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21 Most Intriguing: Wayne Arnold
Jeremy Greenfield & Courtney Barnes

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Co-Founder, Profero

What do you get when you combine £500, a failing career and a little green box? If you are Wayne Arnold, you get the first—and arguably most successful—digital interactive marketing agency in the U.K.

“I was working for Merrill Lynch in Hong Kong, and I realized I was a very bad lawyer,” Arnold says. “I knew I would be found out very quickly, so I had to get out of it.”

With that realization, he flew back to his home base (London), and, with the help of his brother, maxed out a credit card to launch Profero in 1997.

“We’ve been around for 10 years now, which really scares the hell out of me,” he says, acknowledging the agency’s equally scary inception: Neither Arnold brother had any background in advertising, let alone formal training in launching a business. In fact, Profero was born out of curiosity and little else. Enter that little green box.

“Every morning in our Hong Kong office, everyone would gather around this little green box,” Arnold says. “After a bit, half the blokes would walk away very excited, and the other half would look quite despondent.”

As it turns out, that was a Bloomberg box that operated on Internet-like technology. “I thought that if this little screen could create that much emotion, then maybe there really is something to this Internet thing.”

So, back to London, and back to the future. The Arnold brothers landed on interactive marketing by process of elimination, and soon their shop up and running. That risk-taking spirit remained intertwined with Arnold’s career path. For instance, after the dot-com crash five years ago, he took the road less traveled.

“When everyone was retreating into holes, we expanded to Asia,” he says. Profero now has offices in 11 cities worldwide, and a New York City shop will be up and running by the end of the year.

Arnold hangs the staggering success of the agency on its fusion of creative and media. From the very beginning, their initiatives focused on interaction and integration, with clients such as Puma, Mini, Western Union, Colgate and Coca-Cola signing on. And though the crux of Profero’s offerings is digital, Arnold says his team relies on magazine advertising to create a cross-pollination effect, and to attract audiences from all sides.

“Increasingly, we are the agency that the U.K. government goes to for challenging social problems, such as drugs and youth smoking, so we are increasingly targeting teenagers,” he says. “Constantly, we are looking at how we can use magazine titles in addition to online channels to reach this audience.”

But the integration of print advertising doesn’t stop with a teen audience. Consider the agency’s work for Western Union, which uses print advertising to drive viewers to a digital extension of the campaign.

Nor does his adventurous spirit (or, some might say, insanity) stop with business endeavors; his personal life is marked by extreme pastimes.

“I tend to have these distractions. I try to do things I haven’t done before,” Arnold says. The list to date includes traveling down the Mekong River on a rice boat, sea-kayaking through Patagonia (see inset photo) and running six marathons in seven days in the Sahara desert.

“I don’t do these things for physical reasons,” he says. “It just gives you a different perspective." He pauses to reconsider his motivations.

“Or, maybe I just have a compulsive disorder.”

March 1998: The Arnold brothers found Profero in London
October 1998: Became the first and only organization to “own” the Internet in the U.K. for a day with its fully integrated campaign for Sky Digital
Sepember 1999: Created the first pan-European cookie-based campaign for CNN’s launch of CNN.com Europe
March 2000: Profero became the first digital agency to join the IPA (IPA is the U.K. equivalent to AAAA)
October 2000: Profero opens first international office in Madrid
August 2003: Produced viral video clips for the first time for The Home Office
September 2004: Planned and booked the first campaign on a 3G network with Apple’s campaign on Pete Tong’s Fasttrax magazine weekly.
June 2006: Arnold became chairman and spokesperson of IPA’s Digital Media Group

mInsight

If you think abandoning a career as a lawyer for one in digital marketing—something in which Arnold had zero experience—is crazy, consider this: Since maxing out a credit card to start his firm, he hasn't borrowed a single cent. A baby that pays for itself at birth? We'll gladly buy that genetic code for £500—or, on this side of the pond, $1,026.15.

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