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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: Tell us about your agency and how it got started.
SCOTT COHEN:Quattro is clearly one of the fastest growing digital and direct marketing agencies in the Philadelphia area. We’ve got some great national clients, many of them based in the Philadelphia area. I started the business back in 2004, and over that 12- or 13-year period, we’ve created one unbelievable marketing company.
We had four original founding partners. Tom [McNamara] has got both a client and agency background. He’s got a strong background in banking and financial services. He now functions as our agency Chief Operating Officer. He’s the guy that keeps it all together, the inside guy to make sure that the trains come and leave on time.
My other partner is Dan Boerger, and Dan and I have a relationship that goes back to the 1980s, believe it or not. I’ve never met a guy that knows the direct response insurance business better than Dan. He’s a resident pro in accountable marketing programs.
I’m an agency guy. I’ve been in the agency business for 30 years, both in the marketing and creative side. And with my background, and Tom and Dan’s background, we really have a great machine—we share responsibilities in running our agency day-to-day.
Q. Can you talk about some of the milestones you’ve reached over the years?
A. Going back to 2004, what was nice about the launch of Quattro—what I’d like to say back then is that we were a new business, but not a start-up. We were four guys that really had existing clients and financial services business. We did a lot of work with GMAC Mortgage, which to this day is still a client—we’ll talk more about that later—but one of our largest early clients who are still a client today is US Bank. US Bank joined us as a client back in 2005 or 2006. Some other key milestones over the years is Verizon becoming our client back in 2006 as well. Verizon was our client for 10 years. We actually worked with them to launch their Fios product. We also worked with them to launch what I would call pioneering program in the direct and digital advertising world—a trigger-based program that targeted actual movers or pre-movers before they moved. It was a test that we did with Verizon back in those days, and for a 10-year period it truly was the number one responding direct response program that Verizon ran. It was a true milestone in bringing them in as a client, because that led many years later—going back to 2012—to us bringing in Comcast to the fold: another key milestone for us as a client.
For Comcast, we run their mover programs, we run their customer onboarding programs, as well as some other initiatives within the organization. They’ve been a client of ours now for five or six years, and they’re Philadelphia based, we’re Philadelphia based—very complementary skill sets, and it’s a great relationship.
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