Brian Sheehan is Associate Professor of Advertising at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University. Previously he was with global creative powerhouse Saatchi & Saatchi for 25 years, with CEO roles at Team One Advertising in Los Angeles and at Saatchi & Saatchi Australia and Japan.
Loveworks follows Brian’s books Basics: Online Marketing (2010) and Basics: Marketing Management (2011). He has been published in Advertising Age, the Journal of Advertising Research, and in several peer-reviewed books and journals. In 2011 Brian was presented with the coveted Teaching Excellence Award by the Newhouse School’s graduating class.
Extended Bio
After graduating from College of the Holy Cross in 1983, Brian joined what was then Dancer Fitzgerald & Sample (now Saatchi & Saatchi) in New York the same summer. He began his career working on the General Mills account, developing advertising for such brands as Cheerios. By the mid 1980s, Brian was working on the Toyota account developing ads for the “Oh, What a Feeling!” campaign.
In 1988, Brian moved to Saatchi & Saatchi Japan as Account Director on the Toyota business. While there, he worked on campaigns for Latin America, Europe, and the Middle East.
In 1990, he moved to Saatchi & Saatchi Hong Kong as Group Account Director running a group of 15 accounts, comprising 70% of the agency’s business, including: Hilton Hotels, British Airways, IKEA, Guerlain cosmetics, TIME magazine, News Corporation, Toyota, Lexus, and Hewlett-Packard.
In 1993, Brian was named CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi Japan. Some of the agency’s key accounts were: Toyota, British Airways, Qantas, Bayer, Chrysler/Jeep, Kodak, Sara Lee, DuPont, Hewlett-Packard, and Corona beer.
In 1996, he was appointed CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi Australia. The agency’s accounts included: Procter & Gamble, Toyota, David Jones, SHOWTIME, Castrol, and NRMA. In 1998, S&S Australia was named “Agency of the Year” by AdNews.
In 1999, Brian was made Chairman and CEO of Team One Advertising in Los Angeles. Team One is a wholly owned division of Saatchi & Saatchi. Team One’s largest account is Lexus, which they launched in 1989 and quickly established as the top-selling luxury automotive brand in the U.S. In addition to Lexus, Team One’ clients included the Ritz-Carlton hotel company worldwide, Flexjet, and Procter & Gamble.
In the fall of 2008, Brian left Team One to take up his new position as Associate Professor of Advertising in the S. I. Newhouse School at Syracuse University. He continues his relationship with Saatchi & Saatchi as a consultant, managing the agency’s Toyota Worldwide Executive Board (TWEB). Brian is also an advisory board member of Fuhu, a China-US based internet-software company and Mission/Metrix, a digital applications and measurement company headquartered in Carlsbad. He has consulted for many companies on digital media, including Brazil’s national energy company, Petrobras, Comerica Bank, and Intesa Sanpaolo, Italy’s largest Bank.
In 2009, Brian gave the keynote address at the Direct Marketing Association’s Global Leaders Forum in San Diego. In 2010 and 2011, he served as chairman of the Direct Marketing Association’s Strategic Summits on Social Marketing in San Francisco and Boston.
In 2010, Brian published his first book, Basics: Online Marketing, which has also been published in Spanish, French, German and Korean. He published his second book, Basics: Marketing Management, in 2011. His third book, Loveworks: How the world’s best marketers make emotional connections to win in the marketplace, will be published in 2013. He also writes articles regularly for Advertising Age magazine.
In 2010, Brian was lead author on a research article about advertising effects on digital music piracy published in the peer-reviewed Atlantic Journal of Communications. He was lead author on a follow-up article published in Advances in Communications and Mass Media Research from the 8th Annual International Conference on Communications and Mass Media. He was also lead author on an article published in 2012 in the Journal of Advertising Research on the same subject. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) awarded him a $20,000 grant to aid in the research for these articles. In 2010, he coauthored a book chapter, along with Optimedia CEO Antony Young, in the peer-reviewed Handbook of Research on Digital Media and Advertising: User Generated Content Consumption.
In May 2011, Brian was named the Newhouse “Teacher of the Year,” receiving the Newhouse Award for Teaching Excellence from its graduating senior class.
Brian is married with two children. In 2007, he received a Master’s degree from Loyola Marymount University in history education. He plays golf, tennis and racquetball regularly. Brian’s assessment of his ability in these sports may or may not bear any resemblance to reality.