This month, Ignited celebrates its tenth anniversary. When I started a mere six years ago, we were only forty people. Then 140. We’ve trimmed down a bit since our height. Made a couple of tough cuts recently. Not replaced some who have left. (These are sucky times.) But most days I still marvel at what goes on here.

We have a broadcast producer who doesn’t know how to say “no.” With time and budget and sanity in short supply, he and his team somehow always make it work. We have a media team that is seemingly flying by the seats of their pants everyday, pulling off miracles in the constantly changing environment they live and breathe. We have an experiential department that gets a budget slashed one day, over delivers the next, then has the client’s CEO walk in two weeks before the event to drop more money on them and ask them to blow his mind. (They proceed to do so.)

We have research and analytics departments that find ways to make floods of information leaner and meaner, and more meaningful. We have HR and operations departments that amazingly keeps everyone motivated, yet mindful of the bottom line. We have an interactive department filled with prodigies, producers, programmers and designers who figure out ways to pull things off they’re just not supposed to. We have project managers and production staff who know no other way than to be downright scrappy. We get deep into new biz pitches we have no business even being a part of because we’re scrappy. And now that scrappiness is an attribute that is becoming more and more appreciated everyday, we’re going to start winning more of them.

From the beginning, prima donnas never lasted long here. Not then, not now, not ever. Now I realize the Yeti has sort of become our unofficial mascot of late. But on this auspicious occasion, I’d like to nominate this slightly more diminutive creature:

That's Scooby Doo’s plucky little nephew, Scrappy. Scrappy’s a doer. And so are the people of Ignited. Happy 10th Anniversary, gang.

 Subscribe to the Ignited USA Blog