Melanie White:
CLASS OF 1985
Eastside High SchoolClass of 1985
Taylors, SC
Syracuse University - ArtClass of 1989
Syracuse, NY
Fine Arts High SchoolClass of 1985
Greenville, SC
Saint Patrick SchoolClass of 1981
Largo, FL
Melanie's Story
Life
After Eastside, I went to Syracuse University and got a BFA and majored in Art Direction for Advertising. My art classes at the Greenville Fine Arts Center prepared me well for college.
Now, I'm a Creative Director at Young & Rubicam in NYC where I work on ad campaigns that include tv commercials, magazine ads, outdoor, and digital advertising. It's a lot of fun! I'm a big fan of the show Madmen and enjoy hearing Y&R mentioned on it. Y&R is still on Madison Avenue, which is where the "Mad" from Madmen comes from. I love going on tv shoots in LA and Sao Paulo. Going out to eat at Wolfgang Puck restaurants and staying at 5 star hotels are the only perks left in advertising since the economy tanked this last decade.
I have two cute girls ages 2 and 7, I've been married 20 years, and I live in Westfield, NJ, where the tv show "Ed" filmed a lot of their scenes. I love living in the New York City area - I enjoy going to art museums, Broadway shows, performance art and concerts in the city. And there are a lot of opportunities living in the NYC area, such as my 7 year old singing in a prestigious choir that performs at Carnegie Hall. And she's getting private singing lessons and in a drama class taught by people who have been on Broadway.
9/11 was hard to go through. I was working in Midtown, which is a good distance from the Financial District, but it was hard to get off the island that day with all the public transportation shut down, and I know people who barely escaped getting out of the World Trade Center and others who had loved ones that didn't. Just about every town aro...Expand for more
und here in NJ, NY and CT lost people. Our town in NJ has 13 four-foot towers made out of stone downtown, that each represent someone lost in our town. I commute into NY Penn Station every day, where since 9/11, I see soldiers and an increase of police. We never had soldiers around before 9/11. It still feels strange. I used to see Ground Zero a lot in 2003 and 2004, when I used to meet with my then American Express client, right across the street from Ground Zero. During those years, the subway underneath the Towers had been repaired and was working, and when riding it, you can look out and see the pit, cause you're in the pit. On my way home every day from work, I take the bus from Port Authority, where I pass a large memorial that has a plaque for every Fireman, police, and Port Authority workers that were killed in the Towers trying to save people.
I have worked in NYC for 12 years. Other advertising agencies I've worked at are Ogilvy & Mather, Publicis, and DMB&B. Here are some of the clients I've worked on over the years at different agencies - American Express, Miller, Crest, New York Times, AT&T, Lucent Technologies, Cellular South, The Search Dog Foundation, and Friends of the Earth. The Search Dog Foundation sent a bunch of Search Dog / owner teams to Haiti and ended up saving a lot of people. When I worked on Friends of the Earth in 2000, it was the first time I had ever heard of the words "America can get off foreign oil in ten years". So much for that goal. Looks like it will take a few more years.
If you'd like to see my commercials and ads, go to melwhiteAD.com
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