A bar, a council chamber and an advertising agency are all places where a person learns to read the room. The lighting differs. So do the stakes. But each asks for some mixture of timing, persuasion and patience. Paul Pomeroy has worked in all three, which helps explain why the official biography of a chief executive can include the phrase “recovering bartender” without feeling like a focus-grouped attempt at charm.
Today Pomeroy is the owner and CEO of Aloysius Butler & Clark, the independent marketing communications agency known as AB&C. He joined in 1999. The agency now counts his tenure at 27 years, a figure that gives his rise a decidedly unfashionable shape. There was no parachute into the corner office, no breathless reinvention. He became a managing partner and director of marketing, then president in 2017, then CEO on October 1, 2022. The title arrived after the apprenticeship.
His responsibility at the top is described in wonderfully unglamorous terms: revenue, strategic growth and long-range business planning. These are not words that will set off a confetti cannon. They are, however, the things that keep the people who build the confetti cannon employed.
The apprenticeship nobody announced
Before AB&C, Pomeroy worked as a senior communications consultant for a Washington-based firm specializing in marketing communications strategy. He later served as national director of a nonpartisan education and lobbying organization based in Washington and Delaware. The route put him near both message-making and institutions before he made the agency his professional home.
His education had already given the path a clean outline. Pomeroy, born and raised in Delaware, graduated from Archmere Academy in 1988. He earned a Bachelor of Science in marketing from Georgetown University and a master’s degree from George Washington University’s business school. Marketing and business were the formal subjects. His later jobs added the untidy curriculum: clients, voters, colleagues and the chronic human tendency to want two incompatible things before lunch.
By 2013 he was a managing partner and director of marketing at AB&C, providing strategic counsel to clients and managerial support inside the agency. In the language of agency life, he was responsible for the work and for creating more work. He has been unusually direct about the second part. In a 2019 podcast conversation about building and buying agencies, Pomeroy treated business development as a professional craft. Sales, in this view, is not a dirty word or an occasional task for creative people between projects. A growing company needs someone thinking about revenue today, next week, next year, five years out and ten.
That clock matters. When AB&C acquired Oxford Communications in 2025, Pomeroy described the move as the result of a decade spent establishing the agency in New Jersey and becoming immersed in its public and private sectors. The purchase created an office in Lambertville and added Oxford’s strategic planning, branding and advertising experience to AB&C’s public relations, social, digital and paid media work. A transaction that appeared on one July morning had been ripening for years.
Six years where every opinion had an address
From 2005 to 2011, Pomeroy represented Newark’s First District on the city council. He served three terms. His work concentrated on business and economic development, and he helped create the Greater Newark Network and the Greater Newark Area Economic Development Partnership. He also explored an idea for a live-music venue downtown, studied possible locations and remained convinced after leaving office that Newark could support a room with some ambition.
Municipal government supplied less glamorous matters, too. At his final council meeting, Pomeroy recalled the resolution of reservoir litigation, redevelopment along Main Street and Elkton Road, better public-safety numbers, recycling, Green Wednesdays and energy assistance. He thanked his wife and children for their patience. What he said he would remember most was the council’s cooperation and lack of political infighting.
His colleagues returned the civility. One called him proactive and respectful of constituents. Another praised his ability to think outside the box and look toward the future. A third chose a single word: “passion.” This is the rare farewell in which the complimentary nouns also describe a plausible operating method.
Public office was not a detour from the agency career so much as its sternest live exercise. Advertising people can segment an audience. Council members meet the audience at a microphone, one aggrieved resident at a time. Both jobs require an ear for stated needs and underlying motives. Only one comes with zoning maps.
Pomeroy kept a foot in civic institutions after leaving the council. In 2013 he became chairman of the New Castle County Chamber of Commerce board, representing an organization then serving roughly 1,400 members. His community involvement has also included Goodwill Industries of Delaware and Delaware County, Friends of the Newark Free Library and the Delaware Humane Association. In 2010, he joined a lineup of city officials and business owners as a guest bartender for a fundraiser supporting the Newark Police Department’s K-9 unit. Sometimes a biography circles back with excellent comic timing.
Inheriting the future
Pomeroy became AB&C’s president when founder John Hawkins retired in 2017. Tom McGivney moved into the CEO role; Pomeroy moved up from managing partner and head of agency marketing. Nearly six years later, when McGivney retired, Pomeroy succeeded him. The sequence is worth dwelling on because succession inside a long-lived independent agency is less like changing a nameplate than transferring a web of trust.
The public version of the handoff was orderly. The internal version had to account for clients, creative standards, money, history and people who had spent decades together. Pomeroy discussed that tension on a 2023 podcast episode whose title asked what it means to take over as CEO of an established company. Its summary captured his hope in plain language: not to screw up what he was now in charge of. It is the sort of aspiration that inspires confidence precisely because it declines to pose for a motivational poster.
His tenure has shown a preference for distributing leadership. When longtime CFO Linda Shopa retired at the end of 2024, Joanna Ford joined Pomeroy and chief creative officer Steve Merino as an owner while taking the chief communications role. In 2025, Alex Parkowski became another owner and managing director of the government division. Other promotions elevated leadership in recruitment marketing and the creative department. The pattern is not one hero collecting more titles. It is an institution making more owners.
At the same time, AB&C strengthened strategy and media, created senior specialist roles and expanded its geography. Its offices now stretch from Wilmington to Philadelphia, Bloomsburg and Lambertville, with remote operations beyond them. The agency describes five core segments: healthcare, behavior change, recruitment marketing, consumer and specialty business-to-business. The variety is a hedge against fashion, but also a demand for leaders who can admit what they do not know and hire the person who does.
A serious career with its tie loosened
There is another way to read Pomeroy’s record, which is simply to read his own capsule biography. He is a “recovering bartender,” an “avowed aviophobe” and capable of kickboxing “at a fifth-grade level.” His LinkedIn introduction has included business owner, advertising guy, retired politician, retired bartender and retired Lego builder. One suspects the Lego retirement was especially difficult for succession planning.
The jokes are doing actual work. Advertising executives sell distinctiveness for a living and too often describe themselves with the same gray parade of “results-driven,” “visionary” and “passionate.” Pomeroy gives you the fear of flying and the elementary-school combat rating. The details make the authority feel inhabited.
They also reveal a useful balance. His career has been deeply local but not small. He remained rooted in Delaware while helping an agency take on national and international clients, acquire other firms and build specialist practices across the mid-Atlantic. He has moved between public and private rooms without pretending they are the same. The through line is not scale for its own sake. It is an interest in what makes a community, a client relationship or an organization durable.
Pomeroy’s story offers no miracle quarter and no cinematic pivot. It offers something rarer: a long record of staying close enough to consequences to earn larger ones. The bartender reads the room. The councilman hears the objection. The business developer asks for the work. The CEO plans for the year when somebody else will need the keys.
That is the long conversation. It does not always produce a slogan. It has, in Pomeroy’s case, produced a career.