Bill Coontz arrived in Atlanta expecting traffic and heat. He found conversations. After moving from Minneapolis in 2013, he and his wife would go out for dinner or walk their dog and end up talking to people. It is a modest opening for an advertising executive’s story. No improbable breakthrough, no midnight revelation. Just a new city proving more sociable than its advance publicity.
He had come south to become president of Dalton. Eight years later, he became its CEO. By then, the work involved an agency spread across Atlanta, Jacksonville and Nashville. The appealing phrase attached to his leadership is “one agency with three offices.” Count the offices and the arithmetic is easy. The singular noun is where the effort begins.
A company can print the same name on three doors without making the people behind them feel connected. Coontz’s career provides several ways into that problem: account management, leadership inside large agency networks, partnership at an independent firm and collaboration among independent agencies internationally. His story becomes more interesting when the titles are read as changes in responsibility, rather than trophies arranged on a shelf.
The education between client and creative
Coontz grew up in Waterloo, Iowa, and studied at the University of Northern Iowa. The university lists him among its 1981 graduates. He wanted to work in advertising, though he did not yet understand the division of labor inside an agency. Minneapolis supplied the introduction. At BBDO, he began in account management.
It is a useful place to start a career that will eventually involve running an agency. An account manager lives near the seam between the client’s business and the agency’s response. Ideas have to become decisions. Decisions have to become work. Someone must keep the conversation intelligible to people whose professional vocabularies differ. The role rewards attention to what the other person means, including the inconvenient part that did not fit neatly into the brief.
His later résumé includes senior positions at Bozell, Mithun and Martin/Williams. He eventually became president and partner at Kruskopf Coontz Advertising in Minneapolis. His work there included brands such as 3M, General Mills, Cargill and Ameriprise. These are different businesses with different things to explain and sell. Moving among them gave his career a breadth that a single client category would not describe.
He also retained a family joke about the profession. In 2017, one son worked in advertising and the other was a CPA. “He got his smarts from his Mother!” Coontz said of the accountant. An executive who can allow accountancy to win the family intelligence contest has at least spared advertising one unnecessary sales pitch.
Independence, with company
The move from holding company agencies to an independent firm came in the early 2000s. Coontz spent 12 years at the independent agency before relocating to Atlanta. The change gave him experience of another ownership structure as well as another management role. At Kruskopf Coontz, he became a partner; at Dalton, he would again be part of a partner group.
Independence has an attractive sound. It can also leave an agency with a practical question: how do you remain connected to expertise and markets beyond your own offices? Coontz’s work with AMIN, the Advertising and Marketing Independent Network, offers one answer. He served two terms as its president and also served as global chairman. The network brings together independent marketing agencies across countries.
There is a pleasing tension in that arrangement. Businesses can retain their own identities while choosing to cooperate. For someone whose career crossed both large networks and independent ownership, it is a relevant form of professional company. Independence does not remove the need for colleagues. It changes how the relationships are organized, and how much must depend on the willingness of separate organizations to keep participating.
One agency is a daily verb
Dalton’s home city is Jacksonville, where Jim Dalton founded the firm in 1989. Coontz’s Atlanta role placed him inside an organization whose history preceded his arrival. That matters to the shape of the story. He joined an existing business and became part of its continuing leadership, alongside its founder and other partners.
An early example of connecting its offices appeared in 2014. Dalton creative director Kevyn Faulkenberry moved from Jacksonville to the Atlanta team. Pat McKinney, the chief creative officer, remained in Jacksonville. Coontz described the move as aligning teams to support clients across the agency. The arrangement made collaboration a concrete staffing decision, with people in different cities working within the same creative organization.
The later formulation, one agency with three offices, gives that kind of decision a simple test. Does an office strengthen the whole firm? Can its people draw on colleagues elsewhere? A map shows where a company operates; it cannot show whether a client receives the benefit of that spread. Those questions have to be answered in how the work is assigned and carried through.
In 2020, Coontz was publicly discussing operations, business development and client oversight across Dalton’s three main offices. By November 2023, the agency’s story also included increased international business and additional Fortune 500 clients. Geography and client scale had become part of the same management task. The office nearest a client could be one point of contact within a broader organization.
A room that reflects the work
There is a physical side to all this talk of connection. In November 2020, Dalton was announced as the first official tenant at 8West, a new mixed-use development in Atlanta’s West Midtown. Coontz, then president, wanted a workplace that reflected the agency. His explanation connected the character of the space to the strategic and creative work people would do there.
The building faced Howell Mill Road at Eighth Street, adjacent to Georgia Tech. Its design combined industrial character with modern offices. The location offered a particular setting for the Atlanta team, rather than treating workspace as an interchangeable backdrop. Choosing an office is one of the moments when the abstract language of company culture acquires walls, windows and an actual daily journey.
A good room cannot settle every question about collaboration. Still, Coontz’s explanation makes the choice worth attention. An agency asks clients to consider how environments and messages affect people. Its own workplace is an opportunity to apply that attention close to home. Here, the people being considered included employees and visitors, both of whom would experience the agency before a presentation began.
The period after Dalton
In 2022, Dalton Agency became Dalton, with a period in its logo. A communications business had edited its own name. The change was small enough to fit on a business card, but the announcement also concerned a larger partner team and the agency’s next stage of leadership.
Jim Dalton remained chairman. Michael Munz continued in business development and executive management. Coontz was CEO; Brendan Cumiskey was president. The expanded group included leaders in creative work, finance, paid media, account management, public relations, social media and integrated communications. The business was presenting its future as a responsibility shared across functions.
For Coontz, the stated ambition included growing a diverse client portfolio and helping more clients engage their audiences. That is a broad ambition, but the partner structure supplies useful detail. An agency offering many services needs people who can take responsibility for each discipline and keep it connected to the others. The punctuation in the logo was settled. The work of coordinating all those capabilities would continue.
After the applause
Coontz has also written about advertising’s more visible occasions. His 2017 Super Bowl commentary questioned sales and brand lift from expensive spots without a wider digital and social campaign. It is the kind of argument that brings an account manager’s question into a televised spectacle: what happens after the audience has watched?
In November 2023, his comments about hiring and client confidence returned to ordinary business conditions. Recruiting had become less difficult than during the preceding 12 to 18 months. Clients were more willing to spend, with budgets loosening. These are less glamorous subjects than a championship broadcast, yet they help determine whether an agency can do the work a client wants.
“I wouldn’t be here without their support!”
Bill Coontz, thanking Dalton’s team after his 2023 CEO recognition
When the Atlanta Business Chronicle named him among its Most Admired CEOs in 2023, Coontz’s public response thanked his team. Beyond Dalton, his responsibilities have included the Atlanta Community Food Bank’s advisory board and C5 Georgia’s board. In 2024, he was elected chairman of the board at Rescuing Hope. These roles give his Atlanta chapter a setting beyond the agency’s client work.
The career runs from an Iowa university to Minneapolis agencies, then south to Atlanta and across an organization with three offices. Its recurring problem is familiar enough to sound ordinary: people need to understand one another to work together. Coontz’s professional life gives that sentence addresses, colleagues and decisions. Three doors can carry the same name. Someone still has to make it possible for the people behind them to act as one agency.