Will Lee joined ADWEEK as CEO in July 2023 after serving as chief working officer at Nationwide Public Radio and, earlier than that, senior vice chairman and head of digital, leisure group at Meredith.
Whereas he hasn’t been yelled at for fairly a while, it actually occurred within the early phases of his profession, he instructed ADWEEK for the ultimate installment in video sequence Resume Rewind, sponsored by leisure wiki internet hosting service Fandom.
Lee grew up in a household of physicians, telling a newspaper reporter when he was seven that he needed to be a cardiovascular surgeon when he grew up, as cardiovascular was “essentially the most syllables I may say once I was seven.”
He additionally dreamed up a marketing strategy for an organization that may make a Walkman the scale of an precise cassette tape cowl.
Lee adopted a distinct path after graduating from Brown College, making use of for 33 promoting jobs and getting simply two interviews and no presents, earlier than a buddy alerted him to an editorial assistant place at Leisure Weekly.
“I figured I might simply be making copies and occasional for individuals,” he stated, including that EW was one of many publications the place you would really get bylines on the time, and recalling when legendary publicist Pat Kingsley hung up on him.
He thought he bombed an interview with Harvey Levin for TMZ after not being fast sufficient when requested to share his opinion on Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson. However he acquired a name three days later, and ended up serving as New York bureau chief and producer from 2006 by means of 2009, telling ADWEEK, “TMZ is such a weird place.”
“The factor with superstar publishing and leisure publishing is that the stakes get ratcheted up far past their precise magnitude,” Lee stated. “You simply get yelled at by individuals continuously, notably by publicists, attorneys, managers, all of it.”