EX-NHL player not average ad executive
Sean Avery brings ‘passion’ to new career
It is not surprising that someone who works in advertising once interned at Vogue and has the fashion sense, and looks, to model occasionally. Similarly, it is not unusual to find ex-athletes at agencies. Nor is it out of the ordinary that someone in the industry is also an owner of a bar. Or active in causes like marriage equality and helping the victims of Hurricane Sandy. Or turns up, from time to time, in the gossip columns.
When all that biographical information is on one resume, however, the result is, to paraphrase a familiar slogan, not your father’s Madison Avenue.
The resumé belongs to Sean Avery, who spent 12 years playing for National Hockey League teams that included the New York Rangers. Not long after finishing his hockey career in March, Avery began working with David Lipman, the longtime advertising executive, whose business interests include the Lipman agency in New York.
For a time, the signers at the end of Avery’s emails described him as the chief strategy officer at Lipman. More recently, he has become “kind of an editor at large,” he said, handling a range of assignments for the agency and its parent, Revolate Holdings. Revolate also has investments in companies in apparel (Genetic Denim, Nic & Zoe), media (Archetypes, Tauntr) and sports (ProCamps, Spartan Race).
Along with working with Lipman, who is the chairman and chief creative officer at Lipman and chief creative officer at Revolate, Avery spends time with Michael Mendenhall, partner and president at Revolate, and Andrew Spellman, chief executive at Revolate.
Avery, who is 32, does not shy from discussing the sheer unexpectedness of what he calls “this transition I’ve gone through.”
When he replies to a question at a meeting or after-work event like, “Oh, so what brings you here?” Avery said, “You always see this shift in a person’s face, half confusion, half interest.”
But advertising is not so far afield, he added, because when he was playing hockey, “I was always marketing myself.”
In addition, Avery is keenly interested in technology and social media. And, as a former professional athlete, “I had the cash,” he said, to be “a consumer since I was 19, a high-end, luxury-brand consumer.”
The transition has not been seamless, Avery acknowledged.
“Sometimes I don’t do it the right way,” he said of his interactions at Lipman. “It’s not a locker-room; you can’t challenge people the same way: ‘Let’s go. We need you.’ ”
When that impulse comes over him now, “I go for a walk,” he added, laughing.
“The hardest thing is the long days,” Avery said, referring to employees at the agency “who are in 10, 12 hours every day.”
“For 15 years I had the same day,” he recalled. “I would wake up, eat, practise, work out, eat and sleep, then I would go and play. So now, an eight- or nine-hour day in the office, I can’t do it.”
Still, “I love going in there,” Avery said, meaning the Lipman headquarters, where he works from the top-floor office.
A client who works with Avery is effusive in her praise. “As a professional athlete, you have love of the game and passion, and Sean is certainly bringing that to Lipman,” said Susan Duffy, chief marketing officer at Stuart Weitzman, a shoe marketer, which just re-signed with the agency for a second year.
She ticked off attributes like “his love of business, his love of the luxury market, his love of fashion,” adding: “He wasn’t classically trained, with an MBA or college. He has an MBA degree in social networking. He’s a connector.”
Avery is involved in the campaign for the Stuart Weitzman line for spring and summer 2013, which will bring in the supermodel Kate Moss as the brand’s new face. In a meeting last week at Lipman, Avery beamed as he offered a preview of ads featuring Moss in knee-high gladiator sandals.
Lipman and Avery met in May 2011, after a client suggested that Avery appear in a campaign for Hickey Freeman men’s suits. Lipman, familiar with Avery’s reputation as an outspoken agitator on (and sometimes off) the ice, demurred. Days later, Lipman read an article about Avery’s becoming the first pro athlete to speak out for legalizing same-sex marriage in New York state by appearing in a video for New Yorkers for Marriage Equality.
“I’m flabbergasted. It floored me,” Lipman said. Now, Avery is “integral to my thought processes; he challenges me, he supports me, he has in each meeting at least one idea.”
“That doesn’t mean there aren’t growing pains,” Lipman added, laughing, citing how, at 3 p.m., Avery, recalling his hockey life, will sometimes ask, “Isn’t it time for a nap?”
After Avery previewed the Stuart Weitzman ads, Lipman previewed a print and video campaign for another client, 7 for All Mankind jeans, that is to be introduced in February. Avery will appear in the campaign, sporting in some ads, through makeup, the kinds of black eye and cut lip emblematic of his previous career.