Last week, former New York City Mayor the Honorable Mike Bloomberg was quoted on “the next big thing” in tech relating to the opening of the Cornell Tech campus in The New York Times. He said:

“High-tech companies and new, small companies that will be the next big companies, they tend to be created where the founders go to school. You see that in Silicon Valley. Here was a chance to get a bunch of people educated and create the economy of the future for New York City.”

Source: pexels.com used under CC license.

What he hints at here is that over the past decade, New York has worked hard to prove that it can still reinvent itself, taking the tech world by storm, and now boasts a leading global facility to gear up the next phase of its tech growth. Last month, we announced that PAN, too, expanded its East Coast presence, with the opening of a new office in New York City’s Silicon Alley. This move comes at an extremely strategic time for our agency as we look to grow our capability to better locally support clients in the market and continue the search for great talent with complimentary skillsets to our integrated marketing communications approach.

As part of our five-year growth strategy after our West Coast expansion in 2015, the opening of “PANhattan” (as we have come to affectionately call it) signals to our clients and prospects that we’re at a stage where we’re confident that our award-winning programs and skills can go toe-to-toe with the best agencies in the world. It also positions the PAN brand on a new national scale. In addition to New York, our current office locations proudly include Boston, San Francisco and Orlando.

Interesting to note, last year the tech industry created more jobs in New York than the finance sector. William Dudley, the president of the New York Federal Reserve, stated that in 2016 the technology industry was stepping in where Wall Street jobs were once the main support of the local NYC economy. We’re particularly excited by what this growing new pool of talent “The City” offers us. The continued strength of the PAN brand is dependent on the diversity of experience that our people bring to our clients. With a population of 8,537,673 across all five boroughs as of July 2016, NYC will prove a pivotal platform for our continued expansion.

PAN will continue to focus on expanding our client portfolio in NYC and building cross-office teams that best reflect client needs. In the New York market, we are hyper focused on ad tech/marketing tech, fintech, real estate tech and retail tech prospects. Health tech will also be an important area given the dearth of world-class players across the Greater New York metro area.

With the hire of Ryan M. Wallace as VP and GM of the Manhattan operation, we’re also building out our integrated marketing and PR services to offer more expertise in crisis comms, corporate reputation management, and internal comms. Having rejoined the agency world from NRG where he was leading a mix of executive, industry, and internal communications initiatives, Ryan brings a deep expertise and passion of B2B tech experience that we know will be a beacon to NY prospects.

As we move into Fall, the “Big Apple” is certainly ripe for PAN’s picking. Our entrance into New York is a true milestone for PAN, and I believe that our agency will be met with much success.