Dentsu Health’s Media Lifer

Many people who work in media entered the business almost by accident. Matt Brown counts himself among the proud minority who wanted in from the get-go.

Brown, Dentsu Health’s director, paid search, grew up drawing and painting, and briefly considered pursuing a fine arts degree at Temple University. Even at a young age, however, he understood the long odds against a successful career as an illustrator or painter. “The whole ‘starving artist’ thing scared me a little,” Brown admits.

Instead, he attended Penn State University, where he studied marketing, communications and media studies. After graduation he moved to the Philadelphia area and took a search associate job with digital agency WebiMax. Roles as a search specialist at eBay and paid media associate, senior associate and manager at Netplus followed in turn.

Thus a mere five years after he graduated from college, Brown knew he was a media lifer. “A lot of my colleagues may have stumbled into media because it was different and they saw an opportunity. I feel fortunate that I had the formal training,” he says.

It was at his next stop, at Publicis Health Media as a manager, paid search, where Brown’s media career “kind of went into full speed,” as he puts it. Brown was assigned to the agency’s Johnson & Johnson business, which came with a $100 million-plus per month budget across 10 different brands. As opposed to the smaller brands (with proportionately smaller budgets) he’d been supporting at WebiMax and Netplus,...