Interview with Josh McGilliard
Blue Ridge Advertising
by: Katherine Gold

Josh McGilliard is the vice president of Blue Ridge Advertising, a full service advertising agency based out of Roanoke, Va.  He is also a co-owner and the director of sales and marketing for VIP Group, a real estate development company located in Blacksburg. 

As a graduate from Radford University with a degree in Media Studies, McGilliard is an example of what a driven attitude and a plan can do for you.

McGilliard recently sat down with Planet Blacksburg to speak about his experience in the advertising industry and his advice for students in the field.  The following is a selection from this interview.

Q: You are the vice president of Blue Ridge Advertising.  What do your responsibilities include?

A: I am responsible for operations and management of the company.  I do a lot with client development and basically act as the liaison between the client and the creative and production side of the agency.

Q: Did you have a background in design before you went into this?

A: No. My background was strictly media related.  I did some media sales in the radio industry for about three to four years while I was in college, and one year out. Then I started my own advertising agency with that media background and basically just kind of learned other media.  I learned how it’s purchased, sold, placed and then filled in the blanks with a partner of mine who owned an ad agency from the creative standpoint. 

Q: How long has the company existed?

A: Seven years.

Q: What was your degree in?

A: I graduated with a degree in Media Studies, which I guess would be the equivalent to Virginia Tech’s Mass Communication degree. I also had an emphasis in advertising. I was also a couple credits short of a minor in public relations as well.

Q: What kind of clients do you focus on at Blue Ridge Advertising?

A: Right now Blue Ridge Advertising focuses on two industries.  One is the healthcare industry, which could be a medical device, a pharmaceutical product, a hospital or a clinic. And then the other is real estate, including large single family homes, single track developments, town homes, and we’ve even dabbled a little bit in the property management advertising.

Q: What made you want to focus on those two industries?

A: It just seemed that after about four to five years of being in business, you take on all the clients that want you in order to pay the bills and then you start realizing where your strengths are and where the opportunities are. 

It just so happened especially in the Blacksburg market. I decided to move the advertising agency’s client account services to Blacksburg about four years ago and the opportunities that existed in Blacksburg were with large construction and development companies. They also happened to have their hands in property management of course; in the college market, it just made sense. So they quickly became a large local client. 

We had an addition two years ago of a woman who came to us from New Jersey. She was the vice president of an ad agency called Quantum.  They were a healthcare only advertising agency.  So she assisted me in the development of some clients that she wanted to go after in the healthcare industry and brought a lot of resources to the agency to be able to do that.  So we quickly picked up a hospital in Abington, Virginia and a medial device through some attorneys in Wisconsin and Roanoke, and just carved a niche there and have been doing so ever since.

Q: Would you say most of your clients are local or spread out across the country?

A: They are spread out across the country.  I have very little local clients now.  We have them spread across Virginia, South Carolina, Arizona and New York.  It would have been easy to fall into a local advertising agency niche but we really didn’t want to compete with local advertising agencies.  They tend to pass clients around and each client tries out a different agency all the time and we were really looking for longer-term relationship building with clientele.

Q: How do you do that long distance?  Is there a lot of travel involved?

A: Well, Blue Ridge Advertising is kind of an agency without walls.  So when my partner moved to Roanoke seven years ago from Dallas, Texas, she kept her ties with a lot of her agency personnel.  These copy writers and creative directors kind of moved across the country.  I had some creative relationships through my old radio days in New York and South Carolina.  So we have all of our creative chiefs, so to speak, spread out all over the country. And with that come referrals and other resources.  They enable us to expand our business.

The other thing that helps us is that we are a member of an organization that pools advertising agencies together as a resource for people looking for ad agencies.  So you subscribe to this service, called Agency Finder.  Agency Finder, for a fee each year, posts your profile and does kind of like an E-Harmony match, which is an unbiased consultancy for large companies. You can be a $50 million client looking for a TBWA Chiat Day or you could be a $2 million little hospital looking for a Blue Ridge Advertising or someone even smaller.  So that kind of helped us branch out beyond Virginia as well because that is a national service.

Q: So some research I found claimed that you are a managing partner of Virginia Tech’s Visual Design Studio Four, VDS4, is that true?

A: No. VDS4 was kind of the brain child of one of the professors; his name slips my mind right now... Truman Capone. Truman had a great idea to form a graphic design entity like a cost center that could support the University’s activities. He pitched that to Bob Bates, who at the time, this was probably four or five years ago, was the Dean of Arts and Sciences.  Bob knew me through rotary locally here in Blacksburg.  He was looking for somebody to put a business plan together for it or work in it or have some kind of model other than just the graphic design.  What I did was come up with an idea for VDS4 that would actually put a managing director in there and try to source clients of a national nature. 

The idea kind of came from Truman, being able to do some work for Papa John’s which brought in quite a bit of money.  It brought in a lot of money actually, for the program and the university.  VDS4 was supposed to be kind of like an in house advertising agency like Virginia Commonwealth University has grown to be with their Ad Center. 

Students would apply to be in it. They had to have a certain grade point average. They’d earn credit and also get a stipend for their work.  We would try to bring in Home Depot, people like Red Bull Energy and Pepsi Cola to try to reach the 18 to 34-year-old audience. The idea was that you could bring a certain amount of work in so that they could do mock up campaigns that they could then take their national advertising agencies and say, “This is kind of where we’re going and what we’re looking for.”  It would cost them less than two-thirds of what it would cost to do spec work with their national advertising agency to get to a point where they could actually hire the work to be done.

The idea was to drive money into VDS4. VDS4 would first be graphic design and then branch off into the Communication department where you could bring in some theater majors, some people interested in videography, and you could tie together  people who were interested in developing business. You could get some sponsorships from other local advertising agencies for the program.  You could even bring some of the work to them which would then very much create jobs for these students because if you work on a Red Bull Energy marketing campaign and the national marketing director comes in to see your work and your work is actually so good that they are going to use it, who is going to step up?  Somebody just interviewing for the job that’s put on the street by Red Bull Energy to college students or somebody that’s already done work for that job and has six to eight weeks experience in working with the brand and already knows the brand?  That’s just a straight channel into a job that you probably normally wouldn’t have a shot at doing with a name like Virginia Tech instead of some art or design school. 

Unfortunately Bob Bates took a job at Washington State University. Well, it’s good for him because he’s provost now, but I’m not sure where VDS4 went to.  It couldn’t get the funding and backing that it needed.  The vision kind of got muddled and they ended up basically doing graphic design as they had first planned for just the university as a cost center.  And that’s good, students still get their experience, but I really wanted to see it step up into more of a limelight to where it could win awards and they could go out and work with some real high profile clients.  Students could build a portfolio with clients like Pepsi, Red Bull and Phillip Morris and really put a name on the map for The College of Arts and Sciences.  It probably would have generated more money than some of the engineering and biology programs that are at Tech.

Q: Did your work with radio sales throughout college help you get into the job market once you graduated?

A: Yes, well, I did an internship to get into broadcast.  That was my original focus.  Then I noticed a lot of the businesses, especially in Blacksburg, weren’t on the radio.  So I asked the owner of the radio station I was working for, “Hey can I have a phone book. Can I do some sales for some straight commission?”  He said sure, so I went out and immediately got a bunch of restaurants, bars and student oriented places like the bookstore on the radio and started making some real money.  I made enough to pay for part of my school, my books, my living and things like that. So I just kind of stuck with it. 

So yeah I guess it got me into the job market but then I wanted out of the job market.  I didn’t want to work for anybody.  It was one of those deals where you could just see the doors, the walls, closing in on you in radio.  Everybody was getting bought and being consolidated.  The best sales people were losing their jobs because they could just take their accounts, hire two newbies right out of school or right out of the market from another radio station, and pay them less money.  The annual accounts could then go to the house, which is the corporate side, the manager.  They could just keep siphoning the dollars into the corporation and making it so you couldn’t make the money that you wanted to make. I didn’t think that was particularly going to happen with the station I was working for; however, I had an opportunity to jump ship and go and start my own business.

Q: So you started your own business right after that?

A: I took a little six month stint actually working for a tattoo shop that wanted to open.  It was actually Danny’s H and R Tattoo.  I was hired to place all of their media and build an expansion plan to open at least four new shops on the east coast.  So we opened one in Indianapolis and one in Charleston, W.Va. We moved one from the Roanoke location to downtown Roanoke and then built three in Miami.  I did all my work so quickly that I worked myself out of a job, so that was a good lesson to learn.  But that’s okay, I wasn’t most happy there.  It was a good time and they were interesting people to work with.  I learned a lot about print and placed a lot of international magazine advertising for their manufacturing and tattoo supplies. Their supplier was a company called Time Machine.  Time Machine had quite a bit of money and I learned a lot about different media placement there so it wasn’t lost time at all and they paid me really well.

Q: What would you say are the most important skills for college students looking to get into advertising?

A: Learn how to manage your time.  The reason your professors are giving you a lot of homework is because you need a lot of homework to know how to meet deadlines and how to manage your time.  If you have no concept of time management, you will drown in the advertising agency business, or on the sales and marketing side as well. Strategy and having a plan is so important.  A lot of people come out of college and all they know is tactics, tactics, tactics.  It’s all about strategy.  If you don’t have a clear plan, then you will never be able to, so to speak, “Build the house you want to build.” If you think about it, with a plan, you know what kind of house you want to build. If you have that plan you know exactly where you want to go.  So now you put together the steps to build it. 

People capture the ability to learn it at different times.  For me, it was after college.  Literally, during college, I had no concept of time management except when I was working in radio I learned a lot about it.  I had no concept of an overall plan.  It was basically, “Okay, Josh is going to go build a house, and he’s just going to lay brick after brick after brick, and wow, he’s really good at laying these bricks and look at all these bricks, but what’s he building?” 

It’s absolutely so important to understand strategic planning.  If you have a strategy, tactics will follow, and then you execute and you get exactly where you want to go and there is nothing that you cannot accomplish.  If you think about it, if someone gave you the resources to do what you want to do, you can do it. So the most important thing I would say for someone coming out of college who wants to go into the advertising agency business, is to get strategic really quickly. 

This is important even in an interview.  You sit in front of an interview with somebody who probably makes a six figure salary, looking for somebody who is just going to fill a remedial position at first.  If you sit and say “Well I’ve been looking online at where you’re agency is going and I see you have a focus on healthcare.  I’ve got some really great contacts for healthcare and I’ve put together some thoughts and ideas.”  You just throw yourself out there, but show that you can actually plan.  That’s a skill that a lot of people don’t have.  A lot of adults, 30 and 40 year olds that have been in the business for 20 years, don’t have it.