In Ideasicle, host Will Burns '88 spoke with Tom Butta '78 about "how transformative ideas and creativity can be inside companies." Butta, founder and managing director of brand value accelerator , discusses the role of CMO as "creative director for the brand," the importance of picking the right team, and getting a company excited about an overarching idea. Hamilton also is mentioned in the podcast.
Burns founded in 2010. Ideasicle has assembled a team of hand-picked experts with experience at big-time creative advertising agencies to come up with high-impact marketing ideas for its clients, a model Burns calls "Expert Sourcing." The experts' ideas are kept separate from execution in order to keep the ideas unbiased. Clients use their existing resources to make the ideas a reality. "I don't care if the idea we come up with is free to execute, as long as it's great and it works," says Burns.
Before founding Ideasicle, Burns worked for Wieden & Kennedy, Goodby Silverstein & Partners and Arnold Worldwide. As director of business development at Arnold Worldwide, his successful pitches included Disney Stores, Pearle Vision, RadioShack, Vonage, Tyson, Progressive Insurance, and others. He is a lecturer at the College of Communication, Boston University. At Hamilton, Burns majored in psychology and economics. He played men's golf and was a member of Chi Psi.
Butta majored in economics and English literature at Hamilton. He was captain of the tennis team and was a member of Alpha Delta Phi. He has worked for Y&R and Hill Holiday, founded FGI, and served as chief marketing officer of Red Hat, PTC, and NICE Systems and CEO of SuperStock before founding 21 Weeks. He has been a guest lecturer at UNC's Kenan-Flagler Business School and New York Institute of Technology.
