Bandujo, who received his bachelor's degree in business from Lynchburg College and his M.B.A. from Loyola College, is now the president of his very own advertising firm: Bandujo. In the last 12 years, the firm has come a long way from the company he ran out of his dining room. Bandujo now represents a wide variety of clients ranging from nationwide Fortune 500 companies such as Time Warner and AT&T to regional companies such as Einstein Moomjy and Roswell Park Cancer Institute. The firm utilizes a wide variety of venues to convey messages, including radio, print, television, and direct mail.
"It's nice. We can work with a client on the full range of their tactics; we're not in one specific area," Bandujo said. "We're really good about trying to make sure we tell our clients, or we try to recommend, what we think is right for them as opposed to always saying "you just need to do TV ads," which seems to be kind of the trend a lot of times. People want to work on the most glamorous stuff, so they immediately steer their client that way, which is, from my own experience, one of the things that kind of bothered me a bit. It always felt like you were being steered to the most expensive but the most glamorous things people wanted to work on."
According to Bandujo, the hardest part of his company's growth has been the fact that he has had to give up working one-on-one with the clients. While he loved working with clients, he realized he had to take a step back from that in order to fulfill his management role. He still gets involved in some aspects of the creative process, though.
Bandujo said that there are several campaigns he is extremely proud of. The first is the campaign created for Roswell Park Cancer Institute, which featured outdoor, print, radio, and TV components, all prominently displaying the catchphrase "Remission accomplished."
Another favorite was a pro bono project for the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation. It was a co-marketing campaign with a mall in New Jersey that made contributions to the foundation if people shopped at the mall during a given time period. The slogan for this campaign was "Shop for millions of women at once."
Bandujo feels that thanks to the creation of TiVo and DVR, those in advertising must adapt their tactics in order to get the attention of those they are trying to reach. He said that the biggest challenge advertisers face right now is the need to be "even smarter or more creative than ever" in order to either use or adapt to the ever-changing technology available. Taking TiVo and DVR into consideration, advertisers must create commercials people do not want to skip.
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"I think if you do something that people really find appealing, then they are going to continue to watch them," he said. "I think people appreciate the work, but if you're doing the generic commercial screaming about the [latest] sale or whatever, I think that is the kind of stuff that is definitely going to get skipped."
"Really understand that it is a business," Bandujo said. "It's fun, but that's not what we're here to do; we're here to really help a client—to make it or break it. There are so many brands that have made it or broken it based on their advertising, so it can be critical. A lot of jobs are dependent on what we do."
Bandujo, whose parents emigrated from Cuba and came to America with nothing, grew up in Virginia. He said his parents stressed the importance of a "great education" and hard work to their children, teaching them that those are the things needed to be successful in this world. He moved to New York, where he currently resides, 15 years ago. He loves to spend his days off wandering around the city, exploring new areas.
