Jimmy Asci and the Trouble With a Good Story

In August 2010, a congressional campaign borrowed a little sunshine from Bananarama. Sean Mahoney, a Republican candidate in New Hampshire, used “Cruel Summer” in a campaign video. The song belonged in the soundtrack of somebody’s youth. Its use in an election advertisement required something less romantic: permission.

Jimmy Asci, then a spokesman for Sony/ATV Music Publishing, supplied the missing detail. “It wasn’t licensed,” he said. The video came down before a cease-and-desist letter was issued. Asci described such episodes as routine. There was no need to convert every unauthorized chorus into a courtroom production.

It is an unexpectedly useful place to begin his story. Years before he co-founded a firm advising chief executives, Asci was explaining where enthusiasm encountered a boundary. A campaign wanted a song. A publisher controlled its use. Someone had to describe the situation without turning a minor infringement into the presidential debates.

The exchange also offers a welcome corrective to the usual picture of corporate communications. Sometimes the work concerns grand strategy. Sometimes it concerns a person who has mistaken a catchy tune for public property. Asci’s subsequent career would bring larger organizations and considerably more expensive misunderstandings. The recurring task was to put a complicated situation into words that could withstand being repeated.

“It wasn’t licensed.”

Jimmy Asci, on a campaign’s use of “Cruel Summer”, 2010

Before the boardroom, the songbook

Asci’s early employers included Rubenstein Communications and Burson-Marsteller. He then joined Sony/ATV, where his responsibilities extended beyond dealing with reporters. By 2009, he was director of operations. In 2011, he became vice president of communications and project management. The pairing of those last two disciplines is worth lingering over: explaining the work and helping organize it appeared in the same job title.

Music publishing supplied plenty of both. In November 2011, an investor group led by Sony Corporation of America announced an agreement to acquire EMI Music Publishing for $2.2 billion. Asci appeared among the announcement’s media contacts. The transaction involved a catalog of compositions, investors, regulatory approvals and the practical business of administering other people’s creativity.

By January 2013, he was explaining a consequence of the EMI acquisition in Nashville: the company needed more room. Finance and worldwide administration functions required additional space, while the creative division would remain at its existing location. “We are looking at all options,” he said. The statement was restrained because the decision was still open.

That Nashville episode gives the career a useful sense of scale. An acquisition has a price that fits neatly into a headline. Its aftermath has desks, offices and people who need somewhere to work. Asci was speaking about that second story, the one that continues after the deal announcement has been filed away.

A founder, a board and several audiences

On January 5, 2015, Asci joined Teneo Strategy in New York as a senior vice president. The move took him from a music publisher into a firm built around advising corporate leaders. His earlier experience covered crisis, internal and marketing communications. At Teneo, corporate reputation and investor relations became more prominent parts of the brief.

A March 2015 acquisition announcement shows the new remit in practice. Asci was listed as a Teneo media contact when a BC Partners-led consortium completed its purchase of PetSmart. The announcement combined a change of ownership with a new chief executive, Michael Massey, and the end of the retailer’s Nasdaq listing. Several consequential changes had to be explained in one document.

The contrast with music publishing was substantial, yet the practical demands were recognizable. The transaction had an effective date. Shareholders had a cash payment to understand. Employees and customers were being introduced to new leadership. Corporate communication had to carry the particulars of the transaction alongside the language of future plans.

One assignment placed him close to a particularly contentious question: who gets to speak for a company when its founder and an investor disagree? In 2017, he served as a spokesman for Travis Kalanick during the Uber co-founder’s dispute with Benchmark. The investor sought to limit Kalanick’s ability to fill board seats while litigation proceeded. Asci delivered Kalanick’s response.

It was a dispute about authority with a communications battle attached. A founder, an investor and a corporation can occupy the same news story while wanting different outcomes. A sentence attributed to one party does work for that party. Readers need to know whose interests it represents. The job demands a precise understanding of the speaker’s position before anyone reaches for an adjective.

Asci’s assignment illustrates how far he had traveled from explaining an unlicensed campaign soundtrack. The subject now included board control and the search for a successor chief executive. Both episodes involved contested rights, but their stakes and participants differed sharply. His place in each was as the named representative putting a position into public language.

Six months at WeWork

In April 2019, Asci joined WeWork. He became its chief communications officer as the business prepared for a public offering. The role placed him inside the organization, working with founder Adam Neumann and other senior leaders on the company’s narrative and overseeing a global communications and public affairs operation.

There were several audiences to address at once. Employees needed internal information. Investors needed financial communication. Governments and local communities had their own concerns. Customers knew the product through the buildings they used. A title as compact as “chief communications officer” covered an unusually crowded room.

Then the proposed IPO exposed the company to scrutiny over its valuation, losses and governance. In September, WeWork withdrew its offering paperwork and Neumann stepped down as chief executive. By October, Asci’s departure was being reported. His tenure had lasted roughly six months.

The dates are stark enough without invented scenes of midnight telephone calls. April: arrival. September: withdrawal. October: departure. A job taken to help explain a company’s next chapter had coincided with a reversal in that chapter’s direction. The timetable leaves very little room for the comforting fiction that an executive controls the pace at which a public story develops.

WeWork is the conspicuous episode in Asci’s career, but it should be kept in proportion. His work there included employees, public affairs and financial communication as well as the founder’s public image. The failed offering was a corporate event involving a business model, governance and capital. Treating its outcome as a referendum on a single communications officer would make the same mistake as treating a polished narrative as a substitute for those things.

The theatre connection keeps returning

Teneo announced Asci’s return as a senior managing director in February 2020. He resumed advising from its New York office after the brief period inside WeWork. The move restored a familiar professional setting, but another strand of his career remained visible alongside the corporate assignments: the performing arts.

Asci served on Signature Theatre Company’s board of trustees from March 2020 to May 2021. His name also appeared on the New York Public Library’s Library for the Performing Arts Business Council in its 2017 annual report. Those are concrete institutional connections, extending his music-industry years into the city’s wider cultural life.

In July 2021, he assembled the participants for a Teneo discussion about the revival of cultural life in America. The group included playwright and actress Anna Deavere Smith, Jujamcyn Theaters president Jordan Roth and American Ballet Theatre executive director Kara Barnett. Kevin Kajiwara hosted the conversation and thanked Asci for bringing them together.

Here was a different use for a communications executive’s network: gathering people who understood an industry from several directions. The cast included an artist, a theatre operator and a ballet administrator. Asci’s contribution sat behind the conversation, in its assembly. The person who arranges the panel rarely gets the most memorable line. The panel still needs arranging.

A company of his own

In 2022, Asci and Sam Davis founded Scale, a New York strategic advisory firm. They serve as co-CEOs, counseling executives on communications. After years representing organizations and individual leaders, Asci had become one of the leaders responsible for building an advisory business himself.

Scale’s work spans executive positioning, media relations, crisis response and digital communication. Those services bring together concerns that appeared separately in his earlier jobs: how an organization explains a decision, how a founder responds under pressure and how different audiences interpret the same words.

A further development came in June 2025, when Radina Russell announced her forthcoming role as Scale’s president. She called Asci and Davis her friends and described her background in strategic communications and finance, including capital markets transactions, crises and shareholder activism defense. The appointment added another experienced adviser to the business the two founders had established.

Seen across the whole career, the music years deserve more space than a decorative line in an executive biography. They contain operations, acquisition communications, copyright questions and the consequences of growth. The arts connections continued later. The corporate work added founders, investors and boards. Scale gives those strands a shared business address.

There is an appealingly practical detail in the 2010 Bananarama episode. The video disappeared before the formal letter arrived. A dispute ended without acquiring a second act. Later assignments would be far harder to contain. Still, the modest resolution belongs in this story beside the failed IPO and the chief executive titles: sometimes the useful outcome is simply that everyone understands what must happen next.