In the fall of 1998, Hugh Broder faced a difficult choice: He could either leave the city where he’d spent most of his life—or give notice at Young & Rubicam, Detroit, where he’d served as senior VP/director of broadcast production for the past five years.
"[Y&R’s] major client was Lincoln Mercury, and Ford moved that division to Irvine, Calif., over the course of six months in 1998," Broder explains. "They wanted the agency to move everybody who worked on national to Irvine. What in reality happened was, the account folk and research people went to Irvine, and the creative group went to work out of the Y&R San Francisco office. I was offered my job in San Francisco."
After much deliberation, Broder opted to remain in Detroit. And, for the first time in his 22-year production career, he had to actively search for a new job. "The problem with that was, there were only about five or six heads of production in the city," he relates.
While he says he "kicked around the notion of going to another agency as a producer, maybe an executive producer," and a few offers came his way, Broder didn’t accept any of them. More appealing was a bid from Postique/Griot, Southfield, Mich.—a postproduction division owned by Farmington Hills, Mich.-based parent company Grace & Wild: "I thought, ‘Gee, maybe it would be a good time to go to the suppliers’ side."
So Broder became Postique/Griot’s VP/managing director, and there he remained, for less than a year. "Little did I know that BBDO would come calling," he continues. Seven months into his Postique/Griot stint, BBDO Detroit, Southfield, offered Broder a job as director of broadcast production. And although he says, "it was hard to just pack up and leave after seven months," it was harder still to reject the offer. "The notion that I would pass on a head of production job—I just wasn’t ready to do that."
Broder’s decision to join the BBDO staff paid off handsomely. In November 2000, the agency, which already oversaw the Dodge brand for DaimlerChrysler, won the Jeep and Chrysler work from the automaker as well. FCB Detroit, Southfield, had serviced the latter two brands. As a result of consolidating the estimated $2 billion account, the PentaMark Worldwide, Troy, Mich., unit—which is a part of the BBDO Worldwide network of ad shops—was formed to service DaimlerChrysler.
Broder was named director of broadcast production at the newly formed PentaMark, where he is now in charge of a large staff of producers, and oversees all facets of production on spots for the automobile company’s Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep brands, as well as the corporate Chrysler Group ads. Needless to say, Broder was glad he’d decided to stay in Detroit. "It worked out well," he notes. "And when I look at the [production] roster, I’m pleased."
Broder oversees 40 staffers, 22 of them producers. "It’s about twice the size of Y&R’s production department," he reports. "And twice the size that we were when we were BBDO alone."
Building the new department took Broder a couple of months. During the hiring period, he spoke with former FCB staff members as well as with BBDO employees. "Here I was, charged with finding the ‘best and the brightest,’ " he recalls. "I could have gone anywhere to find them. But the reality is, between the two [agencies] I didn’t have to go any farther. There were great production staffs at both. The only thing I’m sorry about is that we couldn’t bring everybody onboard."
It helped that he was already acquainted with most of the interviewees. "A fair amount of them had worked for me at some point or another in this town, because I’ve been around so long," he explains. "And some of them I got to know as clients during my brief stint on the suppliers’ side. Also, it’s a very small community. Producers are the ones who get out of the office, so we run into each other. We share information.
Broder is a longtime member of that small community. "I got out of high school six months early, and took a job in the mailroom of an agency here, Simons Michaelson, which is now SMZ in Troy," he recalls. "Little did I know that would end up as my career."
He studied at Kalamazoo College, Kalamazoo, Mich., graduating in ’77 with a theater arts major, but his true passion was filmmaking. "Every senior had to do a research project and be off campus for one or two quarters," he remembers. "By then, I knew I wanted to go into production, and I knew that an ad agency might be a great place for that." He approached execs at WB Doner (now Doner), Detroit, Southfield, about doing an internship in the broadcast production department. "I think I was their first-ever broadcast production intern," he says. "It wasn’t just a ‘watch’ kind of internship. I was actually producing within my third week there."
When Broder returned to college to finish up his final quarter, he already had a reel of spotwork. "Doner made me an offer when I was still in school," he says, "and with a couple of months to go until I graduated."
After graduation, Broder accepted the offer, and stayed at Doner for the next 17 years, starting as a producer and working his way up through the ranks to become director of broadcast production in the mid-’80s. Among his many accounts were Vlasic Pickles, British Petroleum International and Chiquita Brands. He left for Y&R in ’93, where he continued to produce spots, in addition to his duties overseeing the shop’s Lincoln Mercury account.
A hands-on producer who likes to get involved in all aspects of spotmaking, Broder says he learned quite a bit about post, particularly while he was at Doner. "We had to keep a lot of our post work in Detroit," he explains, "so it seemed like I was having a meeting a month with the head of one of the facilities to talk about what we needed. I think I probably knew more about the facility business than an ad agency producer ordinarily might."
Though he enjoyed his brief experience at a post house, Broder points out that the market is extremely crowded, for both suppliers and directors. "It’s very difficult to look at a storyboard, in a relatively short amount of time, and come back with four, five or six people that you’d like to show it to," he observes. "Particularly right now, when the DGA has six thousand card-carrying commercial directors, and every young music video kid is being peddled to us by a rep, and every feature director who’s got some down time is being peddled to us. And there are so many facilities out there. In a lot of ways, I’m glad I’m not a supplier any more."
These days, Broder is indeed happy to be back on the agency side, where he is beginning preparations for PentaMark’s first major projects: a series of spots, set to debut in June, announcing the new Jeep Liberty; and, later in the year, commercials for the redesigned Dodge Ram truck.
Though his new job is bound to keep him busy, Broder hopes to continue visiting sets, talking to suppliers, and generally being as hands-on as ever. "My history has been that if I have the right people in the right place, then I should be able to go out and produce a commercial every now and again," he says. "And I think it’s important that I do. I need to get out and keep learning. Not that you can’t learn while you’re sitting in an office, but you do start to feel out of it."Q
