What's the Story?

When I think about how I’m hugely proud of Story Worldwide (which is often) I'm also on occasion, more than a bit humbled and baffled.

I used to call us “the world’s most complicated small business” because we were about the size of a neighborhood hardware store but spread out, somehow, all over the western hemisphere. Now, we’re not so small, but spread out even further. Together with our partners at Eight Publishing in China, we’re more than 200 people in seven offices around the world.

All this growing seems inexplicable until you think about the great ideas and exhausting work that a growing collection of great people contribute to the company everyday. I want to welcome you to Story’s group of great people. It’s good to have you here.

Let me tell you a little story about how I joined this outfit:

I grew up in Washington, D.C., where a good story can make you famous. My childhood ambition was to tell stories and I didn’t much care how I told them. I took up still photography in New York in the ’60s, acted, played rock ‘n’ roll, composed music, wrote about culture and politics for underground newspapers, learned cinematography, fished for halibut in Nova Scotia, went broke shooting a documentary in New Mexico, wandered around Europe, worked as an assistant director for 20th Century Fox in Greece, worked as a newspaper reporter for big city dailies, switched to magazine writing and editing, raised a million bucks to start a city magazine in Detroit, built a custom publishing company in the mid ’80s, worked for an ad agency in the ’90s, and bought and built magazine and newspaper publishing companies for people — not necessarily in that precise order.

After all this tilling and planting in the arid fields of media, I became convinced that traditional marketing (personified by the 30-second TV spot) and traditional media (the ad-supported TV show and magazine and newspaper) were on a collision course that would result in the messy deaths of both traditions and the birth of something new: great media that truly serves an audience AND accomplishes the business goals of a brand. Call it custom content. Call it whatever you want. It’s what we do now in all media channels.

Back in 1997, in between gigs, I began working to launch Story Worldwide to create such media as a unit of The Interpublic Group of Companies. I called it The Publishing Agency then and I was the first — and, for a while, the only — employee.

The writer in me always believed that great work would make us grow. The media M&A guy in me believed that starting and finding great companies and creating smart mergers would help, too. Story’s partners are a collection of people who believe essentially the same stuff. Jim Small helped start a custom publisher in the ’80s called Quarton and he pioneered a bunch of sports magazines, from NASCAR to the NBA. Simon Kelly started up The Publishing Department — TPD — in London and was the first to combine print and digital work on a magazine (for Microsoft). Mike LeBeau invented Byte Interactive in the ’90s, leading the way in telling stories for marketers online. Jon King helped re-invent music in the ’70s by founding the band Gang of Four and he went from there to build companies like World Television in London, from where we kidnapped him.

Story’s first office was a 1,200-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment on East 34th Street in Manhattan. Today, we occupy some 50,000 square feet of office space in 7 locations in the Americas, Europe and Asia. We began life with no clients and today we are fortunate to have earned the trust of some of world’s greatest brands.

So it goes (as the late Kurt Vonnegut was fond of saying).

The point of all this, I guess, is that if you dream about something hard enough, you can build it. And that’s really the point of Story Worldwide.

We’re here to dream hard about revolutionizing media and marketing. If we all dream hard enough and work even harder, we’ll do it.

So get to work — start dreaming.