I'm tired but I had a little bit of a nap, so that'll get me caught up. We do so much business prior to CreateAthon that we are usually a quarter or a third of the way there once we start. We started (Thursday) about 1 p.m. on the official 24-hour (clock), and you just go. ... It ends up being 48 hours total because you spend another whole day doing things. It always feels good when you sit down and look at everything you've done.

How many staff members did you have working?

There were probably, all told, 20 out of about 23. We have pretty good participation.

How many years have you done CreateAthon?

This is our fifth year.

Is there a point of diminishing returns throughout the 24-hour period that you can detect?

Yes, there are a few. Usually it is between 10 and 11 p.m., and usually about 5 a.m.

When and how was LWT founded?

It started in 1959 by Jay Leavell and Ed Wise. We are the second oldest ad agency in Alabama that has continued to stay in business. They were both in publishing, and at that time, broadcasting wasn't what ad agencies did a whole lot of. They brought in a third partner to do the broadcast stuff in the early 1980s, and my business partner, Jim Leonard, and I purchased the business in 1994.

How many clients does LWT have today?

We probably have 50 clients. Some of them are concentrated in different industries. Destination marketing is kind of what we do. If it's kind of a place you want to be or a destination, that's kind of the work we do a lot of things for. We have some business-to-business clients.

Has LWT grown in the past 10 or 15 years?

When we bought the business, it was essentially six employees. We shared an art department with a publishing company and we steadily grew that to about 20 employees within the agency.

What kind of results have you been able to get for your clients?

They vary, of course, but we'll point to some success. We took over the Montgomery Convention and Visitor Bureau account about four years ago, and developed a campaign that focused on specific reasons to visit Montgomery, rather than just, 'Hey, you should come to Montgomery." There's Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and (Alabama Shakespeare Festival), and (we) kind of boiled it down to certain things you should be looking for. In their first year of that campaign, they had an increase in inquires. They had a very, very large increase in interest in Montgomery, much larger than they thought they would have.

What issues are there in the advertising and marketing business today?

Fragmentation of media. Every day it gets harder and harder to reach the customer for the client. I read recently that there is a new media type formed every minute -- if it's on the Internet, on phones. There's a new program now where you can sign up with a cell phone company, and with every 60-second ad you listen to you get 3 minutes of free air time. That (kind of) stuff is invented constantly, and it's very difficult to keep up with, and make sure that your customers are getting through to their clients because I think we are all exposed to something like 5,000 messages a day now, and we are tuning it out.

What is your long-term goal with this business?

To continue to enjoy what we do. It's really fun to be in a business where you do something different every day and you enjoy it. It's really hard when I talk to people who don't enjoy what they do. It's hard to understand why they continue to do it. They are sort of in that career and they don't really know a way out. I've been fortunate to be in a career that I really, really enjoy.

What's some of the best advice you think you've received in life?

Very early in my purchase of this agency, a guy told me that the hardest part of this business is people. We don't have printing presses or capital expenditures that we have to make in order to produce product. We have to have people who are good at prooducing product and we have to keep them happy. ... Just paying attention to people and making sure that they are happy.