Building in The Big Apple: lessons from ETC’s first year stateside

2025 was one for the books. I shifted from EP to Managing Director, New York, before we even had a ZIP code. 

The first item of business was, naturally, finding the perfect space. Countless viewings later, we opened the doors on Crosby Street in spring, and distilling everything that’s happened since is distinctly difficult. More difficult, in fact, than furnishing a studio from scratch. Or delivering six Super Bowl campaigns…

There’s nothing that can really prepare you for your first gig as MD. And what even is an MD, anyway? It’s a role that’s evolved as the industry has progressed. Companies are larger, pipelines more complex, bidding more aggressive. Throw a transatlantic move into the mix and, well, I’ve learned a lot. You go into building a studio with ambition and a blueprint. But the reality is far less linear.

There’s nothing that can really prepare you for your first gig as MD.

One of my earliest wake-up calls came in meetings where I thought I was being concise and decisive, very London, only to realise later that, in New York, that brevity could read as distance. There’s a different expectation here around presence. More airtime. More context. More conviction in the room. 

I had to learn, quickly, that clarity doesn’t always mean speed, and that trust is often built through conversation rather than efficiency.

Above: The ETC NY team.

Maintaining cohesion between London and New York quickly became our number one priority, and not in the abstract. It required an intensely hands-on approach: a constant, never-ending flow of ideas, shared context, and hard-won process. Advice harvested in one time zone, stress-tested in another. Never an island, never adrift from the motherland. Keeping synergy front ’n’ centre wasn’t just a cultural ideal, it was an operational necessity. It grounded me throughout the first year and kept me close to the creative, the clients, and the work itself.

But they say it takes a village, and what began with just me, a former London-based EP with a plan on paper, grew into a rapidly expanding, double-digit team. Some came with us from London. Others joined once we landed. Some of my proudest moments this past year have been onboarding the talent who chose to join us, people who helped shape both the culture and the work as we found our footing in a new market. This new group of talented humans made it almost easy for me to pack my life into five (ish) suitcases and open our studio just off Broadway.

And what a studio it is. All the things you’d expect, of course. And then there are the things you might not expect.

But one thing I’m certain of: it feels innately Electric.

New York, though, is a whole new landscape. Old clients. New clients. Sharply varying expectations. The city isn’t a place for toe-dipping. You must dive right in, and swim, hard. The tussle here is different. The scale of opportunity is bigger, but so is the competition. Access is earned. You fight to be in the room, a much bigger room, and then you learn how to listen, how to cut through the noise without adding to it. While there’s common threads with the way it’s done across the pond, it’s very different here, logistically and culturally. I don’t take for granted the immense trust our clients placed in us during our first year as we learned the ropes.

Advice harvested in one time zone was stress-tested in another.

Delivering six Super Bowl campaigns in our first year sounds impressive, and it was, but what it really involved was an intense exercise in orchestration. Multiple agencies. Multiple time zones. Creative expectations moving at speed, while technical realities stayed stubbornly fixed. It required trust, not just in the work, but in the process. That pressure forced us to articulate how we collaborate, how we communicate, and how we protect the creative under scrutiny. Super Bowl didn’t just test our capacity, it tested our values.

That Sunday, we watched together as a team, spread across twelve screens, cheering at the ads rather than the football. Less victory lap, more collective exhale.