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Take an octet of young professionals with marketing and creative skills, put them in a 130-year-old building in an area of town on the brink of exploding, and you have Bullhorn Creative, whose employees are pretty passionate about branding Lexington as the next great American city.
“I saw this undercurrent of making Lexington a better city. That was really the selling point for why I just had to work at Bullhorn,” said Will Jones, who is in business development at Bullhorn. (They’re not into titles so much as functions there.)
Originally from Lexington, Jones studied sociology and anthropology at Centre College in Danville. After graduating in 2004, he worked at UK on an interesting oral history project, spent a summer in Brazil studying Portuguese and “being immersed in this really amazing culture,” and worked at a ski resort in Breckenridge, Colorado, for a couple of years, in an office job that involved a little bit of marketing.
“Things clicked that I really liked that industry,” he said. He started looking for a way to get into the ad game and found a graduate program in advertising at the University of Texas. He applied, got in, earned a master’s degree in advertising and wound up with a job at Austin, Texas-based GSD&M advertising agency. He worked there from 2009 to March 2012 in the digital media strategy department, seeking out areas of the Internet, including social media, for clients such as MasterCard, Norwegian Cruise Line and Jarritos soft drink.
“It’s a rapidly changing part of marketing,” Jones said. “Every day it seems there’s a new social platform.”
Regardless of the medium or platform, he knows it’s important to remember the core principles of advertising.
“Whether it’s a TV spot or a social media network, you’re still, in effect, intruding on these people and trying to convince them that you are offering something that would be of value to them,” he said. “If you respect that and you respect the audience, then you’ll probably be successful no matter what the platform is.”
As much as he was learning about marketing and advertising and enjoying living in Austin, Jones wanted to get back to Kentucky. But he did not want to make “any career sacrifices just to move back home.”
He kept his eyes open for opportunities and started hearing about a new business called Bullhorn, a branding and creative company in Lexington. He knew Bullhorn project manager Lindsay Rall from Centre College. She was helpful in getting Jones a conversation with owners Griffin VanMeter and Brad Flowers.
“I knew they were a little different,” Jones said. “I knew everybody here had sort of a fresh approach, a young approach.”
Jones was hired at Bullhorn in March. It took no time at all to adjust from working at a company of more than 500 in Austin to one with eight people.
“We can do things quickly without a lot of bureaucracy,” Jones said.
Bullhorn Creative occupies the second floor of a historical building on North Limestone. Years ago, it was the longtime site of Mom’s Loudon Lunch. Bullhorn co-owner Griffin VanMeter purchased the building in 2007, a year before knowing it would be Bullhorn’s headquarters. The North Limestone sector of downtown Lexington is an area the Bullhorn crew calls “NoLi.”
“We’re excited to be here,” Jones said. “There’s a lot of future in this part of town.”
Bullhorn got its start in the fall of 2008 when VanMeter and Flowers were involved with the same civic projects and decided to start a business together. They flipped a coin over opening a pizza place or a branding company, according to Flowers.
Jones is glad the branding company won the toss. He is putting his marketing and advertising training to good use, tapping into opportunities for businesses, organizations and civic movements to “define who they are and make a statement to their competition in a professional and sophisticated way through well crafted and integrated design.”
He is also excited about contributing to the momentum of the identifiable energy in Lexington and the future of downtown. Of his marketing co-workers, he said, “It’s a group of people interested in the future of this city and want to see our generation eventually take the reins and take it to the next level.”
For more about Bullhorn Creative, visit www.bullhorncreative.com.
Kathie Stamps posts grammar tips at www.facebook.com/GrammarTips.