled its profits during the year – and by last January had rebuilt most of its creative staff and positioned itself to resume the strong growth that had been taking place even before the Cadillac debacle. 2010 also marked the fourth time in as many years that BBH New York was named “U.S. Mid-Sized Agency of the Year” by the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the industry’s governing body.

“We have a very solid foundation here now,” Andersen said with a gleam of optimism, while describing the resurgence at BBH. “Really, our prospects have never been brighter. We’re got a terrific cadre of creative people – more than 150 [employees], all told, and we’re looking forward to winning many more pitches in the years ahead.

“Looking back, I don’t have any regrets, really. I mean, you can’t see an earthquake coming, and that’s what the GM thing was. It was frustrating ... but it was also a wonderful example of the kind of thrilling excitement that lies at the heart of advertising.

“Making pitches and the thrill of winning a major account with your pitch – that’s a big part of why I love this business so much.”

Inspired By ‘Fox’ Bryant At UNLBorn and raised in what was once the

Nebraska town of Millard (it’s now a thriving suburb of the city of Omaha), Greg Andersen enjoyed an unusual childhood. For starters, his paternal grandfather, Harry P. Andersen, was the charismatic and fiercely combative local mayor.

“As a kid, I used to sit on his lap in the mayor’s office in Millard,” remembered the 43-year-old advertising guru. “I’d unwrap his cigars for him, and when I got a little older, I’d listen to him rail against the annexation of Millard by the city of Omaha.

“Harry fought hard against that annexation, because he was convinced that small-town Main Street was the heart and soul of our culture in the United States. He didn’t want to see his town become part of

At 14, He Was The Second-Best Duck Caller In All Of Nebraska!Make no mistake: Advertising wizard

Greg Andersen and his creative team at BBH have won their share of professional awards over the years. Among their most notable triumphs was a 2009 “Titanium Lion” prize in Cannes, France, for their highly imaginative launch of a new album by the rock band Oasis.

BBH has also been named the industry’s “Mid-Sized Agency of the Year” during each of the past four years.

But when it comes to trophies, Andersen said his absolute favorite is the glittering second-place award he nailed down as a 14-year-old duck caller in small-town Nebraska.

It happened back in the early 1980s, when Andersen and a pal decided to enter the yearly statewide duck-calling contest. “After a couple of years of practice and a lot of duck hunting on the Platte (River), a good friend and I decided to compete,” he recalled.

“We felt we were pretty good, and we were definitely the youngest competitors. It was a surreal experience... . The contestant room was full of guys blowing duck calls over the top of each other and in walk these kids.”

The competition went very well, said Andersen, until he made a fatal mistake: “I had too much saliva in the call during my final routine, and the reed squeaked on the next-to-last note.”

That single reed-squeak probably cost him the state title.

“That was it,” he explained with a mournful groan. “Second place!”

NEBRASKAMAGAZINE 27

Omaha, and he led a struggle that eventually made its way onto the national news. I watched all of that, and today I’m really proud of the fact that I grew up in Millard. These days I always tell people that I may live and work in New York – but my soul is the soul of a boy from Nebraska.”

After distinguishing himself as a bright and loquacious student at Omaha’s Jesuit-run Creighton Prep high school, Andersen headed for UNL. “My parents told me I could go to college anywhere I wanted,” he remembered with a smile, “provided only that it was located within the state of Nebraska.

“Actually, going to UNL had a lot of appeal for me, because by the time I arrived on campus [in 1986], I was already determined to become an advertising major – and everybody knew that UNL had a terrific program.”

Within a few days of enrolling in Lincoln, Andersen had settled into an Abel dorm room with an aspiring artist and Omaha buddy named Jeff Reiner (B.A ’90). The two of them quickly joined the Delta Tau Delta fraternity and maintained a friendship that has lasted to this day.

“Having an artist as a roommate was really inspiring,” recalled the Big Apple ad czar. “Jeff was constantly creating all of this original and challenging art, and hanging out with him gave me a real appreciation for creativity.”

For his part, Reiner remembers the youthful Andersen as a fiercely dedicated student who also knew how to laugh at himself.

“The thing about Greg is that he’s extremely dynamic and driven,” said Reiner, today the owner and director of the

Turnpost Creative Group graphic design firm in Omaha. “He’s got a knack for managing things, and also for coming up with the creative ideas that are essential for effective advertising.

“I wasn’t at all surprised when I learned that he’d been named to run a major New York ad agency, or learn that he’s been very successful with it so far.”

While minoring in English and psychology – the two disciplines that he figured would help him the most in advertising – Andersen focused on learning how to craft messages that would grab audiences and not let go. In one particularly inspiring advertising class, taught by longtime UNL Sports Information Director Don “Fox” Bryant, his assignment was to create a catchy ad that sang the praises of an “all-natural” dog food.

“I think the dog food was called ‘Favorite Uncle’s All-Natural,’ or something like that,” said the ad mogul with a hoot of nostalgic laughter. “I finally came up with an idea in which the dog had to choose between eating two all-natural things: the dog food or a neighborhood cat.

“So I put the whole thing together, and it ended with a line like: ‘Favorite Uncle’s All Natural Dog Food – less dangerous than eating the neighbor’s cat.’ And Don gave me an ‘A’ on the project, which was very encouraging ... along with a note suggesting that if I continued to work hard at it, I might actually have a shot at becoming an advertising copywriter someday.”

Running An Ad Agency: ‘It’s Like Mixing Nitroglycerin’ W ith his brand-new sheepskin tucked

away in his back pocket, a super-determined Greg Andersen set sail for New York – and what he hoped would be an illustrious career as an ad man – in the summer of 1990.

Was he fearful about the great struggle that surely lay ahead?

“Yeah, I was a little nervous,” he said, “but I was also looking forward to the challenge. I was only 21 years old, after all, and just out of college. But I was determined to break into the industry somehow.

“So off I went. The first thing I did was rent a room at a hotel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I got a special deal on the

rent, but I knew it wouldn’t be long before my money ran out.”

Desperate to land an entry-level job with an advertising firm, Andersen sent out resume after resume. He got nowhere. Increasingly frantic, he showed up in response to an “advertising position” classified ad at a firm in Midtown ... and was told that he had to start by taking a “typing test.” His heart sank – this was obviously a clerical job – but he took the test ... and failed it miserably.

He was sinking fast. Within a few weeks he was forced to take a job waiting on tables (at a low-priced “Dallas Jones BBQ” eatery on 73rd Street at 3rd Avenue). He hung on through months of fruitless searching, and then he finally got a break. After a half dozen rejections, he found a tiny start-up agency – only four employees – that was willing to pay him just enough money for survival.

“The office was ramshackle, but it was located on Madison Avenue, and it was the best possible job I could have gotten,” Andersen said. “Because it was such a small agency, I was forced to learn every aspect of the business from the ground up.”

And he did. During the next two decades, Andersen mastered both the management side of advertising and the creative side, as he armed himself with the wide-ranging skill set that made him increasingly valuable to a series of high-powered Madison Avenue firms.

While working for such trend-setting agencies as DeVito/Verdi, Euro and Merkley Newman Harty, the silver-tongued kid from Nebraska helped craft a series of dazzling multi-media campaigns that soon established his reputation in the high-performance world of Madison Avenue.

In 2006, the London-based global ad agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty tapped Andersen to be the director of its newly created Engagement Planning department ... a supremely innovative, in-house unit dedicated to combining a deep understanding of the modern media landscape with the creative development process.

At BBH, and while reporting to UK advertising legend Simon Sherwood (the worldwide CEO), Andersen helped lead the charge to hit advertising home runs for such U.S.-based monster-clients as Axe, Google, Sprite and Ally Bank.

Andersen’s team has also helped to develop and manage several highly innovative new programs at BBH, including some pioneering trend-setters that are now having a significant impact on the industry

28 spring2011

as a whole. Among the most interesting breakthroughs:

– BBH’s new “ZAG” brand-innovation unit partners with investors to create and then launch new brand-name products. Different from fee-based client relationships, BBH retains equity ownership in the companies it creates.

– The recently established “BBH Barn” internship program for college students (including UNL students) interested in advertising careers is now setting an industry standard for “super-progressive and creatively out-in-front college work-study programs,” according to Andersen. A recent Barn assignment challenged students to “Do something good, famously.” The result was a program called “Underheard in New York” where New York City homeless were given pre-paid mobile phones to Tweet their daily challenges. Its intent was to raise awareness, donations and volunteers to help fight homelessness in the city. The program was covered in news outlets across the country.

– The influential “BBH Labs” online blog (www.bbh-labs.com) is rapidly becoming an industry heavyweight in

creating and disseminating the latest cutting-edge insights into the surging relationship between advertising and social media.

These days, Greg Andersen said he’s enjoying his high-stress and high-adrenaline lifestyle more than ever as he takes BBH into the wild blue yonder of new accounts and increasingly complex multi-media campaigns.

“What I love about advertising is that it’s a fundamentally creative business,” he said as he summed up his past two decades on Madison Avenue. “It’s unpredictable. It’s explosive. I’ve often said that working with creative people in our industry, as they put together their ideas and concepts – it’s like mixing nitroglycerin, while also trying to make sure the stuff doesn’t explode on you. No two days are ever alike, and when you see the power of your ideas ... their power to affect and change the culture, well, that just continues to amaze me.

“The products we make, as a creative agency, we make from scratch every time. Because there’s no formula for them, and there never could be. Our messages are the result of people and passions coming together – and in the end, I guess that’s probably the thing I love most about the business of advertising.” n

Recent BBH work for Google Chrome and Sprite.

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Google Chrome FastBall was a game within YouTube that had people race across the Internet to show off

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