Concrete Marketing
Concrete Marketing is an independent marketing company based in New York City, US, founded by Bob Chiappardi and Walter O'Brien in 1984. Concrete: Early years Concrete Marketing was founded by Bob Chiappardi and Walter O'Brien in 1984. Chiappardi was working in the mail room of Arista Records in New York whilst managing a few bands from Long Island and O'Brien was the founder of Relativity/Combat Records. The company name was chosen by plucking a name blindly from the Yellow Pages. Concrete’s first client was RCA’s Grim Reaper. It was during the group's first tour that Chiappardi and O'Brien decided to start working as a marketing company, realizing that there were few people out there to properly service the metal community. During the 1984 New Music Seminar, they distributed around 200 flyers advertising Concrete and its services and by the end of the first day they had been approached by Rick Dobbis, then vice president of marketing at Chrysalis Records, and were hired to work the first full length Armoured Saint record. In 1990, Chiappardi and O’Brien amicably split as business partners with Chiappardi taking the helm of Concrete Marketing and several other companies they had created, whilst Walter O’Brien took