Carlos Jimenez looks for spark that makes each brand memorable
By Holly Fisher, Special Projects Editor

Creativity is in Carlos Jimenez’s blood. His grandfather was an artist for the Catholic Church in Spain and was sent to Cuba to work on cathedrals and religious art. Jimenez, whose family lived in Cuba a number of years, was born there in the years before Fidel Castro came to power.

When he was 7 years old, his family moved to Miami. His brother is an art curator and his sister is an art teacher.

“I grew up with several cultures,” said Jimenez, chairman and CEO of the bounce agency in Greenville. “Diversity and creativity—I grew up around it.”

When he was 14, Jimenez was an intern at a Miami advertising agency. Most of the time he was a go-fer, but he sometimes had the opportunity to show off artistic flair. His career in advertising was born, and he continued to work with a number of mentors and earned a degree in advertising design from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh.

“I never looked back,” Jimenez said of his career choice. “I love the concept of creating something that doesn’t exist and solving problems. If I didn’t have a CFO, I would give the stuff away.”

Jimenez started his career in Florida and on Madison Avenue in New York. He was later brought on board the Leslie Agency in Greenville to make the firm “more of a creative powerhouse” that could compete with ad firms in Atlanta and Charlotte, N.C.

Jimenez fell in love with the area and agency and eventually moved up the chain of command, becoming president and then chairman and CEO.

In April 2005, Jimenez took the firm in a new direction. The name was changed to the bounce agency and the firm went through a paradigm shift.

“We wanted to be real innovators and on the leading edge of what was happening in the communication field—all the new media that was developing, the Internet, so many different styles of magazines. Everything was changing, including the consumer.”

About four months ago, the bounce agency moved into a new home along the Reedy River in downtown Greenville, an area Jimenez calls the “epicenter of the region.”

The office floor plan is open to encourage collaboration, rather than giving people secluded office areas.

The bounce agency also has taken a new approach with its clients, assessing the client base and making a conscious effort to work only with leading companies, those companies that are leaders in the market or are very well respected, Jimenez said.

“You’re as good as the people you work with in terms of your reputation,” he said. “Those kinds of companies demand more from their ad agencies.”

The firm has grown to 60 employees, better known as “energists” to represent the bounce agency’s focus on energy.

"Why bounce? It stands for energy,” Jimenez said. “We believe our job is to find the energy that flows within a brand, to find that energy and give it life, make it get up and walk, make it memorable.

“When we hire, (employees) have to have a lot of energy, a bounce to their step, pardon the expression,” he said. “(They say) I’m here, I’m glad I’m here and I’m ready to go. It’s really easy to spot one of our employees.”

Most of the bounce agency’s clients are in the Southeast, although the firm’s work has appeared in national publications.

“We’ve reinvented ourselves and repositioned ourselves to be a much more performance-based agency,” Jimenez said. “We wanted to sell ideas and innovation and step out of the ad agency business model and creating ads. We create brands.”