Gary Slack
Chairman and Chief Experience Officer, Slack + Company
Gary Slack is chairman and chief experience officer of Slack + Company, one of the world's first integrated marketing communications agencies and one of the very few that works exclusively with business-to-business marketers.
The Business Marketing Association has named Slack Barshinger its national Agency of the Year three times in the past eight years. And Crain's BtoB magazine has named Slack Barshinger a Top 3 national b-to-b agency for five of the past seven years.
For eight consecutive years, BtoB magazine also has named Gary to its annual list of the "Top 100 Most Influential People in Business-to-Business Marketing." For three years in a row, he has been named to the annual "Who's Who in Chicago" list published by Crain's Chicago Business.
Gary is into the second year of a two-year term serving as national chairman of the Business Marketing Association. He is a judge of the Chicago Innovation Awards and is a past chairman and member of the board of directors of the Economic Club of Chicago.
Before founding Slack + Company in 1988, Gary spent 11 years with the Omnicom Group, where he held senior-management positions in Chicago and Washington, DC, with Doremus & Co. and Porter Novelli.
He started his career in 1977 as a writer with Porter Novelli in Washington, DC. Before joining Porter Novelli, he was a newspaper reporter in his home state of New Mexico.
Gary graduated in 1976 with a B.A. in economics from Dartmouth College, where he was editor-in-chief and chairman of The Dartmouth, the nation's oldest student-owned college newspaper.