Matt Scheckner: the person who made Advertising Week topic

It’s a trait that’s outlined his occupation ever since he wandered thru City Hall as a faculty graduate, hoping for a task with not anything however a newspaper clipping from his mum and a way of interest. “There was no internet, so I literally went to City Hall and got sent to the wrong place three times,” he recollects. Eventually, he discovered the workplace he was once on the lookout for: the Commission at the Year 2000, a blue-ribbon panel tasked with imagining New York’s long term and which was once the topic of the inside track piece he was once sporting. He charmed the receptionist, landed an interview and were given a task.

What adopted was once much less a instantly occupation trail and extra a chain of instinctive pivots. But underneath all of it was once a collection of unshakable ideals: that puts topic, that tales should attach the top and the guts and that should you don’t ask, you don’t get.

Now chair of Advertising Week and named New Yorker of the Year by way of The Advertising Club of New York’s Advertising People of the Year 2025, Scheckner’s tale is a masterclass in turning intuition into infrastructure and construction a industry that feels and purposes like tradition.

A style for town politics, a stoop about recreation

In the mid-80s, Scheckner helped plot New York’s long-term technique throughout transportation, healthcare, schooling and waterfront building as a part of his process within the Commission at the Year 2000.

But one thing bugged him. “Cities were starting to understand that sport was economic development,” he says. “And New York didn’t have anything in place.” He’d noticed it first-hand thru a college internship in Atlanta, running on a marketing campaign that helped safe the 1996 Olympics. So he made the case to New York: give sports activities an everlasting house at City Hall.

It labored. At 23, he was the founding govt director of the New York City Sports Commission – a task nobody else sought after again then, however one he changed into a powerhouse over the following decade.

He introduced the Goodwill Games to New York, fought off political interference and quietly stored a boxing membership within the South Bronx from eviction. “It was in an abandoned building,” he says. “But just because a building’s abandoned doesn’t mean nobody’s in it.”

The sports activities gig resulted in a conflict with Giuliani’s management and Scheckner left to start out his personal corporate. He produced off-Broadway theater, he staged logo extravaganzas for Pepsi (“Ray Charles, the Rolling Stones and Riverdance in Hawaii – Mick Jagger said, ‘All the years I’ve been doing coke, now I do Pepsi’”), he helped release the Arthur Ashe Stadium, he ran Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest at the nook of Surf and Stillwell in Coney Island.

That ultimate one caught. “Coney Island was a place where imagination came to life,” he says. “I liked what that symbolized.” When he introduced his personal company, he known as it Stillwell.

From toilets to boardroom

At some level, Radio City Music Hall introduced him a spare workplace. “I didn’t need an office, but it insisted – and it had its own bathroom and its own air conditioner, so I couldn’t refuse.”

That element would possibly sound trivial, nevertheless it was once that workplace and that construction that gave Scheckner one among his maximum formative ingenious activates. After 6pm, the chief front would close, which impressed any other improper position perception. “You had to leave through the stage door. You’d walk through the guts of the building. I got to know every inch of it.”

That’s how he found out the Roxy Suite, a sublime, long-forgotten Art Deco condominium tucked away behind the curtain. The venue’s unique impresario, Roxy Rothafel, as soon as lived there. “It was one of those spaces you just don’t forget.”

Years later, a senior exec at DDB, Abby Hirschhorn, known as him with a temporary: Ken Kaess, then chairman of DDB and the 4A’s, sought after to reconsider how the trade introduced itself. Scheckner knew precisely the place to carry the primary assembly. “We didn’t have a name yet, or a plan, but I knew the ‘where’ mattered. So I borrowed the Roxy Suite.”

At the time, Scheckner had by no means even heard of the 4A’s. “I knew two As. AA is who you call if you drink too much and AAA is who you call if you get a flat on the expressway. But 4A’s?”

Advertising Week was once born now not from a committee, however a stoop. “The brief was: young people weren’t coming into the business the way they used to. Advertising wasn’t cool any more. And there was no singular event that brought the industry together.” He spent seven months, unpaid, construction and growing the idea that.

The thought was once easy, however potent: concept management by way of day, showbiz by way of night time. Not simply panels and PowerPoints, however gigs and galas in areas that sparked emotion. “It was never just about content. It was about how it made people feel.”

The components: position, folks and goal

Ask Scheckner what makes an ideal tournament and the solution is as considerate as it’s sensible.

“Place is everything,” he says. “You have to get the environment right. People respond to where they are.” From St Paul’s Cathedral to the Sydney Opera House, Ronnie Scott’s to the United Nations, Advertising Week has at all times leaned arduous into venue. But it hasn’t ever been about grandeur for grandeur’s sake. “You want somewhere that makes people sit up and think, ‘This is different.’”

Then comes programming: the mix of industrial common sense and emotional intelligence. “It’s the mix that matters. The head and the heart. You can have hard-edged sessions on data and AI, but also something that moves people. A conversation on mental health. A talk on purpose. We never say no to an issue. There’s always room.”

And after all, pop culture. “We bring in people from film, fashion, sport, music – because that’s what creativity lives in. It keeps the work alive.”

What binds all of it in combination? “Make it feel human,” he says. “Make people feel proud of what they do.”

Gracie Mansion, Christie Brinkley and a parade of mascots

Scheckner’s first transfer was once vintage him: again to City Hall, to pitch Bloomberg’s workplace on internet hosting the hole night time at Gracie Mansion. He even did an financial affect learn about with KPMG to turn how a lot promoting contributed to the New York financial system. “About 20 cents on the dollar,” he says.

They agreed. He then persuaded town to close down Times Square for a parade of promoting mascots – Mr Clean, Tony the Tiger, the Keebler Elves. “It’s not easy to close Times Square, but I knew how to get it done.”

He additionally introduced a faculties outreach program that noticed advert businesses mentor public faculty scholars on actual briefs. That initiative ultimately advanced into the High School for Innovation in Advertising and Media, which nonetheless operates in Brooklyn these days.

‘The things that pay and the things that might pay’

By 2006, the 4A’s had pulled again investment and Advertising Week needed to stand by itself ft. That’s when Scheckner made his transfer: he purchased out the development, restructured it as a industry and became it into a world franchise.

“I’ve always believed in blending the things that pay with the things that might pay,” he says. “You try stuff. You chase it. And sometimes, it works.”

London adopted in 2013, Tokyo in 2016, Sydney in 2018. Then got here Johannesburg, in partnership with the Nelson Mandela Foundation and Education Africa. “We brought Kevin Hart to a township called Orange Farm, to a school that has 1,200 kids. We built something there that still stands.”

In 2022, Scheckner offered the industry to Emerald Holdings, however stays chairman.

Over the years, Advertising Week has featured everybody from Emma Stone to Nile Rodgers, Al Gore to Bruno Mars. But the magic lies now not within the giant names – it’s within the combine. “You’ve got to connect the head to the heart,” he says. “The business issues, sure, but also the human ones.”

What he’s proudest of

“I took an idea,” he says, “and built it into a global business. We’ve touched people all over the world. We made people feel good about the industry they’re in.”

He’s nonetheless chairman. Still stuffed with concepts. Still making plans what’s subsequent. “I’m 60 now. I feel better than I did at 40. There’s more to come.”

And for the ones short of to practice in his footsteps?

“Don’t be afraid to fail. Be willing to try. Paint the picture in your head, then figure out how to make it real. And always ask. What’s the worst that can happen? People say no? Sometimes you just keep going till they say yes.”