Bill Patton

When you’ve cut your teeth on 70-degree ascents up Grand Teton, the “hell” of interactive marketing somehow gains new perspective. That said, Bill Patton will be the first to tell you: In either world, you’ve got to learn the ropes. Or else. Bill’s life lessons seem to come best when they surround things he’s passionate about. Which is another way of saying he came to advertising through the back door—initially working at companies that made products he believed in (the names Wild Country and Black Diamond Equipment say it all), and more recently at Concept2—the rowing-machine company that is now famous due in no small part to Bill’s nine-year effort building a loyal, multi thousand Internet community spanning 93 countries.

A self-taught Web guru, Bill can spar virtually with the best of them—he’s written code, managed budgets and developers, done PR, sold projects internally, directed projects externally, pulled apart servers and suffered through hackers, crackers, and imposters. For hmc²’s clients this means a real short learning curve when it comes to the Web. Bill’s marketing prowess is captured as a textbook case study in some illustrious volume he can never recollect the title of—likely because he considers his history (including the MBA from Northeastern) just that: old news. Superfluous to a guy who’s got uncharted waters ahead. Moreover, an unrelenting zeal for what they hold. Which is precisely what clients wanting to sail the wide-open spaces of the www need. When not pondering some new way to harness “the power,” Bill is taken to musing about bouldering or nights in Helsinki or his two beautiful daughters. Fittingly, he lives in Underhill, a town situated in the Green Mountain range, aka the “rock rib” of Vermont.