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Rod Bradley is the proverbial ad man. He's got an every-two-week haircut and a year-round golf course tan. He's as comfortable elbowing up to a farmhouse dinner table as he is sashaying through a penthouse cocktail party and is known as much for his back-slapping boyish charm, as he is for negotiating million dollar business deals from the head of the conference table.
Although semi-retired and splitting his time between Anchorage and Todos Santos, Mexico, to talk about the advertising industry in Alaska without talking to Bradley would be like having a discussion on the history of software development and not including Bill Gates. The founder of Bradley Reid + Associates--originally Murray Bradley & Rocky when it started in 1978--Bradley, 61, grew up in Anchorage after his wanderlust father sold everything and drove the family up the Alaska Highway from Los Angeles. Although not particularly inspired by academics--he graduated from West High School with a D average--when he enrolled at California State in Fullerton, he took an introductory advertising class that led to earning a degree in communications in 1969 before returning to Alaska to apply for his first professional job.
BRIGHT BEGINNINGS
"A bright young guy just out of school walked into the office and announced he was an Alaskan who had a degree in advertising," Con Murray, Bradley's first boss and owner of what was then Murray Alaska says almost 40 years later. "He had no experience, but what the heck--nobody else did either and he at least had theories and knew how things were suppose to work." Murray, who added Bradley as a partner in 1978 and later sold the agency to him, hired the young ad man on the spot where Bradley did a little of everything to help get the start-up agency going.
With a state contract and a few retail accounts, the team laid the foundation for what is today the largest and oldest continuous operating agency in Alaska, developing a portfolio that grew to include powerhouse clients, such as Alyeska Pipeline Service Co., ARCO Alaska and RCA Alascom. Although Bradley briefly returned to California in 1973 to try his talents in a big market, it didn't take long for him to realize that he could go faster and further in Alaska where the oil boom had just hit and the advertising industry was growing as fast as steel pipe was being laid. In less than two years, Bradley left the glitz and glam of Wilshire Boulevard to return to Alaska and work for Murray again. "I felt like it was as if there was a party going on at my house and I wasn't home for it," he says.
HIS OWN TURF
Murray sold the agency to Bradley in 1986. As Bradley Communications, he hired Connie Reid who would ultimately buy the firm from him in 1998, changing the name to Bradley Reid + Associates. Recognizing her unique ability to handle the creative team, new business and operations, he says he knew that he had found a successor he could grow internally rather than selling out to a national firm. Today, Bradley continues to be very involved with one of the firm's largest clients, the Alaska Travel Industry Association, and to assist the agency with strategic planning for other clients.
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Over the past four decades, Bradley says he has watched the industry become more strategic in its approach to handling the marketing needs of clients. Instead of a creative team sitting around the table and saying, "Okay, we've got to crank out a TV spot--who's got an idea?", today he says there is more of an emphasis on strategic marketing. And, he says, the playing field has changed. Historically, the Alaska industry has been dominated by two agencies, with the No. 1 billing going back and forth between Bradley Reid & Associates and The Nerland Agency. Today, he says, a lot of smaller agencies are also building their businesses by doing work for smaller clients, and clients have become more sophisticated in their understanding of what it takes to produce effective marketing materials.
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