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An award-winning, rapidly expanding, full-service marketing agency in Philadelphia

Scott Cohen is the managing director, partner, and owner of Quattro, a multi-channel marketing and advertising agency based in Berwyn, Pennsylvania. Quattro provides a full range of creative services, including direct marketing, online advertising, social media, interactive design, and more, for a wide range of industries across the globe. The agency has worked with corporate and nonprofit clients such as US Bank, the American Red Cross, Comcast, Geico, Metro PCS, and Lincoln Financial. Earlier this month, Quattro won several awards as well as top honors at the PhillyDMA Benny Awards. Scott spoke with citybizlist about launching Quattro in 2004, the ways digital technology has changed the media landscape, and the challenges of marketing to millennials.

EDWIN WARFIELD: How has the world of advertising and marketing changed since the launch of Quattro? With the rise of the internet and digital media platforms, have you had to rebrand or completely rethink how the agency operates?

SCOTT COHEN: Quattro was started back in 2004 as Quattro Direct. Back then, in the good old days, a “direct marketing agency” really meant a direct agency that did direct mail, that maybe did direct response television and kind of did old school direct work. Back in those days, you had your branding agencies that focused on impressions and brand, and you had your direct agencies that really focused on driving sales and driving leads—or whatever KPI or metric that your client might have. Over our history, however, the world has changed and digital became a real big part of what we do, so much so that in 2014 we rebranded the agency as Quattro. We dropped the “Direct” because of that old school stigma and we came up with a new corporate identity. And to this day, digital work—everything digital, whether it’s social and content, or search strategies, or creative work—represents the majority of the creative work we do as an agency.

What I like about it is that the digital world is an accountable advertising world. It’s a measurable medium. The direct world is a measurable medium. For us, it was an easy migration. Yes, we had to hire people that really understood the unique disciplines on the digital side, but we fully embraced it as an agency, and to date, we view ourselves as an omni-channel agency—an agency that really does everything: both traditional advertising and digital advertising as well.

We have what I would call a “unique digital path” in that we made a great decision—best decision we ever made—I want to say five or six years ago, to embrace everything digital. [We were] coming from a traditional ad agency background, where we did TV and we did basically broadcast, outdoor, direct mail—all of that stuff—and you know what? We still do it and we still do it great, and it still accounts for a sizeable portion of our agency revenue.

The world has changed, man. It really has. Our goal was not just to be able to tell our clients “we can do your search programs” or “we could do your social media and write your content, and curate your content, and do all of that stuff,” whether or not we outsource that or did that internally, we made a decision to fully embrace the digital world. But we did not want to be pigeonholed like we were pigeonholed in the past, as more of a traditional agency—we did not want to just be a digital agency. We wanted to be an agency that fully embraced everything, where our clients could come to us with a strategic need, and we could come back to them with a digital solution, a traditional advertising solution—whatever it might be—and I pinch myself right now because we fully embraced that. I’ve got an unbelievable staff of 60-plus people across all mediums, and we’re providing the services for our clients in a great way.

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Edwin Warfield, CEO of citybizlist, conducts the CEO Interviews.

If you're interested in reaching CEOs, please contact edwin.warfield@citybuzz.co

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