Allen Bosworth ’81 runs what he calls a 30-year-old start-up with the mantra 'unthink everything'
by Barbara Wiedemann
Allen M. Bosworth IV ’81 is a president at EP+Co, an award-winning integrated marketing firm recently named one of Ad Age’s 2019 “A-List” honorees. As a brash 28-year old with a graduate degree in PR and ad agency experience at DMB&B (now Saatchi & Saatchi) under his belt, the UNC Hussman School of Journalism and Media graduate helped build the creative agency with an old high school friend and his wife. At Erwin Penland, the agency’s moniker before a 2017 rebrand, Bosworth served in various leadership roles including director of client services and chief operating officer before being named president in 2016.
Since its founding, the firm has strategically grown from three to 300 people across two offices, one in Greenville, South Carolina, and one in New York City. Bosworth helped steer the organization through a purchase by Boston’s Hill Holliday (a subsidiary of Interpublic) in 2006, building a collaborative environment for creative problem-solving in broadcast, print, digital, retail and experiential channels for clients such as Verizon, Denny’s, John Deere, Twentieth Century Fox and Puma.
A longtime supporter of the Hussman School, Bosworth recently made a significant commitment to the university’s Campaign for Carolina, enhancing an existing Hussman School fund, The Leigh and William F. Goodwyn Family Expendable FashionMash Fund.
His support of Carolina doesn’t end there. Bosworth returns to campus often to consult with classrooms full of creative undergraduates, to meet potential new hires at “Meet the Pros” events in Carroll Hall, and to co-teach a FashionMash course at the Hussman School with his EP+Co team this fall. Bosworth is a member of the Hussman School Board of Advisers.
His firm has established a paid summer internship program in both the New York and South Carolina offices, recently hiring Michael Walker '17, a summer intern who moved into an account manager role on the John Deere account for the firm.
Recent graduate Heather Grace '18 (below) joined EP+Co as an apprentice in January, first jumping into the CoLab where she tried her hand at building prototypes and sets. Now she’s diving into six months of work with the social team, recently shooting a Lenovo ad that rolled out in December.
“She’s absolutely fearless,” said Bosworth. “[FashionMash students] are not intimidated by the unknown. They embrace what they don’t know.”
“Allen’s support is going way, way, way beyond just the financial donation,” said Hussman School faculty member Dana McMahan. “He is remarkable and an incredible friend to the program.”
An advertising and marketing professional, McMahan has been a professor of the practice at UNC since 2008. She quickly established a place for herself at the Hussman School, creating a product and experiential design incubator dubbed “Workroom” in 2009, focusing on fashion and lifestyle products. Seven years later, her approach was elevated with the $1 million grant from the Goodwyn Family Foundation which Bosworth’s gift is building upon. McMahan next created “Workroom: FashionMash,” boosting the innovative fashion-related incubator into the creative stratosphere.
McMahan teaches a series of Tuesday/Thursday classes this semester: Advertising Creative in the morning followed by Workroom FashionMash Product Design and Art Direction in Advertising in the afternoon. Students who take all three courses experience a creative immersion in lifestyle branding. They gain a fearlessness about diving into new hands-on experiences and a compelling portfolio of real-world products and immersive experiences that have been professionally presented to real clients such as Cartier and Gucci.
“Allen told me in our recent Start Here / Never Stop Podcast interivew,” said Hussman School Dean Susan King, “that what he saw happening in Dana’s FashionMash classes was a world-class academic education in combination with the best of an experiential education. He said that we are heady, but we get our hands dirty. That’s a great way to describe the learning environment we’re creating for our students.”
Finding Carolina
Childhood friend David Zeman '81, grew up with Bosworth in Michigan, where they played on the same middle school basketball team before Bosworth moved to South Carolina with his family at age 15.
“My best friend from back in Detroit said, ‘I’m thinking about UNC. You should look,’“ Bosworth recalled. “I drove up [to Carolina] with my Dad. I fell in love,” he said of the bucolic campus and the friendly students and graduates he met during his visit. “And I got in two weeks later!” He went on to enroll in the broadcast journalism program at the Hussman School.
Zeman transferred into the Hussman School’s journalism program from the University of Michigan when the friends were juniors.
“Allen was the only person I knew on campus,” remembered Zeman. “He was wonderful about helping me find a home there.”
Zeman, news and investigative editor for Bridge Magazine, a Michigan-based nonprofit news organization, spent more than 20 years as an investigative reporter for the Detroit Free Press. He noted that despite different career paths, interests and politics, he and Bosworth have continued to stay in touch over the years. Zeman said that his old friend dotes on his daughter and remains the down-to-earth, laid-back-yet-adventurous guy he was back at Carolina.
Giving great people opportunities
Bosworth gravitated to advertising and marketing after graduate school, relishing the problem-solving challenges and the nimble, creative thinking required to use ever-changing communications tools to advocate for products and ideas. It’s a topic he’s just as passionate about today.
“You have to be very, very broadly curious,” he said. “You have to be so intellectually flexible. And so willing to go into new spaces. There is probably no business that I can think of that is more attuned to keeping you young, if keeping you young means always learning something new.”
As a young partner in a growing firm, Bosworth remembered setting goals at the 10-year mark with his partners and their staff: be the biggest ad agency in South Carolina in 10 years. They reached that goal in five. Become one of the three largest ad agencies in the Southeast in 10 years. They checked that box in five years as well. Make the Ad Age “Agency A-List” by the year 2020. That dream came true last month.
What means the most when he looks back over 32 years with the firm?
“The fact that we’ve been able to grow,” said Bosworth. “That means the most to me. That allowed us to give lots of great people opportunities: Great jobs. A great work environment. That’s the most gratifying thing.”
Of the re-brand to EP+Co, Bosworth emphasizes the “+Co” in the equation, as in the “company” of creative professionals he works with in Greenville and New York.
“When we re-organized, we leaned into the idea of providing a super-weaponized tool box of many things,” he said. He describes the firm as channel-agnostic, willing to listen and ask questions to get a full understanding of a client’s communications needs before trying to figure out how to best drive success through any medium in the toolbox, from television to print to digital to experiential.
The firm hires well-rounded team members who are not afraid to solve complex problems and try new things; and then fosters their curiosity by allowing for change-ups in responsibilities and direction.
Karl Dunn is a case in point. He’s a copywriter and creative director with decades of personal experience in blacksmithing, woodworking and other hands-on crafts who ended up running what’s called the CoLab at EP+Co in South Carolina. The lab develops and shoots video for social content, but also creates prototypes and sets and builds out experiential elements. For Lenovo, the team built an anthropomorphic sculpture to celebrate International Women’s Day created entirely of a gamut of products designed by women. A power saw. A bullet proof jacket. An ice cream maker. Seen from one particular angle, the shape of a woman’s face comes into view.
Another project for Lenovo involved building a foosball game using Motorola Moto Z Force mobile phones with Shattershield™ in place of foosball players, built to withstand the heated foosball game that ensued.
Making the transition from wordsmith to creative craftsman was encouraged, which is the key point Dunn made about working for and with Bosworth.
“The rule he has that I live by is: ‘if it’s not expressly forbidden, it’s permissible,’” said Dunn. “That kind of opportunity and attitude allows people who have ideas to give them a shot.”