jack abraham
Milo
There’s a whiteboard in Jack
Abraham’s bedroom, so he
can stumble out of bed and
jot down ideas. That focus
helped build Milo, a web
and mobile app that stream-
lines the inefficient process
of searching for products
online before buying in-
store. In December, eBay
bought Milo for $75 million,
tapping Abraham, 25, to
transform the veteran
e-seller that “does over
2 billion commerce searches
a quarter,” he boasts.
tina fey
Writer
Tina Fey has mastered the
funny. NBC picked up her
Emmy-winning comedy
series, 30Rock, which she
produces, writes, and stars
in, through 2012, and Bossy-
pants, her collection of
personal essays, recently
debuted to critical raves. In
2010, Fey, then 40, became
the youngest person ever to
win the Mark Twain Prize
for American Humor, thanks
to her biting wit and classic
quips (“I want to go to
there”). “I hope that, like
Mark Twain, people will see
my work 100 years from
now,” she remarked, “and
say, ‘Wow, that is actually
pretty racist.’ ”
Stephan Durach
BMW
It takes three to five years
to put new tech features in
cars, so “based on pro-
jected estimates, we would
have Friendster in our cars
right now,” jokes Stephan
Durach, head of the BMW
Technology Office, the
automaker’s skunk works.
His new creation, called
Connected, eliminates that
lag time by enabling BMW
and Mini Cooper owners to
download an app to their
iPhones, sync their phones
with their car, and access
driver-friendly apps such
as Pandora. “We want
technology that maximizes
our flexibility,” he says.
“With this interface, we can
react fast.”
john jay
Wieden+Kennedy
1
Dan WieDen, cofounder of Wieden+
Kennedy, is sure that John Jay, his
agency’s global executive creative
director, does work related to adver
tising. He just can’t quite describe it.
Jay commutes—between the shop’s
offices in Tokyo, Shanghai, London,
and Amsterdam, where he identifies
the most creative local people in art,
music, and technology. Jay unearths—
what’s new, exciting, and bubbling
up on the edges of places as unlikely
as Delhi and Detroit, so he can feed
that culture into the hive mind of the
Portland, Oregon–based powerhouse.
(No wonder Advertising Age noted
W+K’s “sense of current culture” when
it named the shop Creative Agency of
the Year.) And in his free time, Jay
runs his own company, Studio J. Its
latest project: “The Grove,” a proposed
blockwide “art hostel” for young global
creatives—musicians, filmmakers,
artists, designers, hackers—that he’s
developing near the front gates of
Portland’s old Chinatown with Ace
Hotel cofounder Alex Calderwood
and Goldsmith Blocks LLC. But the
veteran ad man, who’s worked on
campaigns for Nike, Uniqlo, and Tar
get, is just getting started. “I consis
tently try to connect to the greater
cultural world,” he says, “in order to
help make W+K a catalyst for innova
tion on a global scale in areas outside
of what used to be called advertising.”
