Convergence marketer extraordinaire: Marcie Brogan of Detroit's Brogan & Partners Convergence Marketing aims to give her clients the edge by zapping into the power of a new kind of marketing

Detroiter, April, 2002 by Rodd Monts

The first thing that catches your eye hen you step off the elevator onto the 19th floor of the Fisher Building is the leopard carpeting--acres of it, or so it seems. It's a fitting introduction to the world of Marcie Brogan, the convergence marketer extraordinaire who early on traded the "glass ceiling" for her name on the glass door as founder and managing partner of Brogan & Partners Convergence Marketing in Detroit.

Follow the trademark spotted trail through those double glass doors and you'll find yourself in a maze of artistically--sometimes startlingly--decorated offices and conference rooms (Elvis on velvet peers soulfully from his 24-by-36-inch frame in one), reflective of the high energy, high-impact style of its eponymous founder.

Brogan started the agency in 1984 after studying English, philosophy and literature in college and then cutting her creative teeth with the likes of W.B. Doner and BMP (the agency that invented account planning) in the United States and Europe. Today, Brogan & Partners ranks as one of Detroit's top agencies with more than $6 million in annual gross revenue.

Inside the maze, the walls in Brogan & Partners' New Center headquarters tell a compelling success story. They're brimming with striking examples of the agency's creative ad work (one, for the Michigan Department of Community Health, prominently features a brightly hued condom) and row upon row of trophies, plaques and commendations the firm has won for its creative advertising and marketing campaigns over the years.

Brogan: When I was in London (with BMP), and this was the mid-70s, television (in Britain) was only on for a few hours in the evening. So people read more. There were a lot of things going on that made advertising there more erudite, more literate than it is here. I know that's still true.

Thus, a unique style was born. In Europe, Marcie Brogan gained a virtual lifetime of experience in just eight years that proved invaluable when it came time to open her own shop back home.

At the time, she recalls, Detroit's advertising market was made up of a handful of large agencies that serviced the major automakers and Tier One suppliers and dozens of small agencies that scrambled for everything else.

Nearly two decades later, the climate hasn't changed much, but Brogan has managed to carve out a comfortable niche. She started by crafting highly creative campaigns with low production costs for retail clients--among them, significantly, Kmart Corp.

Brogan: One of the most exciting things that we did was an assignment from Kmart to come up with an idea for their kitchen and house-wares department. I sold them the Martha Stewart idea and I believe we made $7,500, as a consultant. And now it's a jillion-dollar industry. We were too small to be an agency at the time, but we did it as a consulting project. We came up with the concept of, "You hire Martha Stewart, and here's how it works in your kitchen ... " This was just when she was becoming popular. I saw a book she did. Now every time I see her I think about that.

Back then, Brogan had no way of knowing that the Martha Stewart franchise would grow into a billion-dollar business, but the concept is an indicator of the type of forward thinking that Brogan--along with partners Bonnie Folster and Maria Marcotte--bring to the business. Their innovation would fuel the agency's growth.

After wading into the retail waters, the firm began taking farmed-out automotive work from Campbell-Ewald. From there Brogan & Partners began branching out into a variety of industries, and today its portfolio includes health care, economic development, consumer services, technology, tourism and automotive clients.

Brogan: We went into automotive through retail, through the car dealers. We did a women's marketing program for a bunch of dealers in mid-Michigan. Chevrolet hired us to go around to dealers in Michigan and then some places in the Midwest. Our assignment was to tell dealers why they should market to women. We showed them that women had money in their pockets as well.

The firm went on to add Ford and Chrysler, and suppliers like Delphi and American Axle to its client roster. Meanwhile, by 1986, the company was helping Henry Ford Hospital improve its image. It was a challenging project, because few health-care providers advertised on television at the time. The hospital suffered from an image problem, much as the city did, because of the misperceptions about its surroundings. Brogan decided to correct the image problem by humanizing the hospital. She proposed using a television campaign to let the public take a closer look at the hospital, its doctors, nurses and technicians. It proved to be a groundbreaking concept.

Brogan: Henry Ford was the first hospital to use television in this market in 1986. The doctors were just terrified of going on television. The only thing that they could relate to was Dr. Scholl's foot powder. That was their image of medical advertising. So we did something which still exists today. We created the Henry Ford health segment around the 11 o'clock (p.m.) news. It was a minute segment on Channel 4 and Channel 7. We created a pod where there was a reporter giving health news, then a 30-second commercial and it was all called the "Henry Ford Health Report." And it was very successful.