Ron Benza has twenty-nine years experience in marketing and advertising in five cities on two continents: New York, Brussels, Paris, Minneapolis and San Francisco.
His career began at Ted Bates Worldwide after completing his MBA at the Stern School of NYU. By 25, he was elected vice president, the youngest ever to hold that title. His career would eventually move on to Europe, working in French in both Brussels and Paris. Returning to New York, he would be named “One of the Best and Brightest Young People in Advertising” by Advertising Age in 1985. His first management job was running the ad agency Bozell Worldwide’s Minneapolis office. That was followed by a move to the San Francisco Bay Area to take over the important San Francisco office of McCann Erickson Worldwide as EVP, General Manager. During the next six years, Ron ran McCann San Francisco to acclaim, growing it to be one of the top ten offices worldwide for McCann, the world’s largest ad agency in 163 countries, by winning accounts such as AT&T Wireless and Silicon Graphics.
By then, though, the lure of the internet era came upon us all and Ron realized he was sitting in the epicenter of it all in San Francisco. Not content to be on the sidelines, Ron became VP of Marketing for Brodia, an Internet start-up with a suite of e-commerce applications in the digital wallet and shopping portal/ product search space. He continued his odyssey in technology migrating to Chief Marketing Officer of a Silicon Valley software company, Kintana, in the IT process automation space, subsequently bought out by Mercury Interactive.
It was then that Ron, looking for the next great challenge in his life, drew on his experiences with Terry Gruggen when they were colleagues in Minneapolis at Bozell. They conceived a version of Gruggen Buckley’s already successful endeavor and formed the affiliate, Benza Gruggen Buckley to extend Gruggen Buckley’s reach into new territory. The fit seemed perfect for Ron, matching two of his past experiences, communications and software, to create high volume marketing collateral for clients in a radically unique way. He could easily see how proprietary software like SpeedVersion® could render the old ways of preparing files obsolete and how clients could gain in the process.
Ron sits on numerous boards and advisory boards of both commercial and non-profit organizations. He is the recent author of Advertising Looks in the Mirror, an article that addresses the arthritic underlying business model of the advertising industry. He is also a co-founder of Founding Fathers, a group of thousands of prominent men dedicated to ending violence against women and children, under the auspice of the Family Violence Prevention Fund. |
