Matthew Greitzer
Cofounder and COO, Accordant Media
Winning ways: Being a great marketer is a challenge on its own. Being an apt businessman? That’s a whole other talent, and that’s Matthew Greitzer’s skill. Greitzer, a 15-year digital marketing veteran, helped launch the agency trading desk ATOM at Razorfish when the practice was in its infancy. He left Razorfish to start Accordant with a former colleague and has helped double the programmatic buying company’s year-over-year revenue each year for the past three years.
Defining moment: “I left Razorfish (then Avenue A) back in 2004 to start something like a Yelp. I made every mistake you could make over 10 months, but I came back to Razorfish with a very different perspective.”
Words to live by: “Anybody can do something well, but start something if you really want to stick out.”
Head swivel: “We saw the media buying landscape going through a profound change and felt like in order to navigate that change you really have to know something special about data and technology. We’re still changing, but macro-level change is what drove what we’ve done over the past four years.”
Good advice: “Find a problem to tackle. Find the job nobody wants and do it better than anyone thought it could be done.”
First job: “I washed pots and pans at a ski resort. I got to ski for free!”
Favorite book: Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
Favorite app: Seamless
Click or tap here to read the stories behind the successes of the other Direct Marketing News 2014 40 Under 40 winners.
