For all of his life Howard Dinin has had an attraction to words and pictures.
He wrote his first poem in the fourth grade and took his first photographs
the same year. By the time he was accepted as a candidate in the Ph.D. program
in the graduate school at Bryn
Mawr College he had awards for his writing and money for his photographs,
and a year of teaching communications and literature in college under his
belt. When he learned you can actually make a living with an ability to
communicate, he acted. He switched from the world of academia to those of
the pen and the magic marker, first as an editor of The Exceptional Parent,
and then as copy chief of a Boston ad agency. While there, among other duites,
Howard named the brand, and helped design and shot the photos for the award-winning
packaging for a company called Timberland.
Howard started his own business, an advertising photography studio that
evolved, with the addition of words, into a full-service ad agency.
In the interim, Howard accepted top level positions. For a year he was Editor
of The Boston Monthly. Subsequently, he joined the agency now known
as Cuneo Sullivan Dolabany, as Creative Director.
The ability personally to couple electricity with information seemed fundamental
, so Howard learned computing. It was a valuable lesson. It eventually brought
him the Vice Presidency of high tech business at yet another agency, Rizzo
Simons Cohn. He also taught Marketing at Boston
University.
In 1988 he and a former partner at Rizzo formed their own agency, called
M&D Communications, where Howard served as Chief Creative Officer until
1993.
He founded Bertha Communications in 1994.
This biography is being detoxified (for being unctuous and self-absorbed)
and will appear in its updated version soon.
A personal note:
It has always seemed arch, certainly artificial, to talk about oneself in
the third person. On the other hand, I have always felt it was somewhat
important to depersonalize the reader's sense of the individual's role in
the character and reputation of the business--a somewhat academic exercise
with a company as small as Bertha Communications, and as dependent on my
exertions to exist, never mind have a reputation. However much this seems
confusing, I apologize. That's life.
In any mode of expression I have always felt that the adoption of a persona,
of a mask, was a necessary part of the process--not because I have anything
to hide, or am a superficial person, but for other reasons. I think it is
an innate human quality always to be playing a role, however unconsciously.
Some of us are more conscious of it--more self-conscious, if you will--but
that doesn't lessen the instinct.
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