Press Releases 
Born to Thrill.
The event DNA strand is in us all
Event Marketer - 10/2003—We were the kids who were always coming up with new ways to entertain ourselves and those around us.
Our ideas would evolve from things we'd find laying around the house. Or we'd be inspired by something we saw on TV. Inevitably, we'd figure out ways to bring props and ideas to life and create something that would get all of the other kids on the block excited.
In the summer time, you'd find us setting up lemonade stands at the foots of our driveways, hoping that cars driving by would stop and pay us twenty five cents for sugar water. We'd put on shows inside our garages. On Halloween we built haunted houses and on holidays orchestrated performances with cousins in the basement.
After looking back on childhood memories, one thing seems obvious: We were born to be event marketers. After all, when we set up those lemonade stands weren't we executing our first live sampling program? And the clever ways to promote our productions around the neighborhood on our bikes? We were p.r. and mobile marketing mavens before we even knew what it all meant.
As a fourth grader, Jacqueline Picariello and close friends wrote and produced plays, then begged teachers for permission to put them on at school. Now a senior promotion manager at Campbell Soup Co., she is sure her passion for creativity played a major role in mapping out her career. "I always knew I was motivated to make money, but could never figure out how to combine my business sense with my creativity,” she recalls. "The more I became involved with [marketing], the more I realized it could offer me everything I wanted.”
Marc Bromfeld, brand manager at Skyy Spirits, remembers dancing on the chairs anytime he had a chance to go to a concert with his parents. Marc's attraction to events grew when he served as an emcee and sampler for Newport cigarettes during college. "It was always about getting people so excited that they wanted to join in," he says. "That's something I've never lost."
My guess is that like me, many of you didn't set out to be event marketers. Instead, it's something that snuck up on us while we were searching for a livelihood that felt natural to our make-up. While colleges are only now starting to develop event-related curricula for students interested in this business, most of us arrived here serendipitously. Now, after 12 years in the industry, I'm still thrilled when someone asks me, "How do you get a job like this?"
When that happens, I think of the first time I realized there was such a business as event marketing and the feeling of knowing I could make a living doing the things I've always loved to do.
Jon Lesser is president of Gillette, NJ based ZAG Marketing. Buy him a cup of sugar water at jon@zagusa.com.