An ex-Marine with a Yale degree in classics is an advertising founding father in Kyiv
e. He’s probably the only member of Kyiv’s ex-pat community who’s both a student of Greek and Latin and a U.S. Marine Corps veteran.
After majoring in classics at Yale University, Bain, now 40, took a hard left turn: he joined the Marines.
“It was a way to see the world and good training, and more interesting than working for a company,” says the Denver, Colorado native. However, a military career didn’t seem right for him. After his Marine Corps hitch – in the Philippines, Hawaii and Japan – he went right into the University of Michigan’s business school. After earning his MBA, Bain decided to check out the newly independent Ukraine. He was then 28.
“I came here in 1992…. The Cold War had just ended and the whole of Central Europe and Eastern Europe had opened up. I went on a trip to Prague, to Budapest, to Bratislava looking at what the opportunities were, and eventually decided that Ukraine has larger opportunities simply because it’s a larger country. There were lots of companies in those other countries, and no one was in Ukraine,” he says.
Bain wasn’t sure exactly what he would do here, but when he got here, advertising beckoned. It seemed to him that he knew more about advertising than most Ukrainians simply by virtue of being a media-savvy American and having written a report on telecommunication and media in Ukraine for the American company McGraw-Hill right after arriving in the country.
“I remember talking to the head of production at the state TV channel and asking him, ‘How many people watch TV?’ and his answering ‘50 million.’ Then I asked, ‘How many commercials do you run?’ and he told me ‘None.’ I thought, ‘Well, this is gonna change soon.’”
Bain also remembers talking to Ukraine’s deputy minister of communications and mass media about launching a radio station. The official told him that radio advertising is “a stupid idea that will never work.”
Atlantic crossings
Bain’s initial company, Perehid Media – now a part of Atlantic Group – launched two months after his arrival here, in November of 1992. Initially all the money was his own; in the spring of 1993, he invited another partner.
“Our office was up on Lvivska Square. It was a two-room apartment and I slept in one room and had an office in another room. And we had three or four employees.”
Two of those early staffers are still with the company. Andrew Kinsel now manages Perehid Media. The Atlantic Group’s Ukrainian partner, Serhiy Staritsky, who came from state TV, is still on the team, too.
Bain recalls Kyiv in 1992 as a pretty bleak place. There were no lights on Kreshchatyk, you were served Pepsi in wine glasses, and there was “fairly scary” live music playing in the only viable restaurant in town. But it was an adventure. “It was fun back then,” he says.
As for Kyiv’s residents, he jokingly remembers that his impression of Soviet citizens was influenced by the famous old TV ad for Wendy’s fast food. In the clip, the only models in a Soviet fashion show are three dumpy old babushkas who waddle up and down a runway.
“Obviously, it was a mistake,” he laughs. “People were extremely friendly. We had a lot more fun then. Now we have a lot more business.”Gradually, with the help of a translator, Bain met more people involved in local broadcasting and started selling commercial time on state TV. At first business was slow but in 1993 the Moscow office of Mars bought time on state TV through Bain’s company.In time the company expanded from just selling ads on TV into production, animation, market research, real estate, business consulting and other fields. In 1994 Perehid Media’s advertising division was renamed Provid; it became Provid BBDO in 1996 as a result of its new association with the New York advertising agency network BBDO.
In 1997 the Atlantic Group expanded into Kazakhstan. It attempted to settle offices in Uzbekistan, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, but those markets never took off. In 2001 the group established a Los Angeles-based animation production studio called Animax that explores new technologies. But Bain still considers Ukraine the company’s main field of activity and plans a major expansion here through the next year and a half.
Family life
Bain’s entire family – his parents, his two brothers, his wife and his two-year-old daughter Caroline – live in Colorado. His wife Diane is American, though they met here in Kyiv seven years ago when she was in Ukraine working on a contract. Though he officially lives in Colorado, Bain now spends more time here in Kyiv, anticipating the post-election economic boom. He spends a lot of time in the air.
After having spent five years as a Marine he is still in the reserves, and in 2003, during the Iraq War, he served with Ukrainian troops in Kuwait as a lieutenant colonel, helping out the Ukrainian commander who didn’t speak English and needed help navigating U.S. military culture. Ukrainian troops, Bain says, “are more professional that some other international troops that were there, and than some of the U.S. Army too.”
Besides classical languages, Bain knows Russian and French, but admits that his Ukrainian is pretty weak. He confesses to a passion for golf, skiing, hiking, and especially for traveling.
“Part of the reason [for] setting up those offices in Central Asia was to see what it was like there,” Bain says, “I like traveling, but now I do it too much.”
