Bruce Failing received a B.A. from Tufts University in 1971. He received his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School in 1973, after which Bruce and his father started ActMedia, the first in-store advertising and promotions company in the United States and took it public in 1983. In 1989, ActMedia was sold to Heritage Media, which in turn was sold to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation in 1997. ActMedia exists today as News America Marketing.
Bruce was a principal in Lamaze Publishing Company, a for-profit company that licensed the “Lamaze” name to create a series of baby and parenting media vehicles, which was sold to a subsidiary of NBCUniversal in 2006. He was also a principal in the 2000 purchase from GE Capital of Productivity Solutions, a leader in automated self-checkout solutions for retailers, and its turnaround and subsequent sale to IBM in 2003.
In 2004, Bruce was a founding partner of Alerion Partners and continues in that role. Alerion Partners invests in and provides managerial assistance to companies, focusing on start-ups and turnaround situations. He teaches a course on entrepreneurial development in the M.B.A. program of Palm Beach Atlantic University’s Marshall E. Rinker Sr. College of Business.
Bruce is an active sailor and skier. He has five grandchildren who reside in Darien and Greenwich.
