krouse/WADE/1stjc/mark2nd

Diane Murray Krouse

Managing Director

D’Arcy, Masius, Benton & Bowles/Los Angeles

Age: 42

Diane Krouse once lived in New York’s fast-paced ad industry and loved it. Even so, she thinks it’s more “interesting and dynamic” in Los Angeles, where DMB & B; transferred her in 1985.

“Here there are smaller, more entrepeneurial ad houses that call on the individual to be more creative and resourceful, because you don’t have all these departments to do the work for you,” said Krouse, who joined DMB & B; in New York as an assistant account executive in 1979 and is now managing director here.

“The pace of business here is every bit as fast as New York, and L.A. is in the global market, but the quality of life here is better,” she said.

DMB & B;/Los Angeles competed and in late March won the Gateway 2000 computer company account, valued at more than $100 million. The office reported $125 million in billings for 1996.

Gateway representatives in the company’s South Dakota head offices told Krouse that the Los Angeles office won partly based on its “strategic understanding of the brand and how to link it to customers” and “how they felt about the process of conducting business with them.”

Krouse is well-liked in the industry as someone with charm and charisma, and who doesn’t mind the spotlight. Perhaps that’s a family trait Krouse’s father is Jan Murray, the popular comedian and stage and screen personality in the 1950s and 1960s and who still performs today.

Wade Daniels