Meet Our Alumni
Rob Waterman ’05
- Take Nothing for Granted
These are hard times for the auto industry, to be sure. But life hasn’t changed much for Rob Waterman ’05. As an account director in the Boston office of the worldwide advertising agency BBDO, Waterman oversees advertising for New England Jeep dealers and New England Chrysler dealers.
“Work that was being done by 9 or 10 people four years ago is now being done by my assistant and me,” Waterman says. “Just because the numbers go down, that doesn’t mean the work goes away.”
Waterman developed an appreciation for hard work at USM. In the spring semester of 2005, he was among the students who participated in the regional competition in which they planned, executed, and evaluated a full-scale marketing campaign for the redesigned Ford Focus automobile. The USM team won the competition, and Waterman won a job with J. Walter Thompson, one of the project sponsors and Ford’s top advertising agency.
He started in JWT’s Detroit headquarters and was promoted to the Boston office, where he managed advertising for first the New England Ford dealers, then the Upstate New York dealership group. In 2007, he moved to BBDO.
How influential was that final semester? In fact, Waterman says, the work involved in the Ford Focus program is “almost exactly what I do now.”
Waterman has another happy reminder of those days. He and Ford Focus project colleague Amy Strout ’05 were married in August 2008. She is an account manager at the Boston office of the advertising firm Digitas.
“One major thing I carry with me from USM is to not take anything for granted,” he says. “Going to school at USM grounds you. There’s no sense of entitlement or that anything is owed to you. You work for whatever you have.”
