Surf's up: Big Apple floats to Montauk - November 1, 2004
By AJ Carter
Jill Fleming moved to Montauk in 1993 for the surfing. But it wasn't until this year that surfing got her any business from New York City.
Fleming and Lynn Blumenfeld are hoping their campaign for Business Wire, about to be unveiled, will serve as a national springboard for their small Montauk advertising agency, helping to prove that you don't have to go to Manhattan for high- quality ads.
Fleming, whose forte is graphic design, and Blumenfeld, whose background is in copywriting, both have Big Apple/Big Time Ad Agency backgrounds. They have been working together for a couple of years, creating somewhat of a buzz on behalf of local businesses. If you live on the East End, you may have seen their campaign for Schmidt's market, apologizing for the dirt on the tomatoes (because they're so fresh), or the mooing fish pushing the prime rib special at Sunwater's Grill in Hampton Bays.
They were proud enough to enter this year's Long Island Advertising Club competition, and they walked off with 14 BOLIs. "It was a pretty big win for this little agency that nobody had ever heard of," Blumenfeld said.
That led to a newspaper article about Fleming's love of surfing (both her current and past husband are surfers), which caught the eye of the surfer-husband of Cathy Baron Tamraz, Business Wire president and chief operating officer, who passed it on to Michael Lissauer, her senior vice president of marketing and business strategy. Lissauer had been looking for an agency that could implement a particular idea.
"We wanted the expertise of people who worked on major campaigns, had that creativity and that kind of intellect and dynamic," Lissauer said. "Since we both grew up and live on Long Island [Tamraz in Mill Neck, Lissauer in Plainview], we had no hangup about dealing with someone from the East End." At a meeting, he said, Blumenfeld and Fleming "got it right away."
"Because Jill and I are both from big-city agencies. ... We both had really good strategic training in addition to being strong creative," Blumenfeld said.
Both are hoping for more national work - as long as they can remain based on Montauk. Said Fleming: "We get to live in the most amazing place in the world and do something that we love, and are actually being allowed to do it to a standard. ... I never thought I couldn't do it, because I know that that's what I was doing, so why not do it here. I feel extremely proud of myself, to be honest."
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