The ihaveanidea Creatives section, with few exceptions, has long been the domain of illustrious advertising creative directors from around the world. But just like how the ad industry must travel into other realms to find truly inspirational creative work, sometimes we at ihaveanidea meet non-advertising creatives that are just so fascinating that we want to share them with our ad family.

Such is the case with Stefan Sagmeister, Austrian-born super-designer and founder of Sagmeister Inc. in New York City. Stefan’s work in everything from album cover and poster design to brand identity has earned him high praise in many creative circles, but it has been his philosophical musings on work and life that have made him a minor celebrity and very popular TED conference speaker (in fact we caught up with him in Cannes at the TED event held there during the Cannes Lions).

Always on the lookout for interesting problems, Stefan answered some of the quirkiest questions we could throw his way.

ihaveanidea: Imagine this scenario; two small towns in America, both with the same small population of 5,000, and both with a similar main street, a small supermarket or two, barber shops, a baseball diamond, diner, mom and pop shops, and the usual small-town economy.

Now imagine that we send one creative professional to each town to work with all of the businesses to remake their brands in whatever ways the creative sees fit. To town “A” we send a major advertising creative director, highly awarded and very talented who’s worked in the ad industry all his life; and to town “B” we send a designer, perhaps someone like yourself who was worked with a lot of great brands. Both would have the same budget and time and would be given the ultimate goal of using their powers to have a maximum impact on the town. We would leave, and come back a year later. What do you think will have happened in the towns?

Stefan: The CD would look at all the merchants and select the strangest and oddest ones in order come up with a number of funny and clever ads, run them for no money on the local cable channel, submit them to Cannes and win a Lion or some other sad little sculpture. Outcome 1: The town remains the same. The agency hallway becomes uglier.

The designer would organize the merchants into an action group that ultimately bans all billboards, vinyl banners and oversized signs within town limits, including the print versions of the clever ads the CD came up with. Outcome 2: The designer remains the same. The town becomes prettier.

ihaveanidea: Say that I would get a group of senior art directors from top agencies to sit in a one day class where you would teach them. The curriculum would completely be up to you. What do you think they’d need to learn?

Stefan: To sit still for a day.

ihaveanidea: How is the creative process for a designer different from a conceptual creative process of coming up with a brand idea?

Stefan: It’s more lovely.

ihaveanidea: A lot of agency people hit a wall when the web took over because they had been doing TV, print and radio for so long that they had (and still are) a hard time at adapting their skills to interactive. Is it the opposite for designers? Was the web an easy move?

Stefan: In the beginning yes, now no. The craft on the web has developed: If you don’t know the tools you cant come up with ideas.

ihaveanidea: A lot of the best agencies I know have moved designers from being the ones that fix up typography for the art directors to being a full fledged member of the creative process and the team. If you were to take a guess at what the role of designers in the ad industry will be in three years what will it be?

Stefan: Wieden and Kennedy is run by the designer John Jay. If there is an agency in the US that has been doing more good work consistently for a longer time, then I don’t know of it. In three years there will be a number of other similar situations.

ihaveanidea: What traits in your personality distance you from other designers? What separates good designers and art directors from great ones?

Stefan: I was born five miles from the German border and am likely better organized than most designers. I am not very spontaneous but very focused. Great work is formerly good work that has been pushed very hard.

ihaveanidea: Give me a crazy client story with the big lesson you learnt from the experience.

Stefan: Here is a long account of my first meeting with Mr. Mick Jagger: On Wednesday, a brand new and extra-clean stretch limo picks me up at the studio. We are going to Newark airport, and the driver hands over business class tickets for LA and I have a stupid grin on my face all the way to the airport, looking out over the New Jersey industrial landscape with the Statue of Liberty in my back, contemplating if this is one of those ‘happy’ moments that I have about once a year.

The next morning, Jagger’s assistant Lucy meets me in the bar, gives me a quick rundown on Mick and we go to the suite. In the elevator I’m nervous. Mick opens the door, turns around immediately without saying hello and I feel awkward. Lucy introduces us, and he’s friendly but busy going through a Sotheby catalogue with Charlie Watts. “At nine million that’s a real bargain”, he says in heavy British accent looking at a Monet painting. “Pity I have no walls left to hang it”.

As I help Lucy opening the water bottles, Mick grabs my portfolio and says, “So, your the floaty one”. “The floaty one?” “Yeah, all your covers seem to float in the plastic box.” He likes the Lou Reed package, he likes the attention to detail in some of the others and now I can stop being nervous. I ask him about his favorite Stones covers and he mentions without hesitation: Exile on Main Street, Sticky Fingers and Some Girls. These are my favorites as well: “We should have an easy time working together since I would have told you exactly the same covers only in a different order: Sticky Fingers, Some Girls and Exile on Main Street“. Charlie Watts (in lowered voice) asks Jagger: “What’s on the Sticky Fingers?” to which Mick replies: “Oh, you know Charlie, the one with the zipper, the one that Andy did”.

The stupid happy grin is back on my face.

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Jagger shows me the presentation for the stage designs, labeled “The Blasphemy Tour”, with a huge baroque cross in the center of the stage. “Just look at it for style, forget about the title and the cross, we got rid of that.” I mention that I’m certainly glad they did, cause after having had the orthodox Hindus on my back for the use of Hindu iconography on the Aerosmith cover I have little desire to revisit the religious world and have right wing Christian groups making bomb threats. Watts asks me about my accent and I tell him all about Bregenz, Austria and that I lived in New York for the past eight years, and that I’ll fly back there tonight. “Oh, you came here especially for this, so this is like a little vacation then.” I tell him I feel like I’ve won first price in “The Big Rolling Stones Meet the Band All Expenses Paid” radio show contest, they crack up and I am out of there. I take the limo back to Rizzoli’s, get some books on Baroque, meet with the stage designers and fly out at 8:30. I feel good and am asleep before the plane leaves the ground, having learned no big lesson whatsoever.

ihaveanidea: You get stuck in a deserted island for one year with ample supplies of food and water. You get to choose three things you can take with you to the island to help you pass the time. What would they be?

Stefan: A sketchbook. A pencil. A pencil sharpener.

Interview by:

Ignacio Oreamuno
El Presidente
ihaveanidea

Chief Creative Officer
Publicis USA

For some people, home is wherever you rest your head at night. For others, home is a specific place, and no mwaatter where life takes you in this great big world, you’re always drawn to the familiarity of ‘home.’

Bob Moore seems to fall into that latter category, where ‘home’ includes the blue oceans, green forests and majestic peaks of the Pacific Northwest. Sure, he’s braved the wilds of Minnesota, and he helped put Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam on the map, but he has always come back ‘home’. Even today, as the Chief Creative Officer for Publicis USA, his main office is not in the network’s New York location, but rather in Seattle, where his career is as bright as ever.

ihaveanidea had a golden opportunity to chat with Bob about his storied career, his role at Publicis, and his ongoing plans to help shepherd the agency in the right direction.

ihaveanidea: I heard that when you started in advertising you were doing practically every job and were essentially a walking ad agency.

Bob: I was just turning 21, just out of college, and had an internship at this little agency with thirteen other people. I earned a thousand dollars a month.

ihaveanidea: Hey, that’s a pretty good start!

Bob: Yes, twelve thousand a year! I was an English major at the height of the Reagan administration. My parents were scared to death that I was going to come home and live with them. Everyone was doing computers and business at the time, and I had an English Major.

I got into it and really enjoyed it. I mean, you’re an idiot when you turn 21. I was an idiot at pretty much everything, but I enjoyed doing it.

I particularly enjoyed the writing, we were doing radio and I loved it. My friend said that I should go to the school of visual concepts if I really wanted to write. We really didn’t have an advertising school back then. There was only one marketing course. So I took a course and came out with a stick man portfolio. It wasn’t art directed, it wasn’t fancy, but people liked the idea, and I got hired very quickly. I wouldn’t trade my year and a half of trying to do everything, and understanding my role.

ihaveanidea: You were one of the people who started Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam. What was that experience like? It seems to me it would be like some sort of adventure.

Bob: It was awesome. We were seven Americans, and we didn’t know what we were doing. I would go out to lunch and we’d be asking the waitress how to translate the washer/dryer instructions for us because we couldn’t wash our clothes. We had a big job immediately due, that turned out to be the Nike Opera campaign that we were struggling with, and it was very difficult at first because in Portland we had a good creative cocoon, separate from Madison Avenue, from big city advertising so we’d go off to do our thing always.

After four years, even though it had Wieden’s name on the door…  it felt like you’re leaving your own agency.

But here I was- the fifth writer, with only five teams. By the time I left four years later there were 115 people, Spanish, English, German, French. All of these people were misfits from their own advertising culture. They didn’t quite fit in. The melding of cultures kind of happened there. It was really scary at first, because all of the normal influences in our cocoon weren’t there, and I remember walking along the streets of Amsterdam really frustrated, and looking at bookstores and thinking “Where are my normal creative influences?”. And I kept hearing opera inside and wishing, I wish I could make an opera for Charles Barkley, and mess with that, and I finally opened up my ears and said wait a minute, there are different influences here and that’s GOOD, you know, I shouldn’t be playing to my old influences, I should be looking for new influences.

It was hard to leave; it was really really hard to leave in the end. After four years, you kind of felt, even though it had Wieden’s name on the door, that you were there from the beginning; it felt like you’re leaving your own agency. It was very difficult.

ihaveanidea: A lot of people are obsessed with starting their careers at a hot shop. Do you think it’s better to start your career in a big agency like Ogilvy, Leo or Publicis and ending your career in Crispin or Wieden or to do it backwards?

Bob: I’ve done it backwards. Actually, I’ve done both. Because I started in a small agency and then moved to a pretty good creative shop in Seattle, then I went to Wieden for ten years, four in Amsterdam, then went to Fallon, then saw an opportunity to build a shop in Seattle, so I kind moved around like a pendulum.

I think that if it takes you some time to get noticed by the hot shops, and I would include Publicis in that list, because, we may be large, but we’re not the agency that we were five years ago, then you need to work at a smaller agency or different agency.

The danger is that if you go into a place that’s too big, you might get swallowed up. You end up on a treadmill. You find that after two or three years you think “Holy crap, I haven’t produced a TV spot, or I haven’t produced any of my digital ideas.” In a place that’s too big, the opportunities may be there but there’s also a lot of competition.

My personal opinion is to go into a mid-size or small shop because there creative directors will never judge an idea based on the budget you have, I mean good creative directors, they’ll look at the quality of the idea. That’s the love of the playing field; it’s the quality of the idea.

ihaveanidea: Now you’re the Chief Creative Officer of Publicis USA. What does your job entail right now?

Bob: We have three main offices in the US, with New York being the biggest, then Seattle, and then Dallas. I am the Chief Creative Officer for Publicis North America and I also have a worldwide job as well, sitting on the Worldwide Creative Director Board. Since my very great friend Olivier Altmann is now the Worldwide Creative Director, I really wanted to support him a thousand percent. We used to divide up the worldwide responsibilities amongst the board members but now he gets to do most of it.

ihaveanidea: Some years ago, after David Droga left his Worldwide position at Publicis to start up Droga5, I remember hearing about some internal arguments from Publicis which said that the Worldwide Creative Director job is too difficult, that it doesn’t work or that it isn’t even a real job. What do you think now?

Bob: It’s not a fake job. I mean, there’s so much to be done, leading an agency. And I’ve always felt that the industry doesn’t move forward unless there’s a creative partner involved.

For example: Richard Pinder, is our Chief Operating Officer at Publicis Worldwide, and he’s trying to change the agency with the creative Board’s help — the issue is that without the day-to-day partnership from creatives, stuff just doesn’t happen, or isn’t visioned out properly, or the creatives don’t buy into it because they didn’t have a hand in it in the beginning. Olivier and I have been in Publicis for the same amount of years. Since coming here I’ve switched sides on this issue; If you’re not fully dedicated to something in this business it just won’t happen.

ihaveanidea: As an agency, what does Publicis stand for, what does it mean? I think an agency like Ogilvy has a well defined spirit, which is David Ogilvy’s culture. So If I had to explain to someone the difference between Publicis and Leo, or Publicis and J. Walter Thompson, what would be the explanation?

Bob: In one sentence, we believe in contagious ideas that change the conversation.

There are two parts to that. Change in conversation has been active in the marketplace and we must realize first that we can’t push media into society anymore. The most effective communications are conversations that happen back and forth between brands and individuals. For example, this 25 year old who we have twittering as Clark Griswald, is having an active conversation with hundreds of thousands of people, three or four times a day. There’s something that the participants gets out of that, which is a relationship with this fictional character who is not Chevy Chase. It’s this fictional character who makes them laugh and says funny stuff all of the time. It’s this symbiotic relationship in which both sides win.

The contagious idea part of it is two things: the pass-along of it. It’s like the “Did you see this?” But it’s also recognition that a contagious idea doesn’t have to be digital. Two examples: that Old Spice spot, “Now I’m on a horse”, my kids showed me that like sixty times. That’s hysterical, they sit around with their friends and see it, it’s getting a lot of hits and buzz, and it’s all in cameras and no special effects.
We did a spot for the Washington Lottery that won silver at Cannes last year and won huge pass-alongs, because it was saying that you should win the lottery so that you could help the world. So it’s not like, you know, take the money and run, it was like hey you could change the world if you wanted to. But it was nothing else; it was just a sixty second spot. That was a contagious idea because a lot of people were talking about it.

ihaveanidea: Publicis is perceived very differently in Europe than in North America. What do both sides share apart from the same logo?

Bob: Well, we share a lot of accounts; you know worldwide accounts and things of that nature. But I think it’s more united and similar now than it was five years ago.

The fact that Olivier and I know each other quite well and pick up the phone on a daily basis helps a lot, but the agency has been around for 90 years, which only really has had two leaders in 90 years, one of them being Maurice Levy, But it’s more established in France, there are a large number of establishments in France as compared to here but that’s also good, it makes us different.

ihaveanidea: When you guys started at Publicis, you said your goal was to fix the earth…what does that mean and did you achieve it?

Bob: It’s a work in progress and it’s a good question. David Droga and I are good friends, so this isn’t going to be any surprise for him, but when he was here he did some very, very good work for some very, very temporary clients, but it fractured the agency. There were the people working on that stuff and the other people that were working on the day-to-day stuff for very large important clients. And so it created a Haves versus the Have Nots. It fractured the agency. And then, when he left, there was a period when there wasn’t a worldwide creative director at all. And when there isn’t a creative mommy or daddy at the agency, the places lose vision, they lose momentum.

It’s fair to say that that happened here. We brought in Rob Feakins and he started to turn it around, not just for the cool little accounts, but for all the accounts. So if you look across the board at the Procter & Gamble and Citi accounts, all the work has steadily gotten better. When they got new business in like T.G.I. Friday’s they’ve done groundbreaking work.

The answer to that is that it’s not 100% fixed, but no agency is (laughs). It’s heading in the right direction though. I think part of the things about agencies is that they’re incredibly flawed, and they should be incredibly flawed, the clients can be all normal but it’s up to us to get the work out, and be great partners and all of that stuff, but try to manage around the chaos versus trying to manage the chaos.

You’d hate to have that ‘we only make TV spots’ label put around your neck. That’s eliminating ninety percent of the creative options you have.

ihaveanidea: If big agencies are like big ships, and the future is like a big wave that’s coming, do you think you guys have made all the changes necessary in the agency to face off the next two years?

Bob: No, certainly not everything. I think that any agency that would say “Yeah, we’ve got it completely figured out” would be a big lying bastard.

I think we’re doing a lot of things right. For example, we don’t hire anybody who doesn’t have substantial digital experience. A young kid coming in has to have at least half of their work in the digital sphere. You can make an ad? That’s great. But show me your other work because that’s the way forward. We’ve had that in place for a couple of years, and because of that we’re growing as a digitally savvy firm. Part of the issue that we have, is that there are many other companies within Publicis— there’s Modem, there’s Razorfish, and there’s several other digital partners, and so my main job is that the ‘ad agencies’ don’t become dinosaurs. Rob’s doing a great job with that in New York, and Sean in Dallas and myself in Seattle. You’d hate to have that ‘we only make TV spots’ label put around your neck. That’s eliminating ninety percent of the creative options you have.

ihaveanidea: What sparks your interest the most right now in our ever-changing industry?

Bob: I think that mobile is something that has been around for a while but it’s never been really fully explored creatively. There are lots of reasons for this. One is the low penetration of smartphones and WAP-enabled phones. The other is that the numbers of creatives who understand that medium are very few. There a lot of people who are very suspicious of the small screen. A lot of that is changing. I think mobile now is where digital was ten years ago, and everybody’s been saying for the last for years that “this is the year of mobile” just as much as they’ve been saying that the ‘30 second TV spot is dead’. As smartphone penetration starts to get up to say 15/20%, I think you’re going to start to see creatives shift towards that platform. We’re getting more clients who are saying “What is a mobile ad? Yeah, yeah, we don’t have a mobile-enabled website”, and some of these clients of ours are mobile companies (laughs). All the clients feel like they’re behind, and they’re right. They’re not as behind as they think, but it’s time for that platform to start being explored.

ihaveanidea: What would you advise someone, about the ‘ideal career path’? A lot of people go to portfolio school and then straight to work at an agency. What do you think is the ideal path for a creative? What, from your experience, is a good path? If anyone wants to end up with a job like yours, do you think there is a specific career path they had to take?

Bob: That’s an impossible question to answer. It all depends on the individual. When I was at Fallon I found there were very few women creatives there. I saw the potential in a young woman who was an account person who I thought was very witty, so I turned her into a writer, and now she’s a writer. Andy Berndt, who’s now at Google, was an account executive when I met him at Wieden, but pretty successful in his thinking as a creative, and eventually became creative director at Ogilvy. So it depends on the individual. There’s quite a few young account people who think “Wow, the glory — maybe not the money — but the glory and the fun is in on the creative side. I’m an idiot, being the bag carrier. I want to get off and make work”.

We’ve got quite a few of those in this office and in Seattle too. People who understand and have the ability to go and communicate with clients, but also have this amazing creative side. It’s really impossible to say, it’s really on the individual. But like I said, now you also need to be able to be fluent in digital.

In terms of the next generation of creativity…my nine year old programs my smartphone. She’s the one who downloads apps, and she shows me how to do stuff. And from my generation, if technology doesn’t work, it’s my fault, but for her generation if technology doesn’t work, it’s technology’s fault. It should be intuitive, it should be smart. And for her, she’s a creative individual; she’s going to grow up probably in the mobile world, because she’s drawn to it. I get home and she’s like “Hi Daddy, give me the phone.” (Laughs).

The playing surface is so different, and the ads are different. So, the creatives coming up these days have a far greater chance of changing the world. Ads like Lee Clow’s 1984, which we’re still talking about twenty five years later don’t come around much. In digital, there’s so many new opportunities.

Interview by:

Ignacio Oreamuno
El Presidente
ihaveanidea

Vice President, Creative Director
Bleublancrouge

Here’s a short excerpt of a recently overheard conversation between Dominique and another Montreal creative director we shall refer to as “Creative Director A” for the benefit of this short exercise:

Creative Director A: You’re the interactive guy.
Dominique: Well yes, but I do everything now.
Creative Director A: Oh…

It is kind of true that Dominique holds the interactive championship belt in Montreal, what with him being a regular on some of the industry’s most prestigious award show juries, and perhaps most notably for being the only person in the province to have been awarded two Gold Cyber Lions at the Cannes advertising festival. And also because in previous lives, at Diesel, Cossette and TAXI, he did hold the Interactive Creative Director position. But just as he was telling our good friend Creative Director A, his new role at Bleublancrouge is about more than “just interactive”.

I had a chance to catch up with Dominique to reflect on his ad-making journey so far, squeeze out a few golden nuggets from his brain and even get some advice on how to win awards in the Cyber categories.

ihaveanidea: This question is old and tired, but just like an old hooker it’s still very useful, and everybody always wants to know. So tell us, how did you start your journey into advertising?

Dominique: I left Concordia University in 1988 and started up freelancing as a graphic designer and illustrator. I then got hired at a small studio where we mostly worked on corporate stuff like annual reports etc. Around 1995 after doing a lot of graphic design, my boss asked me to jump into the web side of things to help on a pitch for the Montreal Museum of Fine Art who wanted to redo their website. The museum had a page but it was horrible. So we had to design a branded page for them. We won and that’s how my foray into interactive branding really began. I started to learn my craft there and went on to do more web stuff, up to this day.

I went through the many web phases. At the beginning it was mostly brochure type stuff where you had to take whatever was done for other media and put it on the web, until e-commerce sites started popping up.

The design shop I was at was taking on more and more digital projects and went on to merge with a place called “Intellia” to form a 100-person shop. Those were the first great days of the web. We won tons of big accounts, mostly in the e-commerce sector: Sears, CN, Star Alliance, and a few others.

if you look at the web and interactive in general, we tend to do great but pretty confusing experiences that are not very tight in terms of communications. It’s a lot of cool brand experiences that lack in efficiency a little bit.

Intellia then became Nurun and was becoming too technology focused for my liking. So I shifted to a place called Normal in 2000. That was during the first dot com boom. The office producing the content was in New York and was working on stuff like Vice magazine or building their own food brand. So the idea was to develop those brands on multiple platforms: stores, a TV channel, a website, etc. In Montreal we were developing all the digital components to make those brands come to life.

But it was 2000. And as you can guess, everything exploded and the company had to close. 60 people in New York and 80 people in Montreal all lost their job on that same day.

ihaveanidea: I know hindsight has this annoying tendency to be very 20/20, but did you consider following a more traditional advertising path when all looked doomed for the digital world?

Dominique: At the time I didn’t know anything about traditional advertising as I came from a purely graphic design background. I had tasted the future but I also understood that perhaps it was just too soon for all this. I wanted more of that even if it didn’t work out the first time. It’s okay; we’ll just try more.

While I was at Normal I met the people at Diesel (Now Sid Lee) by doing a small contract with them. So when Normal closed they called me and I ended up as Creative Director there. It was a weird period. They had to fire a lot of people for the first time that year, but we also won the Cirque du Soleil and the Tourism Montreal accounts. It was the first time accounts came to the agency through web projects and later became agency accounts.

But back to your question, I never considered going back. I really believed in it and I knew it would just become bigger and bigger. I was deeply involved from the very beginning.

ihaveanidea: This is all very funny since in your current role at bleublancrouge you’ve taken a much broader position, handling some traditional stuff too…

Dominique: The path I took after all those years brought me here. After Diesel I went to Cossette, then TAXI and now this. I started to complete the loop at TAXI as I was head of digital and design there. So I was slowly coming back to my roots and I really started to understand my role as a caretaker for brands. A brand can speak in different ways. When the receptionist picks up the phone, the brand speaks. When it answers comments on its Facebook page it speaks. And when it doesn’t answer, it speaks even louder. So even when it’s not doing anything, a brand lives. To do that I needed to be able to engineer all the touch points of a brand. Adding traditional advertising to my artillery was the last piece of the puzzle.

But I’ll admit that I am more interested in the new stuff. Not just because I like it, but because it’s taking more and more space in people’s lives. I’ve been watching my nephews grow and twelve years ago they were already using messenger and getting their content from the web. They weren’t watching TV. They were watching videos online or playing video games while chatting with their friends. These people are now young adults and they’re the people we’re talking to right now or about to talk to in a big way tomorrow. They have jobs, they have money, and they buy stuff. So it’s a totally different ball game.

a piece of craft can only be understood well if you place yourself in the time it was done. If you take the grid of evaluation of today on an old piece, you’ll get it wrong.

So it’s not about the believing or not anymore. It’s here. It’s a reality and we have to understand it. So by being able to do everything, I can choose which card I want to play. I can choose the people I work with and choose the best media for the job.

I have to play a game that has many players in it, not just me. And obviously it is sometimes hard to manage that, but it’s a very cool game nonetheless and I think there are lots of untapped opportunities. I feel like a kid whose playfield suddenly grew larger with so many new things he can do in it.

ihaveanidea: If you could pick one most valuable thing that you learned or that you could learn from the traditional guys, what would it be?

Dominique: I think the best part of being able to do everything is not that “yeah it’s fun to do TV”, and it can seem pretty easy compared to the sometimes daunting task of building websites – Not saying that doing great TV is easy, on the contrary. But what I really like is that the craft of making an ad and telling a story in 30 sec has been there for decades. Since Mad Men days. There’s something there to be learnt. The communication is very efficient. But if you look at the web and interactive in general, we tend to do great but pretty confusing experiences that are not very tight in terms of communications. It’s a lot of cool brand experiences that lack in efficiency a little bit. You’re never sure what the message is. So my plan is to learn from the people who’ve perfected this very efficient craft and bring that into the interactive stuff that we’ll be doing tomorrow. I want to replicate that efficiency in communications.

But I also believe that the future lies in integrated campaigns. And I mean really integrated ones that talk together and create an ecosystem for the brand. A lot of people confuse integrated and multiple media use. I was sitting on a jury recently, and some of the stuff that was entered into the integrated category was a TV commercial that looked exactly like the billboard and sounded like the radio spot. That sort of stuff won’t make the campaign grow bigger. The media is not talking and they’re not creating a movement. So on that front there is more to do. I really believe that when media is well played up and talks together, we can bring more results to the table.

ihaveanidea : It’s interesting how everything changes so fast in interactive and often a campaign that’s regarded as brilliant one year becomes completely outdated and “lame” two years later, whereas you don’t necessarily see that in traditional mediums. Great TV spots from 20 years ago are still great today. How would you explain that?

Dominique: I think a lot of it has to do with trends. We’re at the Google years and we want efficiency, speed and results. Tools that will help us get our stuff done. So our challenge today is not to do heavy experiences with high production value but very few results down the line.

Things move fast and you got to catch people as they go in this crazy mode. So I think we can do efficient communications in doing less heavy stuff and more things that can help them. We have to follow the way people live. So that’s one of the reasons you’ll have trouble awarding a piece that won two years ago today. Great ads often belong to their time and space.

You can argue that when it’s really really great it will pass the test of time, but you also have to understand that a piece of craft can only be understood well if you place yourself in the time it was done. If you take the grid of evaluation of today on an old piece, you’ll get it wrong. Dove Evolution is a good example of that. It was perfect for its time. Little budget, done in the first big YouTube year. Great in its time and space but do that tomorrow and it has no impact whatsoever. Same goes for Get the Glass. Do that today and people will be impressed with the production value but that’s it.

I wanted more of that even if it didn’t work out the first time. It’s okay; we’ll just try more.

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ihaveanidea: that’s another funny thing. I noticed that looking at a traditional piece, it’s easier to look beyond the high production value, whereas with the web we’re still impressed whenever a new technology is used.

Dominique: Yes, it’s sometimes easy to be impressed with the technology instead of the message. We’re not impressed by airwaves anymore. It’s pure story telling. But it’s true that sometimes technology is way too present and can take center stage. I think as we will work with it, we will demystify it more and treat it as a transparent support to what we have to do. Just like we treat high production TV equipment, and that’s why I am learning the craft of traditional stuff right now!

ihaveanidea: Let’s say five minutes from now your phone rings, and Martin Sorell is on the end of the line. He says: “Okay Dom, I have $30M for you, but we need to start an agency together”. What would that agency be like?

Dominique: As much as I love and I have friends at purely interactive places, I still believe that it’s not enough. Because again, if I look at my nephew it’s not true that he’s only looking at interactive stuff. He’s not living like that. He’ll take his car, and along the highway he will still see billboards. So I believe in finding new ways, because every day there’ll be new means of communications but I think we should be agnostic of media. We should try to get the best solution to fulfill the objective. If it’s only TV, and that’s what’ll make it work, I’ll do it.

I am a creative guy and I like great creativity but after so many years I am tired of creativity for creativity’s sake. Sometimes there is just no point to that. I want the work to be the best in the world, for sure. But I want my stuff to work. I am tired of finishing a campaign jumping to another project without caring very much. I really really focus on making things work.

But it was 2000. And as you can guess, everything exploded and the company had to close. 60 people in New York and 80 people in Montreal all lost their job on that same day.

And it’s funny that we even have to stress that today. My job is to market my clients’ products. Yeah it’s cool to win awards and obviously I want to win them because it’s fun to go on stage. But I am supposed to deliver something that works and that makes a change somehow somewhere. Be it a behavioral change or simply selling something. I am supposed to work around a problem and deliver a solution and I am supposed to be creative at it. As soon as you get what your clients’ issues are, the solution starts there. But if you don’t give a shit about what the client needs or why we’re doing that, you’ll do work for awards only. And to an extent, I’m fine with it, whatever. But I don’t think it’s enough. I want to win those awards with things that work for the client when you deliver.

It’s a bit like being a general on the battlefield. You have to plan your battles but if you want to win the war, but you also have to go on the field and fight. Right now, we do our thing and once we’re finished we move on to other stuff instead of being pre-occupied by what can we do to make it work better. When our job is over it’s in fact starting. And that’s a shift in mentality. We need to be conscious that when you deliver your campaign, everything starts.

The agency will be willing to explore new territories. The mix of communications, of media and means has to be each time tailored to the client’s needs. And maybe it requires more time, more money and more thinking but that’s the only way that we can make it work. So I would build an agency around those principles. And I really believe that in doing so we will win awards and work with the cool clients.

[Show as slideshow]

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ihaveanidea: Last time we met you had told me about this easy way to win awards that you had discovered. Would you mind sharing it with our readers and make it a bit harder for everybody?

Dominique: The easiest way for somebody wants to win gold at Cannes or One Show or at any other international level is to do a banner. Do a kickass idea on a banner that will work. By sitting on many interactive juries, I noticed the stuff that gets sent is so bad that if you do anything remotely cool, it’s your easiest ticket to get on stage. We look at 60-70 entries of banners and it’s usually awful. So at the end of the day, out of hundred of entries that get sent to Cannes, there are maybe 2-3 banners that are worthwhile.

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Interview by:

Rafik Belmesk
Operations, AKOS
ihaveanidea

Executive Creative Director
Google Creative Lab

How do you go from a career of left brain number crunching  to being a right brain heavyweight at Google Creative Lab? You could try doing things the Robert Wong way, but then that would require you to  be born Chinese, live in the Netherlands and become an accountant in Canada first.

While practicing accounting in Toronto, Robert woke up one day, flew to New York, and became a graphic designer instead. Since then, he has had the privilege of working on some of the world’s most loved brands — Apple, Harley-Davidson, Jack Daniel’s, Timberland, ESPN, MTV, NPR and other acronyms.

Before heading up Google Creative Lab, Robert was Executive Creative Director of Arnold Worldwide. Before that, he was Vice President of Creative at Starbucks. His work has won every industry award and has been showcased at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. But he’s most proud of his loving wife and his two perfect daughters.

Robert is serving as one of the esteemed “Monster Judges” of the Tomorrow Awards. As the entry deadline quickly approaches, we caught up with Robert to discuss the amazing path his career has taken.

Oh, if you’re a creative in 2010 and you don’t know what Google Creative Labs is, we suggest you look them up. But don’t use Bing.

ihaveanidea: Not many people thought of Google as an ad making place until that “Search On” Super Bowl spot. Why don’t you start by telling us about how you guys came up with that?

Robert: The team that worked on Search On was part of our Five program.  It’s something that we created where we get five Creatives from the best schools we can find and invite them to hang out with us for a year. It’s kind of like an internship after school; they get paid, and get all the free food they want from our cafeteria before they move on into the industry proper.  They get digitally savvy and get to see all the tools and possibilities that technology brings to the industry.  And then the next five will come in, and another bunch after them, etc.

As a Creative, not so much for the designers, that wants to make it into the advertising industry, Google is not a natural choice. They think “Ok, I’m not going to do a T.V. spot in the year that I’m going to be here.” But regardless, they joined anyway, and probably just thought, “Well, I’ll hold off until I leave Google.”

The first cut of Parisian Love was done last November and turned it into a YouTube Video, but since everyone loved it so much we decided to make it into a Super Bowl Spot. So basically, these guys were 7 to 8 months out of school and got a Super Bowl spot on their reel.  Imagine! It was pretty spectacular for them.

ihaveanidea: If I were to explain what you guys really do at the Lab to a Creative Director or Art Director at an agency, what would I say?

Robert: The simplest way to explain it is – Okay, you’ve just won the Google Account. What do you do now?
The “What do you do?” question is an interesting one, because we don’t have a pipeline of how much we’re going to spend.  Most people are used to filling boxes. Here nobody knows what those boxes are, and we don’t know what to fill them with (laughs). You have to tinker around, paint the boxes, and you have to paint the platform. We don’t really know what we’re doing to be honest with you, we’re just making it up as we go along!  But it’s for Google, so you know that you have their Mojo and their engineers with infinite little bits of technology behind you.

ihaveanidea: So what does it take to work here then? What do you look for when hiring people?

Robert: The first priority would be for the people to “Googley” by nature.  One of the things I strongly believe is that everything you make is a reflection of who you are. Or at least your best work is.  So, it’s always really important to align a person with the brand. They have to be scary smart for everyone else here.  They need to have a certain amount of humbleness, a “don’t take yourself too seriously” attitude, and be really deeply interested in things and possibilities. Interested in doing big things.  They need to believe that they can make a big impact on the world and in history.  That sort of crazy ambition.  That’s what the Google brand respects. So that’s number one.

After that, every creative director will ask for the same stuff: be talented, be able to work in teams, be a nice guy I wouldn’t mind having beers with etc. That kind of stuff.

ihaveanidea: So when Google launches something like Buzz for example. What’s your part in that?

Robert: We didn’t have anything to do with it. There’re a lot of things we don’t touch because Google does so much stuff and we’re a very small team.  We try to find the intersection; we usually work on products that have already launched, products that are already successful. The ones you need to add a little thing to.

ihaveanidea: Is there a technology in particular that scares you? Something that you don’t quite understand or that has you worried…

Robert: You know what, I don’t understand most of it, but I’m not scared by any of it. I think that as human beings, we go towards improving ourselves, and I think if you look back historically we have.  I think people are probably better parents now than they were a hundred thousand years ago.  So of course we’re going to make mistakes and there’ll be a million disasters, but in general, unknown things lead to progress and that’s good.  So not scared, but precautious.

Especially in this industry, most of us have ADD, we get distracted by lots of shiny things, there are so many shiny things out now, that you may be overwhelmed by too much possibility.

It’s easy when you go into a room and you only have one toy to play with, four hours and nothing else to do. But if you walk into the same room and you only have one hour with ten different kinds of toys to play with, you’re pretty much going to be all over the place.  I think that the precaution and the trick is, how do you, define the discipline and give yourself enough time to play with each toy.  Or give the people that you manage enough time to play with a toy. Not just a Google toy, it could be any toy.

ihaveanidea: What’s your five year vision for the ad world? It’s going to be wrong, for sure, but what do you think is the one big drastic change that will happen? Take us for a ride in the Robert Wong time machine…

Robert: Well, by definition your question puts Advertising in a fine box.  And my fundamental belief is that, and I always try to like blow up boxes, there will be no box around advertising, or design, or marketing, or products, or services, or technology or platforms.  Somehow, I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s a deep integration across all that stuff.

ihaveanidea: Communications?

Robert: I think there’s much more to it than communications.  Some of the best stuff that is released is not communication, but more part of a product or a company’s service.  By definition communication implies, at its best, a two way street. But for the most part it’s one way. So I think it’ll go beyond communication, it’s how a company is and how a customer or whatever, interacts with it.

ihaveanidea: A traditional team at an agency is an Art Director and a Copywriter. But more and more people are starting to tinker with that and mix people from different backgrounds. How do you guys do it?

Robert: Right now I have a team that’s a filmmaker and a designer and another team consisting of a programmer, and a writer.  Sometimes we have teams of two people, sometimes its one person alone and other times it’s three people.  There’s no set rule, we’re always tinkering with it.  We’re just letting people’s natural gravitational forces pull each other.

ihaveanidea:  You’re like me in that you’re from all over the place.  You’re an Asian from Canada who grew up in Holland is now living in the US. How did each region change and influence you?  If you could take one thing from each place…

Robert: Before I get to the depths of it, the main thing is that for me there was nothing black and white.  As simple an example as when someone pinches you and you say “Ouch” in North America, in Holland you say “Ow”, in Spain you say “Ai” and in Chinese you go “Aya”.  Even something that should be a visceral reaction of pain you don’t think about is different in every culture. So there’s no right answer. That’s the most important thing: There’s no right answer.

One of the things that I remember is that in English Class people obsess about grammar and what’s correct and what’s not. But that’s not the point of communications. The most important thing is what the other person gets from you. Some of the best poetry is grammatically incorrect.  Because sometimes, it puts the point across better when it’s incorrect, so you get the sense of it. It’s all about memories. I have a diary that I wrote in Dutch that I can’t read, but I remember conversations I had with people while I was in Holland that have somehow been translated to English in my mind.  So you realize that there’s stuff underneath the simple language barriers that is deeper and closer to your reptilian brain. I think that thought me to communicate on another level.

As far as Chinese culture is concerned, I think that what I learned by moving to those places was also related to a social economic chain. I was very poor in Hong Kong, so I learnt that you have to work really hard and not take anything for granted.  In Holland I lived in a very small town. They had a very open and friendly culture over there. In North America, I learned a lot through Mass Media. That’s where I watched T.V. for the first time, familiarized myself with the US culture etc. So I don’t know how much of my personality is shaped from Eastern Philosophy and how much is from the rest, but my mom would right now say that I’m way too Western, and totally not Chinese at all (laughs). But it’s definitely a mix, that’s why we shape our approach on mixing everyone, their backgrounds and their different skill sets. We believe that diversity is the “best strategy” and “Diversity will win”.

ihaveanidea: You have taken an interesting turn in your career by leaving the agency world to take on a creative position on the client’s side. First with Starbucks and now with Google. A senior or intermediate creative may look negatively on such an opportunity. Did you think it was a bad experience?

Robert: No! I recommend everyone to do it.  Before Starbucks, I was made Chief Creative Officer and I was overseeing about twelve hundred creatives from around the world.  So I felt like I had done as much on the consultant side, and I really wanted to know what it was like on the other side. What it’s like to be the client. And I think it’s an important thing for everyone to learn because only on the client side do you feel that feeling of accountability and responsibility for the performance of you work.  Maybe I am overstating it, but you really feel it.

I also got to do many agency reviews, so you get to see a lot of different creative disciplines and understand how they work. Design firms, Architects, all that sort of stuff. It’s hard to get that at a traditional place. And of course you get to know first hand what keeps the marketing group and the CEO up at night. You understand the brand from that perspective of intimacy.  But we also work with a bunch of agencies so I am able to sort of work with some of the world’s best Creatives and you end up scaling the impact even more.

ihaveanidea: So how do you keep plugged to the ad industry proper?

Robert: I don’t do it that much, but like everyone else you know, I have my Google Reader and the different sources pouring in.  There’s just too much stimulation, so I live bubbled up through other people.  There are some great people in our team that are always showing me the shiniest stuff.  I am quite fortunate on that front and I let them do the filtering for me a lot (laughs)

ihaveanidea: You’re part of the inaugural Monster Jury for the Tomorrow Awards. Do you think there’s going to be a region of the world that surprises people when it comes to looking forward to the future?  Do you think there’s somebody that’s clearly ahead of the pack in terms of people are looking ahead?

Robert: That’s a good question.  I don’t know, I think on the one hand, a mature market like North America, is ahead because the budgets maybe apply to it.  But on the other hand, you might have emerging markets like Asia, where the budgets may not be as big, but there’s potentially more experimentation because the stakes are lower, so shinny things can come out of there. I think this could go either way.

ihaveanidea: Okay, last question, have you ever flown in Sergei’s private plane?

Robert: No, I have not.(laughs)

Although, he did visit us yesterday.  Coming in to check out the Google Creative Lab.

ihaveanidea: Do people get nervous?

Robert: Not at all, everyone’s excited.  They just want to do cool shit.

Interview by:

Ignacio Oreamuno
El Presidente
ihaveanidea

Worldwide Chief Creative Officer
Young & Rubicam

Where do you hope to be in your professional career ten years from now? Five years? A year? Most of us don’t even have the slightest idea about what we’ll have for lunch tomorrow. Not that Tony Granger has his objectives mapped out to that level of detail, but the Worldwide Chief Creative Officer of Young & Rubicam is a man who has not only found success, but also planned for it.

This, of course, after plans to become South Africa’s biggest rock star didn’t quite materialize.

As Tony prepares to serve as a Monster Judge in the inaugural Tomorrow Awards, ihaveanidea had an opportunity  to sit down and chat with this creative director renowned for transforming agency cultures about his rise to the top, and how exactly he runs things now that he’s up there.

ihaveanidea: There’s a lot that I want to talk to you about, but let’s get the most common question out of the way. What on earth got you into advertising, and what got you into an advertising agency?

Tony: Well I could read music before I could read. My mom, who was prima ballerina at the Conservatory of Madrid, is also an artist and a musician. She taught me so much about art and music that it became part of my DNA.

I was always involved in the music scene at school. Playing my Gibson in garage bands around Johannesburg. The dream, of course, was to become a “Rock God”. But something else caught my eye…advertising. I thought, Maybe there’s something in this advertising thing…

I joined a studio supply retailer called Art Book Center. Back then, every agency in Johannesburg ordered their studio supplies from us. I was the guy who would take orders from creatives for letraset, magic markers and layout pads, all the tools of our trade before Macs. I got to know a few art directors who suggested I “put my book together,” which I learned meant taking ads you hated and redoing them. My education was hands on, learning directly from people who were in the business.

An agency called Kenyon Eckhardt offered me a job, and I thought, “wow, how easy.” I was supposed to start on a Monday, and on the Sunday night before, I received a phone call explaining that things had changed and they couldn’t give me the job after all because they needed someone more experienced. So I had the honor of being fired from my first job even before starting. This was the beginning of my thick skin that is so necessary in this business.

From there, I was hired at Grey as an assistant AD for a retail account called OK Bazaars. My job was to trace products onto a page with prices so the studio could shoot the photographs and put them in the places I’d designated. Real sexy work it wasn’t, it was more like an apprentice position. I started learning from the ground up, making coffee for people and learning about the craft of an art director. I became fascinated by type and how it has different personalities. I was in awe of people like Helmut Krone, and I would plaster my walls with his work.

Fast forward about three years into my career, and it dawned on me that I wasn’t doing very well from a creative pedigree standpoint. As an art director, I was earning okay money, but my work… well, I wasn’t proud of my work. I decided to take a step backward financially, so I resigned and joined a boutique called Geffen Simkins Marrington. I remember walking into Mark Simkins office and being amazed by all his awards lying around the office. I thought, Here’s a man I can learn from. I joined as assistant AD and stayed for four years.

I had decent campaigns in my book that had won a few things. It got me into Hunt Lascaris. Well, I’m not sure if it was the work or my enthusiasm that got me in. It was probably the latter. But I stayed at Hunts for thirteen years. John taught me about the business. He was very important to me and continues to be an inspiration. Hunts was and still is a fantastic agency.

We were working with our BMW client in New York City, and I would fly over for shoots and meetings. I fell in love with New York, and I convinced my wife, Claire, to leave our very comfortable life in South Africa. We sold everything and moved our one and four year-old children to start life again in the Big Apple. Brave woman, Claire was, she moved here without even visiting! Changing our home over continents was a whole adventure and story in itself.

And to finish up, stints at Bozell NY; Saatchi London and New York; and finally landed here at Young & Rubicam, nine years after my arrival.

ihaveanidea: And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, the key to success is to start by having a ballerina for a mom!

You’ve often been called an agent of change. What does that mean to you? Explain what it is like to be a change agent.

Tony: Well, first off I’m very grateful to people who join me and take a chance on a turnaround, even at its infancy when the agency is seemingly unsexy. It’s not easy, but you get the chance to do something big and to make a real impact. The spirit and tenacity of these people is inspirational. It’s a team effort.

The first step for me is to define the mission and the direction of the organization. There are some incredible things in Young & Rubicam’s DNA that makes it unique.

The most difficult thing about creating a revolution though, is getting it started. Once it gains momentum, it’s unstoppable. It’s been almost two years in Young & Rubicam’s reinvention, and we’re starting to see results. Still a long way to go, though.

Some of my very favorite people are those who I’ve inherited in agencies. It’s not about just coming in and sweeping clean.

“The good thing about the cynics is that they can be converted, but if not, get rid of them because they can be a cancer.”

I find there are three groups of people I come across. The smallest group tends to be younger and brings excitement and a nothing-to-lose attitude. The largest group of people are in fear. They say “am I going to be good enough? How will this affect me?” And then there’s the most dangerous group — the cynics. They are usually the hardest to find. They think “oh, I’ve seen this all before, I’ll just put my head down and ignore it, this too will pass…”

The job of a change agent is simple: you take the first group’s enthusiasm and make it infectious; you hug the second group and help them understand it is for their benefit to evolve; and the third group? Well, the good thing about the cynics is that they can be converted, but if not, get rid of them because they can be a cancer.

It’s a little like changing the engines on a 747 while flying at 30,000 feet at 500 miles an hour. One has to be careful.

ihaveanidea: This whole interactive thing that all the kids are talking about these days. How much are you on top of it? When you joined Young & Rubicam you talked a lot about changing the agency. However, to change thousands of people that were used to making TV and print ads to highly complex social media campaigns must be a bitch behind the scenes.

Tony: While I was searching Young & Rubicam’s DNA, I found a line that Ray Rubicam wrote in 1924. ”Resist the Usual,” he urged. Be “Anti-Usualists,” he cried. Man, I thought, if there ever was a time for our agency and our clients to resist the usual, it’s now. Our world is changing around us so quickly that it demands that we reinvent ourselves constantly. Our audience’s media interaction is changing daily as Google and the like throw wonderful digital creations at us.

“We don’t hire anybody who isn’t digital. Anyone who doesn’t understand digital just won’t be in the business in a few years.”

So, the first thing we did when I joined Hamish at Young & Rubicam was dismantle the digital department in our New York shop (which was on a different floor to the rest of the agency). Digital can’t be a department; it’s at the heart of everything we do. We’re driving this philosophy across all our offices.

We don’t hire anybody who isn’t digital. Anyone who doesn’t understand digital just won’t be in the business in a few years. It’s not only a Young & Rubicam need, it’s an individual career need. Simple really.

Our business is about defining the DNA of an idea and then creating content that connects that idea to a particular audience. We have so many ways to do that now. It’s really exciting. This has to be the most exciting time in our business since that box called TV was invented.

ihaveanidea: What would you say is the core difference between Saatchi & Saatchi and Young & Rubicam?

Tony: They’re both iconic brands and both have a magic that is very different but very powerful.

Saatchi is a network with a creative mystique. Its brand is very focused connecting emotionally to consumers through Lovemarks. Its office in Charlotte Street, London is the soul of the network and New York is the heart.

In the 80’s and 90s, Young & Rubicam was a magnet for the best creative minds in the business. Recently, it had become known as a very intelligent agency with very smart planning and account people. And that helped it grow.

But to make this business successful in the future, there needs to be a balance of insightful analysis from our planners and magical thinking from our creatives. It needs the yin and yang. And to that end, over the past eighteen months, we’ve been dialing up our creative firepower enormously around the world, attracting some really brilliant creative people.

ihaveanidea: I remember you once talking about the way you work with objectives, how you wrote them out and verified if you reached them. Please tell me more about it, or if you’ve developed any new ones for managing your goals.

Tony: I’m very particular when it comes to objectives. I have one-year goals, three-year goals, five-year goals and ten-year goals. I’m constantly reviewing them and upgrading them. Hit one target, cross it off, make another. I’m very focused on that. I have personal goals and goals for the agency, and I methodically put into place people who will help me reach those goals.

I hold other people accountable for achieving objectives as well. I give them specific targets and follow up to help make sure they’ve come through. You’ll always know where you stand with me.

ihaveanidea: Okay, big thinking time. One day in Fantasy-Future-Land, Sir Martin Sorrell wakes up and decides to shut down Young & Rubicam so he can sail the seas in his yacht, and he gives you a million bucks. You’re now in Manhattan, Monday morning with a coffee, a notebook and a Sharpie. Your goal, start a new agency from scratch. What would this agency be like?

Tony: (laughs) Well, I’m not sure a million bucks would be enough. But it would probably be an agency that would engage with the best screenwriters, comedy writers and musicians on the planet, to create content that would have the DNA of a brand idea at its very core. We would share royalties.

ihaveanidea: What creative stuff — and I don’t mean kinky stuff — keeps you up at night?

Tony: Talent, it is the key to everything.

“A great CD will always try to make the work better. They have the ability to make their creative people believe that they can be great and that they can create better work than what they’re seeing…”

ihaveanidea: What’s the difference between a good creative director and a great creative director?

Tony: The step from being an art director or copywriter to a CD is an enormous one. It’s huge because it’s a completely different job. Being an art director is all about you. It’s a very inward focus between the art director and writer: It’s you two against the world. A lot of people stumble in the process of becoming a CD because being a CD is all about everyone else.

A great CD has an ability to find and nurture great talent. She or he understands about managing the very fragile creative egos, and understands that all creative people are paranoid about their talent. When we create, we are showing something that is very personal. The way a CD handles that is very important. I’ve known CDs to completely destroy the confidence of creative people in just a word or the way they approach a conversation.

A great CD will always try to make the work better. They have the ability to make their creative people believe that they can be great and that they can create better work than what they’re seeing, in a way that inspires. They have the ability to build loyalty in their staff.

But that is all futile if they don’t build the trust of their clients. Without that it is going to be difficult to get anything done.

Last but not least, they need to have the ability rally the entire team — planners, suits and creatives. Get them all pulling in the same direction. Define great and focus everyone on it.

ihaveanidea: You’re a Tomorrow Awards Monster Judge, and you’re no stranger to industry accolades, whether receiving them or bestowing them. How would you describe the award shows of the world.

Tony: Well, I’ll start by saying that a lot of people in our industry think that award shows don’t matter. I think they do matter. A lot of work our industry creates is mediocre, mundane and pragmatic. Shows highlight what is possible and inspire our industry to leap forward. They also attract new talent into our industry.

Award shows need to evolve, though, because our business is evolving. It’s now more about content creation with digital at its heart. Many shows still evaluate digital agencies and traditional agencies. It just doesn’t reflect where our business is going.

ihaveanidea: Explain to a civilian what it is like to be in the shoes of the Global Chief Creative Officer of Young & Rubicam.

Tony: It’s no different from being a Chief Creative Officer of an agency, except that instead of one agency to motivate and inspire, I have 185.

ihaveanidea: (laughs) With a slightly larger bank account to show for it! As you climbed to the top, from Bozell to Saatchi to Young & Rubicam, how did your view of salary in your advertising career change?

Tony: I’ve always believed that if you focused on the work and becoming really good at what you do, money would follow. It is career suicide to follow a bigger paycheck instead of following a creative or experience growth opportunity.

But it’s something you can’t ignore and hope it will sort itself out. Creatives seem to always feel uncomfortable talking about money for some reason.

Always negotiate hard when you have leverage.

ihaveanidea: Final question. If you and the other Worldwide Creative Directors from other agencies were shut up in a shady bar with a bottle to scotch, what single common agency problem do you think would rise to the table for discussion?

Tony: Jet lag.

TONY’S RECENT Y&R WORLDWIDE PICKS

Interview by:

Ignacio Oreamuno
El Presidente
ihaveanidea

Partner/Co-Executive Creative Director
Crispin Porter + Bogusky

When you enter the ad industry, something becomes very clear rather quickly : everybody in the world wants to work at Crispin, even if they don’t know it yet. Be it for the wacky Burger King campaigns, Alex Bogusky’s personal guitar lessons, or the clean air you’ll breathe in the Colorado mountains. Or simply because they’re the hottest kids in town, and that more often than not the work they come out with gets noticed within and outside the ad world.

If ever you register as one of the lucky few who land such a gig, there’s a good chance you’ll be calling Andrew Keller your boss. Andrew has been there since before the glowing compliments in my earlier paragraph were printable and has been one of the main creative forces behind the work that took the shop to such heights. Which kind of puts the whole “try to get into the hottest shop around” Vs ” joining a relative outsider and making them the hottest shop around” debate into perspective.

Here’s what Andrew had to tell us.

ihaveanidea: So how did you stumble into advertising?  Why didn’t you become a doctor or something?

Andrew: I was actually supposed to be a doctor (Laughs) . Goes back a long way. The first time I thought it would be for me was when I was in third grade. It was career day and someone’s Dad came in and spoke about advertising. He talked about doing ads for Mello Yello and Waffle-O cereals.

It was a long time ago. Mello Yello was just launching back then. They showed us the commercial and there was a racecar driver and after he won the race he chugged a Mello Yello. The whole thing was that Mello Yello was less carbonated a drink, so you could chug it unlike most soft drinks. I just thought it was so cool, the strategy behind how they were getting people to think, what was important about the creative execution and how they went about achieving that. That was the first time I was exposed to advertising and it stuck with me ever since. It seemed like something I might be interested in doing.

It’s interesting, the last time I saw advertising for Mello Yello the line was  “Mello Yello is not so mellow’’.  Which I often use as an example for the places we get ourselves into in advertising.  Is it better to just cerate a new name or do an ad campaign that completely disclaims the name of the product?

ihaveanidea:  So how did you end up at Crispn then? Did Chuck hire in the 6th grade?

Andrew: (Laughs) Advertising kept showing up again and again but I still thought I was going to become a doctor. I was an English major and was pre-Med in college.  I didn’t do great on the MCAP and I realized I didn’t really want to be a doctor. Or that I didn’t want to take tests rather. And I Didn’t think I really wanted to teach English either, so I played in bands for a few years and through the band I found out about the Portfolio Centre, which was in my home town of Atlanta.

So I thought “well you’ve always thought about this advertising thing, so maybe I should do that”.

So I went there. And this friend of mine had already graduated and he really wanted to get into Crispin, but they weren’t hiring then. So, got offered a job at the Martin Agency and took it.

Then the next day Alex called him and said to come down and when he told him he’d just taken a job at the Martin agency, Alex asked if he knew anyone else.

So my friend recommended me and I went down there, interviewed and did some freelance work, but I didn’t get the job. So I went down to Portland Oregon and worked there for two years. And when that felt like it wasn’t going where I wanted , the guy I was working with at the time said ‘’ You know the guys at Crispin, let’s go interview down there’’. So, we went down and interviewed with them and then I started there in ’98.

ihaveanidea:  It was easy back in those days, eh?  “Why don’t we just go down and interview?“

Andrew: Exactly ( laughs). It was 70 people back then, maybe less. They were doing great work. Florida Truth had just begun and it was a great time to start there.

ihaveanidea: Everyone is always saying to be a good Creative you have to have done something different before hand. For instance some people are shark catchers or prison guards, personally I think that’s BS but as much as your personal experiences are going to affect the way you write don’t you think that’s completely at odds with what ad schools are trying to achieve?

Andrew: Well, I don’t think I would study advertising in college, personally. In general I believe in a liberal arts background.  But everything is different for different people. Someone may not get much out of a liberal arts education.  Maybe some people know exactly what they want to do and they do it.  As far as ad schools go, you’re learning skills and a trade. I didn’t know how to work the computer, I didn’t know the rules of design.  I didn’t necessarily know how to concept, so it’s 2 years of immersion into the skills that I would need.  So I think studying advertising in college may be at odds with the skills you need in advertising but ad schools in general are short immersion programs to garner the skills you need to work at an ad agency on a basic level.

In general what I’m interested in are experiences that have exposed you to the malleability of culture. If you’ve been a prison guard, it’s an interesting  job but it doesn’t suggest to me you’d be great in advertising but it may suggest you’re an adventurous person or that you’re interested in the security of the free world. Personally, I’d be more interested in people who’ve had to sell things or sell themselves to achieve at a high level or have lived in other countries and can look at America and talk about the cultural things happening in American, and how they are not just phases and not take culture for granted.

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ihaveanidea: Do you think old-fashioned ad campaigns i.e. TV and print only can still solve clients problems and turn heads?

Andrew: I do, but clients still need to include a cocktail that includes interactive, they’ve got to be more progressive in terms of media and the way they express ideas. But I wouldn’t say the old system is broken just yet.  I mean TV if you have enough money has huge potential to get the word out and get social media going and become a catalyst for debate and discussion. I’m not against it, but I’d make sure my decision would be purposeful. I wouldn’t begin a conversation saying “okay, we’ve got TV, and print, now what are we gonna do?”

I would definitely be looking for ways to create a digital or interactive connection to any campaign  that you’re doing . It’s a complete missed opportunity if you’re not doing that.

ihaveanidea: Do you think some companies or brands actually don’t have a place online? Or is it a case of everybody having a place, and for them to find it?

Andrew: You have to do it case by case obviously, but no, I think everyone has to find relevance online. Every industry is experiencing some sort of paradigm shift and it all connects to the interactive and digital world. If it hasn’t impacted your world yet, it will. And if you’re not getting ahead of it you’ll be behind it. You will pay a price. Whether it’s about advertising or just about business, you’ve got to be engaging in this new world and social media or the internet. I just don’t think anything can remain untouched by it.

ihaveanidea: So, do you guys miss Miami at all?

Andrew: (Laughs) Well we still have a pretty big agency there so we still talk to everyone there frequently and a lot of people still go back and forth quite a bit. We also have Polycom so we interact with the people in Miami a lot. It’s the people there that I would miss most. I don’t necessarily miss it as a place, although I do love Miami. It was perfect for my stage in my life. I didn’t have kids then and now I have two sets of twin boys, a big family and we love our life here. But there’s nothing wrong with grilling a turkey outside in 72 degree weather for Thanksgiving.

ihaveanidea:  How has Boulder changed your lifestyle, outside of advertising? Everybody knows you moved there because Alex likes mountain biking, but what about for everybody else who isn’t necessarily into that sort of stuff?

Andrew: I would say my age has had a greater impact on my lifestyle than where I live. In terms of having kids, and in terms of having somewhat of a midlife crisis. But skiing is something new. I grew up in Atlanta and there wasn’t much skiing there.  That’s been a huge lifestyle change. All my kids ski and it’s been fun a lot of fun embracing that. Boulder is a really healthy place; in terms of eating right, in terms of being influenced by the environment. It’s a fun place to live and be influenced by all that.

ihaveanidea: I had a friend who described it as ‘’going to a bar and 60 % of the people there are co-workers”

Andrew: (Laughs) Yeah, it’s a small place. 90-100,000 people live in Boulder. But it was voted the smartest city in the US. It’s a really interesting place. 30,000 people go to the school but we’ve got a Tesla dealership on Main St. It’s a really eclectic mix. I can drive 30 min and ski or hike in my back yard. And then there’s NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that does all the satellite and hurricane information is just down the street. There’s just not many places like Boulder.

ihaveanidea: My next question is about your friend Evan Fry who just ran away and started Victors & Spoils, an agency based off a crowdsourcing model. How much can those types of places really accomplish? Could they be trusted with the whole brand campaign as opposed to small projects here and there?

Andrew: Well it remains to be seen.  But there are a lot of barriers to it that have a lot to do with the client. How transparent are they comfortable being?  Clients are very secretive about their strategy and product launches and proprietary information.  So there’s that challenge. It’s going to be right for certain clients that’re willing to open up their process, be transparent about what they’re doing, and engage everyone in the world to throw in ideas on their projects. I think that’s why it will start with smaller less sensitive projects.

In terms of the talent, I think a lot of people are out of jobs so there’s definitely a lot of talent out there that can be utilized. But in general it’s not much different from a freelance concept. You can hire as many people as you want, but you’ll still need someone, a CD, to oversee that project and the quality will come down to that person.  It’s really hard to say, it can go lots of ways. Like when planning started, a lot of the planners become famous because they came up with a brilliant strategy and then everyone thought “we should get some planning!”

Planning isn’t good or bad, or successful or unsuccessful. The same goes for crowdsourcing. It’s a nice way of tapping into talent that’s not being utilized right now, but it’s all going to depend on the clients and the people managing these projects for how much future there is in it.

ihaveanidea: That actually sounds like somewhat of a threat to Creatives? Wouldn’t agencies look at it and just think “hey, that’ll be cheaper…”

Andrew: You have to look at it from different perspectives. Why do some people freelance and why do some people work at agencies?  A lot of it has to do with the projects you get to work on. I think if you’re an exceptional talent, agencies will be looking to retain exceptional talent.

So in some ways it could be seen as a threat, but it could also be the thing that’ll make you feel confident in your abilities or frees up go to live in Hawaii and just jump on a few Crowd Sourcing projects whenever you want. I think it remains to be seen. The pace of advertising, the reality of confidentiality and the working knowledge that creatives need on a brand to be able to make the right decisions to move forward will require agencies to retain exceptional talent. We don’t use much freelance; I don’t think it’s the greatest system to be honest. And Crowdsourcing is another version of that. I tend to look at the more positive side of things, so I wouldn’t think about how it threatens me as a creative but rather how it could free me up and allow me to work on more projects.

ihaveanidea: You mentioned you have to two sets of twin boys. I’m guessing they don’t care about advertising, but would you like them to?

Andrew: It’s funny, when my kids were younger, they would watch TV and when a commercial comes on, and they think the show is over. So I always thought there was a funny message in there (Laughs)

Right now they just love whatever their dad does. They think that I work at Burger King. They think that I work at Gap. They like to play Dominos; they have a whole kitchen set up where they take orders and do deliveries. So they don’t really understand the difference between advertising and working for the company, and in some ways it’s a pretty good way to think of it. But right now, they like the fact that I work on Guitar Hero because it means they get DJ Hero for Christmas.

I’m not sure if any of them will go into advertising. One of my sons wants to be an artist and I think he thinks he’ll make a lot of money being an artist so maybe that will lead to a career in advertising. (Laughs)

ihaveanidea: You must make a great impression at career day when your kid introduces you as “my dad who used to be a in a rock band and now works for Burger King”. But moving on, If advertising didn’t exist, what would you be doing? Is there anything else that you’ve always been good at?

Andrew: It’s a great question, I love adverting, and I think I was designed for this.  My other passion is music. But I’m very happy in advertising. It’s where I feel my calling is.

But if I did something else, it may have to do with music, I love to perform and entertain but again, I get to do all of that within advertising so it’s a field where you get to express yourself in as many ways as you want.

Interview by:

Rafik Belmesk
Operations, AKOS
ihaveanidea

Chief Creative Officer & Co-Founder
Pereira & O’Dell

PJ Pereira is somewhat of an overachiever. After fulfilling every creative’s career long dream of leaving the day job, starting his own agency and winning a couple of Cannes Grand Prix, he moved on to become the Executive Creative Director at one of the most innovative and fast growing agencies of the last decade. And won some awards things there too.

While being a regular on those 40 to watch under 40 lists is somewhat expected of somebody like PJ, he would’ve probably topped the hypothetical 14  under 14 list too, since he started his career as a programmer at the tender age of 13 in Brazil.

And now he’s ready to start it all over again at the helm of his new San Francisco hot shop Pereira & O’Dell. In just over a year, the agency’s built a very solid reputation producing work for LEGO, Corona and Ubisoft. So how does he do it all then? ihaveanidea puts on its entrepreneurial hat and tries to pick up some valuable lessons from serial agency starting PJ

ihaveanidea: Perreira & O’Dell is the second agency you start, the first one being Agencia Click in Brazil. What happened there exactly? It’s quite rare to see people leave their babies behind and move on…

PJ: If you think of my career, the story is kind of like this. My first job in advertising was at DM9 in Brazil - they weren’t DDB at that point .

My first assignment was to start a digital practice into the agency. The web was at its early beginning. I convinced them that they needed to invest in that field, and worked there for a couple of years. I ran around the different departments and was finally moved to creative and then given my own department later.

It was right at the time where the Cyber Lions at Cannes were launched and I won two golds two years in a row, so that started to get me some respect, gave my work some visibility, and allowed me to do things my own way, which I really appreciated.

When DDB bought DM9, I was given the chance to open my own agency with my former bosses. They invited me to start it with them, and I think I was born to be my own boss rather than work for someone else so it made sense at the time.

When you looked at the work all these overly specialised agencies started to do, you felt it was so fragmented that they became more about their specialty than consumers.

I thought that instead of creating my own agency from scratch and being the president, I would prefer to get together with those guys who had experience as entrepreneurs and that we start from that base. That was the birth of Agencia Click. It started as a 15 person company and when I left four years later it had grown to 300-340 people. I think they’re doing even better now. They’re 500 or so. So they’re doing better without me than they did with me! (laughs)

I take a lot of pride in creating creative cultures more than anything. I left Agencia Click five years ago and they’re still one of the most respected interactive agencies around. They still win a lot of awards, do some really interesting work and get attention from all over the planet.That’s one of my biggest accomplishments; to’ve built something that could live without me.

At that time, the Brazilian market didn’t feel that challenging anymore. I had worked on all the brands and with all the people I wanted to work with.  So it was time for me to move on. The next step for me was moving to North America.

That’s when a friend of mine who had just gotten a job at AKQA introduced me to Tom (Bedcarre, CEO) and Ajaz (Ahmed, Chairman). I met them, we had a good time and got along very well so I moved to San Francisco to work with them. I stayed there for 3-4 years but at one point my entrepreneurial dreams started to kick back. That’s when I met Andrew, my partner here, who also has a really strong entrepreneurial spirit and history. Around that same time, Agencia Click was sold to Aegis Group who also bought Lot21, Andrew’s old company. So we basically both sold our companies to the same group, and that sparked the “Hey, maybe we should do something together again” conversation.

And from a joke it became a reality. On the next day we were talking to investors who had been knocking on our doors for a long time, and we created Perreira & O’Dell.

ihaveanidea: How hard was it to say “screw my big, fancy job at AKQA, and let’s do our own thing”?

PJ: Andrew says “this entrepreneurial thing is like a disease”. I didn’t have to do that. I was doing well; I loved the company, loved the people there and was working with great clients. I have absolutely nothing wrong to say about that job. I had no reason whatsoever to leave, but I just had to.

More than being a creative, being an entrepreneur is something that’s bigger than me. I wouldn’t be able to do anything else. It was time to be my own boss again.

Some people just freak out. They can’t handle the pressure and the rush of waking up everyday and making the metro ride. You think “I have 300  people working for me, so today,  I have to pay the salary for 10 of them. Just today, I have to make sure we have the revenue for 10 of these guys. Tomorrow, it’s gonna be another set of 10”. I don’t have 300 now, but I remember that feeling. Some people love it, others hate it. I am one of those that love it.

ihaveanidea: A lot of people say that to start an agency you only need a computer and card box desks. You on the other hand decided to go the investors route. First of, would you like to share some tips about how to convince investors to jump in since an agency’s often not viewed as an investment that’ll pay off quickly?

PJ: I had a twelve years old relationship with our investors and had known them for a long time, so it was different. They were my first bosses in advertising and they invited me to create a new agency with them that was extremely successful. When I left, they kept calling me to say “Hey when you decide to do something again, just call us and we’ll talk about it.”. I kept telling them “I’m not ready, I am not ready, I am not ready.”

So one day I called and told them “I am ready, are you?” and they were ready to go so we started. So I am not sure I can answer the “how do you convince investors to do something” because they convinced us more than the other way around! (laughs)

You’re right that some people start an agency with just a card box and their own ideas. And that’s possible, although you can grow quicker and create a less risky business if you have good investors behind you. And by that I mean people who will put money, let you do your thing and not be on your neck the whole time. We were fortunate enough to have that. That’s one of the good things about having gone to business school instead of a creative school. I understand some issues that sometimes other creatives don’t know exists until they’re in front of them.

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When you’re a small company, the biggest challenge that you have is cash flow. You need to have money in the bank when it’s time to pay people. It’s not about making a profit at the end of the year, it’s about having enough cash to pay your expenses on a daily basis. And that’s why it’s tremendous to have investors. You can make the decisions you need to make for the business to grow. You can be bold on how you pitch ideas; you can be brave about how you try to push your clients forward. You’re not worried about how you’re gonna pay salaries in two days. You’re just worried about the next two or three years and you can make wiser decisions.

You can do well without it, but doing it with good investors that trust you and understand what you’re doing allows you to make long term decisions that will pay much more later. We could have an entire conversation about cash-flow alone, I am sure the creatives will enjoy that a lot! (laughs)

That’s one of my biggest accomplishments; to’ve built something that could live without me.

ihaveanidea:  (laughs) How did you get your first client? That’s always a bit of a contentious question, had you made a deal with them before leaving AKQA or was it a let’s leave, and then find clients kind of situation?

PJ: Let me tell you the real story. The reality is that we didn’t have a single client. Andrew and I are pretty obsessed about doing things the way we think is right. One of Andrew’s main responsibilities at AKQA was new business. And as an Executive Creative Director, it was quite important for me too to keep good relationships with clients. So when we decided that we were going to launch, we had one of those conversations about doing it right. We’re not going to talk about this new agency, what it’s going to be like, who we’re gonna work for. We’re not going to poach clients, we’re not going to talk to possible employees. Basically, we’re not going to do anything for this new agency until our first day out of AKQA. So although we were talking to investors and figuring out the financial part of things. We weren’t having any conversations with clients.

On our first day out of AKQA Andrew and I were both at Starbucks using the Wi-Fi cards we got as a farewell gift from our former colleagues and said “Now What?”

We looked at each other and realised we didn’t have a plan. We needed to make one, but as the last months had been incredibly stressful for us with all the negotiations, we decided to go back home, take two days off and then regroup and start to work on something. So we went back home, and I was remodeling my new house at that time and had lots of planning to do. I was dealing with the contractors, my wife, the architects, it was crazy!

So the next day Andrew called and said he had good news. We had planned to spend up to two months planning the new agency’s positioning, the story, the name and all that. But the second day out of our jobs we get a call from Lego saying they wanted to hear our ideas, so we said “Of Course!”. Fortunately we didn’t have too much time to think about the positioning and had to go straight to work.

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ihaveanidea: You left two interactive agencies (Agencia Click & AKQA) to start an all service one, when all people have been talking about in the last few years is that the future lays in being specialised. Doing one thing, and doing it extremely well. Why did you decide to go the all service route?

PJ: First, because I think creative companies should do things in different ways and go to where the rest of the crowd is not going. And that’s an important thing, but besides that, one thing that we had in mind when we opened this shop was that advertising has evolved a lot since it was created before Mad Men times. It was a very simple profession. The clients had problems and the agencies would help them solve these problems. As these different agencies grew and created these specialised areas: direct marketing companies, PR companies, below the line and above the line agencies, digital, search marketing, social media shops … When you looked at the work all these overly specialised agencies started to do, you felt it was so fragmented that they became more about their specialty than consumers.

So one day I called and told them “I am ready, are you?”

What we wanted to do was create a shop that would treat advertising as it should be if it was invented today. We’re not trying to re-invent advertising, don’t get me wrong. We’re just trying to stay away from trends and what’s cool. Because what’s cool today will not be next year, and we don’t want to be caught up on that.

So we brought people from design, from interactive, from traditional advertising, from PR and got them all together here without specialised departments or anything. Interesting people, with interesting perspectives trying to solve problems for clients. That’s what advertising should be about.

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ihaveanidea:  At AKQA you shared your job with Rei Inamoto (who’s now the Global CD) and Lars Bathsom (now Ogilvy’s Chief Digital Creative Officer), how would you say your jobs are different today?

PJ: We recently had the chance to get together for the first time in years and it’s funny how our jobs couldn’t be more different. Lars is in charge of taking a gigantic company and bringing it to this new world that we’re living in. Making them catch up with what’s happening in the world.

Rei is taking a company that’s a great, fast-growing innovator and trying to make it into a global powerhouse. Maybe make it as big as Ogilvy is. And I am just going the other direction. I am creating something that’s really small and with which I am really hands on. I work with small and ambitious clients that are not necessarily about size, but about how far they can go. So it’s totally different.

We’re talking about tens of thousands of people with Laars, hundreds of people with Rei, and dozens for me. The fact that we were basically doing the same job for a while but that we’re now in such a different path is mind boggling. We had a lot of fun talking about these things.

ihaveanidea: When you mingle with these agency heads who are essentially your competitors, are you always cautious about not sharing too many secrets since you may be pitching against these guys next week…

PJ: I don’t think there’s such a thing as a secret in this industry. The secret is having great people and focused on doing great work. The challenge of doing that in a small, mid-sized or big agency is completely different.

For a huge company, the scale and internal politics make it hard to have a lot of great people. For a small company the day-by-day survival mode and the fact that you don’t have so many people is what’s difficult. And that’s the challenge that we have here.

When you’re right in the middle like AKQA is, the difficulty is do you manage yourself as an Ogilvy or as us? They’re totally different problems and challenges about getting people to do great work.

So in the end, although we end up competing and pitching against each other eventually, we’re doing things so differently that we can go there and open our kimonos without harming anyone of us. It makes all of us better.

ihaveanidea: Are you thinking of following the AKQA path and expanding outside of North America?

PJ: That’s definitely a possibly. I am not locked into any specific mode, I am still incredibly focussed on the work. We’re always open, but we’re not focussed on that now.

ihaveanidea:You decided to put your name on the door of your agency this time, this means you won’t be leaving to start something else when this gets too big and successful right?

PJ: Yeah, that’s kind of the plan. (laughs)

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Interview by:

Rafik Belmesk
Operations, AKOS
ihaveanidea

Global Creative Director
AKQA

Hey advertising creatives! Allow me to let you all in on a little secret about the future of the ad business. Are you ready? Here it goes…

The future is digital.

Wait a second. Didn’t Brett already say those exact words a few interviews back? Maybe so, but it bears repeating when you’re sitting down across from Rei Inamoto, the Global Creative Director for AKQA. After all, he’s one of the most heavily awarded Creative Directors in the digital field, with more Lions, Clios and Pencils than you can shake a mousepad at, including a rare Cannes Lions Titanium Grand Prix.

But for a guy whose life revolves around the more colorful side of ones and zeroes (with more zeroes on his paycheck than you or I) Rei is a very warm down to earth kinda guy. Very casual, very laid back, very polite, very modest, you’d have no idea that this man is one of the most powerful movers and shakers in the digital creative world. How many Worldwide CCOs routinely give out hugs when they see you?

So it was a lot of fun to chat with Rei about his career, his role AKQA, his thoughts on where this whole digital revolution is taking us, and even how not having English as his first language helped him create better work.

ihavenidea: With most of our interviews here at ihaveanidea, we like to start at the very beginning, to see how much their early years have made them who they are today. You are Japanese, born and raised in the Land of the Rising Sun. How much of that culture has guided you to the top of your career?

Rei: That’s a very good question, one that I don’t typically get asked. I grew up in Japan, but I went to high school in Switzerland and then came to the US for college. I went back to Japan a little bit for work, and then came back to the US to really launch my creative career. I think the fact that I got to live in different places — Japan, Europe, and the U.S. — it gave me a perspective that is independent of any one specific culture. So at heart I’m Japanese, but because I’ve lived in different countries, I think that I can appreciate different people’s perspectives and opinions. If you were brought up in one culture or in one place, I don’t think that your perspective gets as broad as it could be, not just with work, but with life. It’s a different way of looking at things, and it helps me approach my work in a way that is much more broad. The question is also interesting because one thing that has helped me, maybe consciously or subconsciously, is the fact that I’m not a native English speaker. English is something that I had to learn. Your first language isn’t English, correct?

ihaveanidea: (laughs) Well, I’m Costa Rican so mi primer lenguaje fue el español.

Rei: For me, the difference between Japanese and English is much bigger than English and Spanish or Western Language. Ten or fifteen years ago I really started learning the language. I felt I was at a disadvantage because I didn’t have the language and vocabulary skills to verbally articulate what I wanted to say. I don’t know if it was a conscious thing that or not, but I started to think “well, I don’t have the kind of vocabulary that a native speaker would have, but if I can explain myself in as simple terms as possible, everybody else whose English is better than mine will be able to understand.” I took my disadvantage which was the lack of English skill and turn it to my advantage which is to explain something simply, something that is absolutely crucial in creative communications. Even today I feel like I’m still learning the language.

ihaveanidea: And now today you’re living in San Francisco. How has that culture affected you, in comparison to your years in New York?

Rei: I was in New York between 1996 and 2005 and I moved here in 2005. Moving to San Francisco has forced me to have a balance between work and life. I find that when I travel back to New York now, I appreciate that balance, and the ability to think about life both inside and outside of work. Moving to San Francisco, I find myself decreasing the hours that I work, but that mean that I’m working less, but rather more efficiently and intensely. Working in New York, I was working longer hours, but that doesn’t mean that I was working as effectively. I’m busier now with the things I have to do, but I think I’m handling more things in less time.

ihaveanidea: More things? (laughs) I always thought the big Global Creative Directors had fewer things on their plate! Actually when we featured AKQA in an agency profile, we heard that you like to personally chat with everyone in the creative department every few weeks…

Rei: I do try to make a point of it, making my rounds in the morning or during lunch. I like to just simply say hello to people, even if we’re not talking about work or something that they’re working on. I just enjoy having that personal touch. To be honest, it’s not an easy task. I may have relapsed from time to time. There’s a guy who had a graph online and he kept track of each time that I visited him. “October 26^th, 10:28 AM”, that kind of thing. I’m still trying to look good on his graph.

ihaveanidea: What about the creative departments in other offices? You must be an Air Miles billionaire.

Rei: Personally I don´t travel that much. My CEO travels more than anyone I directly work with. His job is to fly around to the different offices every week. Last week we was here, the week before that he was in London, the week before that he was in New York, before that in Asia. For me, I tend to stay in San Francisco, with more indirect responsibilities in Shanghai, DC and New York.

ihaveanidea: Ah, a hands-off approach to the other offices, huh? How would you describe all of the offices? Let me put it a different way. Ff you were the father, and they were all little kids, how would they describe them?

Rei: (laughs) That’s a very interesting way to put things metaphorically. Let’s see, we have London, Amsterdam, DC., New York, San Francisco, and Shanghai, and I don’t necessarily see me as the father, but rather London and San Francisco as the parents. Don’t ask me which one is mommy and which is daddy, but I think DC is the oldest brother, New York is the second oldest, but kind of the wild kid. And then Shanghai and Amsterdam are the youngest kids.

ihaveanidea: So I guess that makes you a grandfather! What are some of the biggest day-to-day challenges in keeping the family in line?

Rei: Financially speaking, this has been one of the worst years for the world outside, but for us, it’s been the best year in history for us, on the financial side and from the work perspective. The volume of work is tremendous of course, but due to the same volume of work, we have to have the right people and the right volume of people. That’s been a constant challenge for me, to make sure that we’re getting the right people in for the job. So I’d say recruiting is my biggest challenge.

ihaveanidea: How do you recruit? Imagine that there was a Creative Director that you wanted to hire for AKQA, and he had another job offer at another digital shop. What would you say to convince him that AKQA was a great choice?

Rei: I think that the answer depends on the other shop the candidate is considering. What’s unique about us is that although we’re not a traditional ad agency, the perception of AKQA is that we are purely and mainly digital. That isn’t necessarily an inaccurate thing to think about, but we’re not like, say, RGA doing huge enterprise websites and those kinds of things. So if the candidate is comparing AKQA versus RGA, that might be one example I’d give. But why should they work at AKQA versus any other ad agency, I would say that I want people to do the best work of their career while they’re at AKQA, and that’s why they should come here.

ihaveanidea: Are there any trends you’re seeing in terms of the people who want to work at AKQA? Do they come in with a specific kind of portfolio?

“If they’re not living in a digital age, how can they survive as a professional individual in a time that’s becoming increasingly digital?”

Rei: I would say about 99 percent of the people have a website or some kind of online presence where they show us their work. It doesn’t mean that they’re doing digital work. They might have print or TV or other non-digital things, but they’re nearly all in an online portfolio. If they don’t have an online portfolio, it kind of takes them out of the running. I mean if they’re not living in a digital age, how can they survive as a professional individual in a time that’s becoming increasingly digital?

In terms of the actual people behind the portfolios, what’s interesting is that I´m seeing a lot more traditional people wanting to work at digital shops. We’re also seeing a lot more senior people looking to expand into digital. Maybe they see that the work that got them to the level they are at today might not help them survive in the business five years from now.

As far as student portfolios are concerned, I’m often surprised to see so many print-tasks. I have two schools of thought on this. One, the ad schools use print ads as a way to teach concepting ads, to come up with ideas that tell a simple message. and that’s great. But I also feel that the students are being taught by very traditional advertising creatives who never really worked in a digital space, so they end up teaching print advertising. And print advertising, well it’s not going to die soon, but it’s becoming more and more irrelevant, day by day.

ihaveanidea: But that traditional stuff isn’t going away completely. Do you ever look at yourselves and see that you have ten art directors who started out in traditional advertising and think “hey, we have the people to do more than just digital work.” Do clients ever ask you to do the print work since you did such a great job doing the digital work?

“It was done with a mere one percent of the budget normally allotted to new automobile launches. 1% of the budget and it might be the biggest launch they’ve done in years.”

Rei: Not too long ago, on both the agency side and the client side, digital seemed to be a mere afterthought when it came to a campaign. Nowadays, they’re realizing the power of not just making digital a major component of a campaign, but rather the main component. They could spend millions of dollars on a TV spot and tens of millions on media to spread that spot around, but at the end of the day, how it affects and engages with consumers is questionable.

One of the most recent things we’ve done was for Volkswagen, launching the new GTI. No TV, no print, not even a microsite. It was launched completely on 3G mobile devices, predominately the iPhone. We had a game called Real Racing GTI, and just by playing it, you could win one of six real GTIs. It became the number one free app in the US, Germany, Belgium, Canada, Finland, Italy, Japan, Norway, Portugal, Spain and Switzerland the week it was launched. And it was done with a mere one percent of the budget normally allotted to new automobile launches. 1% of the budget and it might be the biggest launch they’ve done in years.

ihaveanidea: The client must be happy! But do they understand all of this? Do you think the clients are more ahead of the game than the agencies? It must’ve taken some convincing to do something like that.

“It’s a tricky situation because agencies, whether they are digital or not, want to own the relationship with the client as much as possible.”

Rei: Yeah, it took quite a bit of convincing to do this, but fortunately they are a client who is brave enough and gutsy enough to do something cool like this.

ihaveanidea: When you guys share accounts with a big, traditional agency, what are the relationships like? You know, all of those traditional shops want to play interactive too, but is it a strain to work with them?

Rei: It’s a tricky situation because agencies, whether they are digital or not, want to own the relationship with the client as much as possible. I would say that this is especially of traditional agencies because they’re used to owning an exclusive relationship with a client for a long, long time.For decades, traditional agencies were the only agencies that existed. Of course that has changed, and now it’s possible for a digital agency to be given an entire account, instead of working with a traditional agency. As an example, there’s a company called Autodesk the software company that makes 3D studio Max and AutoCAD. They are a premiere 3D and 2D design engineering software company.A few  months ago, they used to work with a traditional ad agency, and they said ¨We are going to try something different.¨ They talked to different agencies, both traditional and digital, to see what they could come up with. They narrowed their search down to three agencies: two traditional agencies and us as the so called ¨digital agency¨. Long story short, we ended up winning the entire pitch, and we are now Autodesk’s agency of record, not just for  digital advertising but also for offline stuff, whether it’s print or TV. (laughs) I guess that answers your earlier question about what to do with the traditional creatives on staff.

ihaveanidea: With all of the changes that are going on with the advertising industry, is there one particular change that scares you?

Rei: I recently went to a conference that had a lot of production companies in attendance, as well as a lot of traditional agencies. They all see the switch to digital, and they’re dying to do more work in it, but as technology improves, costs go down, which in turn means budgets go down. If a company does something for a hundred thousand dollars today, tomorrow there’s someone whose going to do it for fifty thousand dollars, and the day after that there’s somebody else that will do it for ten thousand dollars. Before you know it, you’re out of business because you just can’t compete with price, especially when it comes to production. That is a very scary thought in the digital world.

ihaveanidea: Where do you see technology going two years from now? I know, I know, it’s a long time in a digital world.

Rei: Hmmm… two years from now, I think the notion that the web is something you access on your computer is going to disappear. There’s going to be something that will be completely platform independent, that’s going to be accessible from anywhere, on any device which will impact what we do on a day to day basis. (laughs) I need to think about that one, because if I have a good idea, I should launch a company.  

Interview by:

Ignacio Oreamuno
El Presidente
ihaveanidea

Regional ECD, South-East Asia
JWT

I recently had a chance to catch up with Tay Guan Hin, JWT’s Regional ECD for South-East Asia after what might’ve been the longest game of phone-tag in history.

He is very busy.

Guan’s ihaveanidea interview has been a long time coming. After overcoming the most fearsome of obstacles a young creative’s career could face (Guan’s parents were both doctors), he went on to become one of the most respected creative leaders in the industry. Not only has his work received every accolade there is and his presence been requested to judge the most prestigious of award shows, but perhaps more tellingly, he has always been a huge supporter of young talent. He was instrumental in setting up Singapore’s Crowbar Awards, Adfest’s Young Lotus and in bringing the AWARD school across the region.

When we finally got to chat about his career from its modest beginnings to his current place on the very exclusive JWT Worldwide Creative Council dinner table, I understood how he earned his Mr.Nice Guy reputation around the region.

ihaveanidea: Why don’t tell us how you got to where you are today? Let’s start from the very beginning here…

Guan: Both my parents were medical doctors so obviously they had pretty high expectations of me getting into not necessarily the medical field but much more of an intellectual industry. During my early school years I didn’t concentrate on my work at all and would spend my time drawing and doodling on all my books, until eventually my parents got a call from one of the teachers.

So we sat down, and I thought I was going to get a huge lecture on how bad my grades were, but the teacher was really supportive and said that talent had to be nurtured at a young age or it’ll be lost .

ihaveanidea: And how old were you when then?

Guan: 12-14 years old. Grades are quite an important thing in Asian culture and mine weren’t fantastic, so that’s why my parents thought the teacher was calling to lecture on how hard I needed to study and stuff like that

So it was quite refreshing to hear that there was some potential for growth in the art field, that got my parents thinking it was good to support my artistic skills. So I did my A Levels in England studying art.

When I was searching for schools to do a degree, I applied for the Art Center in Pasadena. My uncle was living there and he recommended it. I didn’t know anything about conceptual skills when I got there so that was quite a shock to me. I had to learn everything about advertising at a very rapid pace. Advertising in America back then was very copy-driven so I had to pick up copywriting quickly coming from an art background.

I did that for about three years and then took part in the first Los Angeles Creative Competition, organized by the creative club.

Coming from Singapore, I was not really used to American culture; it’s a very competitive school and everybody works by themselves. So we all submitted work and throughout the night I saw some classmates of mine picking up gold and silver and I thought there was no chance I’d get anything. But when the final call came out, I won the best of show. That was fantastic. At that time you got a trophy, but also $1000 in cash which was quite useful. It was a lot of money for a student in 1990.

So that was a really big break for me. Especially since the show was judged by many big wigs and I managed to get a job in Santa Monica out of it.  I stayed there three years  and it was fantastic to be able to work in the states coming from Singapore.

ihaveanidea:  I hear you also taught English in Russia for a short while. Tell us about that experience…

Guan: I was in a Christian group called The Navigators and there was an opportunity to go to Russia to teach English for 2-3 months. It was at a really good time since it was when Russia opened its doors and it was a very good opportunity to see the world before I went back to Singapore.

ihaveanidea: How did that help you in your ad making career? Wasn’t it a bit weird for them to see an Asian guy coming to Russian to teach English?

Guan: There were a few Koreans in the group too so it was quite interesting in that regard since English was their second language. But they were quite open. It’s always good to see a new culture that’s so different and so unknown from what you’re used to, and to try to communicate. A lot of the time you had to come up with very creative ways of expressing yourself, and the same thing pretty much applies in the the ad world.

You try to be innovative and think outside the box to communicate something in a way that interests people. Even when teaching English.

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Guan’s Early Portfolio

ihaveanidea: And when you came back to Singapore, how did you make your name in the industry there?

Guan: When I came back I worked for a local company called DMC which was one of the biggest local shops in Singapore. They needed somebody really quickly and on the cheap so they hired me as associate creative director. I stayed there for less than a year, and during that time interviewed with Linda Locke while she was at Saatchi & Saatchi Singapore and I got hired as an art director. I did a lot of good work with Linda there. It was in the heyday of the agency. After she left, Dave Droga came over. When he came to Singapore he really transformed the place and they were named Ad Age’s agency of the year.

After that I went back to Linda at Leo Burnett as head of art. It was one of the greatest jumps in my career as at that time the agency was ranked first in the regional creative rankings. It was a really good transition for me, learning about management and trying to groom people.

I then took the Regional Creative Director role for Grey as they were coming back to Singapore and opening an office there. In 2005 I moved to JWT as the regional ECD for South East Asia and last year I’ve been made the Global Creative Director for Lux.

ihaveanidea: How does that work ? What does a global CD on a particular brand do exactly?

Guan: The offices doing the creative work for Lux are in China, India, Brazil, South Africa and South East Asia.

Obviously each region has different assignments so I work with different offices to come up with different creative. The brand’s global headquarters are in Singapore, they used to be in Bangkok.

how these ideas can be translated to different media is something creatives still need to learn, and digital people need to also understand where the ideas come from.

One of the great things about it is that I get to work with the different offices.  The creatives regularly send me their work and we do a lot of tele-conferencing. I’ll also go for the shoots in some markets. I just came back from one in Rio three months ago.

It was right after our latest Global Creative Council meeting in Sao Paolo. Ty Montague runs one every trimester. In Asia we have a similar quarterly thing called Passion Meetings. We meet to review the work, improve it and to get feedback, but also to see how the global business units are doing. In Manila for instance, Dave Ferrer got the Philippines first gold for radio in Cannes so that was a very good achievement. And our Jakarta office won the first silver last year too.

ihaveanidea: We all know about the offices and countries that are doing well like Singapore, China or Thailand, but what about the smaller ones? Places like Viet Nam for example?

Guan: Interesting you mention Viet Nam since we just got a new guy there called Khai. It’s a market we are pushing on various levels.  We’ve had small successes here and there but no big hitters so far. It’s got a lot to do with the country and the culture. We’re not just hiring a lot of foreign talent and disguising it as doing good local work . We’re building that office on young local talent.

There’s a lot of education and grooming to be done there for the work to reach that world class standard.

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ihaveanidea: As a regional head, is your role to concentrate more on the markets with more money, or do you have a broader mission to develop all the regions?

Guan: Obviously clients with the money are the ones getting the more time and effort spent on them since they’re paying for the costs. But it’s also about individual office performances.

When we meet up for Passion Group, one of the things we always try to encourage is integration with the big clients and also to give them bigger ideas. We’re trying to focus on the work for our bigger brands and establish a dominance in the marketplace. Big clients like Unilever and HSBC you wouldn’t associate with big creative solutions.

ihaveanidea: When you’re looking to hire an ECD for an office what are the qualities you look for in a person? Obviously it can’t just be about the work, which obviously has to be good, but what else do you look into?

Guan: Besides creative work. Quite a lot of the success we’re having right now is from putting people who are willing to prove to themselves  and what they can do it. So hunger to do great things is very important.

The hunger to succeed. The hunger to really build the agency’s reputation, not just theirs, and to really push themselves. So that’s one thing

Another thing is that at JWT we are known to be a nice bunch and to make sure that everybody is well treated and well supported. So that person should be able to nurture and support the whole agency and the network.

A lot of the time you had to come up with very creative ways of expressing yourself, and the same thing pretty much applies in the the ad world.

ihaveanidea: How would you say your region adapting to the new technologies coming up? Singapore’s always been very very good for print, but how are you guys moving on from there and pushing new stuff?

Guan: It’s interesting. I think in the West or in places like Japan, digital is huge. But if you take markets like China, the traditional stuff is still alive and kicking. TV is still the main source of communication.

At the same time, we’re still doing a lot of stuff in digital & integrated by combining some of our resources. In Japan I know the office is working with top digital production companies like GT Tokyo, Projector and that. So it’s starting a move towards the right direction. Working with partners may be the easy way, but we do understand the need for this to happen and in the future you will see more integration coming.

In Singapore we’re moving into a new office with XM who is very well known digital company in Asia. It’s not a merger, we will still retain our own identity but we will be cohabiting in the same space.

Throw titles

It’s a great move as it allows collaboration and idea exchange between the creatives and it makes us much more media neutral. The basic idea development is still a need and it’s still important. But how these ideas can be translated to different media is something creatives still need to learn, and digital people need to also understand where the ideas come from.

So it’s still very much a work in progress, but it’s gonna take us to a more interesting place.

ihaveanidea: If tomorrow you had the chance to hire the greatest creative person you ever met how do you convince him to come to JWT. You’re not allowed to simply throw money at him….

Guan: Throw titles? (laughs)

Everybody wants to succeed in their own way and people need to feel a bit of empowerment and ability to have their own space. Giving them space to do their stuff. I think the most important thing is that they know what the JWT network stands for. One thing with me is that I work in partnerships with people, and maybe this is a fault of mine, but I don’t use my power; I’d rather work in a persuasive way to get stuff done.

So as simple as the answer is, working together and just offering a partnership is quite attractive to a lot of people I speak to

ihaveanidea: And do you still get involved in the creative process?

Guan: It’s a case by case basis. On the Lux role I am pretty hands on; the same goes for some of the regional pitches and for the work that requires more of our creative attention.

Most of the time though, I help sell the work to the client. Coming up with stuff is something, but selling it is another. And that’s a major major part of my job. Inspiring the troops is also really important. You have to lead by example and show them that the solution is often simpler than what they think.

During our passion meetings we also conduct some classes. It’s important to spend time in the office, even if I just go for client meetings I take the time to meet the teams in different cities. And people are curious about all sorts of things. When I came back from judging D&AD everyone was asking me how the work and about my experience being judge. Things like that help people understand how to come out with better work.

ihaveanidea: Since you’ve worked for both, who do you think is the better creative director, Linda Locke or Dave Droga?

Guan: Wow…that’s a really sensitive question.

I learned different things from two very different people. Linda’s a fantastic manager that’s very very demanding and what she wants to achieve is always very very clear. So what I really learned management skills from her. As a creative person, it’s terrible to not know how to manage people and not know how to manage clients, account servicing, and life in general.

With Dave it was all very spontaneous. He’s a genius that comes up with ideas spontaneously and picks things up on the run. When I knew him at Saatchi in Singapore, he was just starting his career and he was extremely brave. Anything goes. Coming from a conservative Asian perspective, seeing him break all the boundaries was  very inspiring. There was this ad for cooking oil and he was able to sell an ad that had mouse in it. Which is kind of taboo because you don’t mix cooking with rats.

I have to say I’ve learnt lots from both.

Interview by:

Rafik Belmesk
Operations, AKOS
ihaveanidea

Hey advertising creatives! Allow me to let you all in on a little secret about the future of the ad business. Are you ready? Here it goes…

The future is digital.

Okay, okay, maybe that isn’t such a revelation. But it wasn’t that long ago when things like super-interactive websites, mobile content and social networking were mere buzzwords, shiny new baubles on the peripheral of your 30 TV spot centred campaign. You weren’t tweeting two years ago, you weren’t Facebooking three years ago, you weren’t YouTubing five years ago.

But five years ago, Michael Lebowitz was already getting set to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Big Spaceship, the digital creative shop he founded out in Brooklyn, NYC. And even before Big Spaceship, Michael was tooling about in a digital realm while the rest of us were still on dial-up.

Nowadays the ad world is embracing digital (in practice or in theory) and Michael is at the forefront, guiding us newcomers to the digital creative revolution and learning a thing or three about Madison Avenue in the process. We had a chance to chit-chat with the man about his early beginnings, the birth of Big Spaceship, and his thoughts on living peacefully with the “traditional” ad world.

ihaveanidea: A lot of the people we’ve interviewed in the past have long, well documented advertising careers. You, on the other hand, come from a world that has only been perceived as “advertising” over the past few years. Take us into this world. How did it all begin?

Michael: I grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I was fortunate enough to have some cool early technology in my home. We had the first Atari Pong system, the one with just the wired paddles. We also had one of the first VCRs, a top-loading, fake wood-paneled, 75 pound monster. The VCR allowed my dad, who was a huge movie buff, to give me a tremendous education in all different genres of classic movies, from silent films to Marx Brothers to Bogart to Orson Welles. We also got the second Mac, the MacIntosh 512, when that came out, and I was completely blown away by it. Even before that, I coveted my friends’ Apple II computers, and I used Logo programming at school and loved it. Later on when I was about eleven, we had a 2400-baud modem, and I set up my own bulletin board. The problem was the modem was so slow, only one person could visit my bulletin board at a time.

My parents are both academics, people of words. My mother is an editor and a manuscript developer, and my father is an English professor and novelist. There’s definitely a relationship between what they did and all of my interests, but I guess I went further away from words on a page and into other communication methods.

ihaveanidea: So I guess you knew right away what you wanted to do in life.

Michael: Actually no. I went to school at Vasser College in upstate New York, but I didn’t declare a major until my junior year. I was playing about quite a bit, taking some computer science and getting into a multidisciplinary department called American Culture. This was a combination of sociology, anthropology, English, writing-really understanding our culture from multiple perspectives. (laughs) I think that’s more advantageous to me now than it was back then, by a long shot.

But in the end I settled on Film, and I loved it. We were the very last class before the school got an Avid editing system, so this meant I was cutting 16mm by hand, using tape, losing frames, cutting my fingers, working at 4 AM.

ihaveanidea: A little bloodshed is always good for the business…

Michael: It was fun, but I was always jealous of the kids in the program the year after me, who got to use the Avid system!

The great thing about college is that you paid $100 a semester and got to shoot all the film you wanted, and you’re the director every time. I knew that would not be the case once I graduated. Instead it would be a lot of working for free, polishing lenses and hustling a lot to maybe shoot a tiny bit of film if I was lucky. This didn’t appeal to me at all.

The film world was just starting to change then, but as it stood, the equipment costs were just too high to do your own thing. Hi-8 cameras, the standard back then, were too much money. My friends who were still forging ahead could only buy 16mm cameras. Things just weren’t cheap yet, and I think if all of this had happened to me just a few years later, my life would’ve taken a very different course, and I definitely would’ve been in film.

Fortunately I was noodling with computers the whole time. I had done software testing and a little bit of programming, and in college I used the internet for the first time, when Mosaic was the only visible web browser.

ihaveanidea: So where does a guy in your position go? I mean today, film and computers are practically inseparable at all levels, but not so back in the 90s.

Michael: My first inclination was to apply for a job at Avid, because I wanted to put those two skill sets together. I didn’t hear back from them, so I decided to move to New York City. Avid eventually did get back to me, but by then it was too late, I had fallen in love with New York and didn’t want to leave. I ended up writing for a trade magazine, but I got sick of that rather quickly. But times were tough then. I remember sending out 200 resumes and getting only one response - and remember, this was before email and other digital technology, so those were 200 physical resumes! It was pretty painful.

“I moved back to New York and promptly got a job at a digital agency out of the back of the print edition of The Village Voice.“

I decided to leave for the west coast, to clear my head and change my perspective of things. While I was out there, I played around with the web, learning bits and pieces as I went along. HTML, rudimentary design work using PageMaker, that kinda thing. But after a year or so, I started getting calls from friends back in New York. When I had left them, they were impoverished, but now they were saying “wow, we’re making more money now than we’d ever thought we’d make in our lives!” Of course, this was the beginning of the tech bubble. I moved back to New York and promptly got a job at a digital agency out of the back of the print edition of The Village Voice.

ihaveanidea: Wow, that easy to land a digital job back then, huh?

Michael: (laughs) I’m loving this grandfatherly look back on “the old days.”

Back then, everybody was skipping from agency to agency every few months in order to up their salaries, because there was so much money out there to be had. I took a different approach and hunkered down in the one shop, watching everything and trying to learn as much as possible. I stayed there for about three years, then left and started Big Spaceship. Yes, Big Spaceship is only my second job in this industry.

ihaveanidea: What made you even think you could start your own digital shop?

Michael: Tremendous naivety, arrogance and hubris. (laughs) If I had known then what I know now, I never would’ve had the balls to do it, so being naïve played out positively.

“I felt that there had become a really big disconnect between who was making promises to clients and who actually had to make good on those promises.”

The thing about that era, everybody looks back and speaks about how ignorant and painful it all was. The part that nobody talks about, and the part that I love, is that there were no schools for what we were doing. Everybody was self-taught and did so many different things that today are now specialized roles. There was nobody asking “is this or that possible?” because nobody knew the answer…everything was possible. We’d figure out how to do things, we’d hack our way through the jungle. I’m not saying they were the greatest communications solutions in the world or anything! A lot of the knocks against that era are true, but the spirit of adventure, the feeling of not feeling failure, is something that I miss a lot.

Starting Big Spaceship was all about wanting to do really cool work. I felt that there had become a really big disconnect between who was making promises to clients and who actually had to make good on those promises. I wanted to be able to speak to a client directly from the perspective of the people who actually make and understand the stuff. So we left the comfort and the high salaries and leapt to go make that happen in 2000.

ihaveanidea: More like leapt right into the dot-com bubble bursting…

Michael: (laughs) The absolute worst time to start a company!

Very early on, we fell into working with the entertainment industry, which is largely more recession-proof than others, and because we were very small at the beginning, we could accommodate smaller entertainment budgets. Our first client at Big Spaceship was Miramax, the one film studio in New York that made larger scale stuff. We did work for them that was pretty innovative for its time, and soon, my client at Miramax started getting phone calls from Paramount and Sony, asking “who’s doing all this cool work for you? We thought we knew everybody!” because back then, there was a very close-knit base of LA digital agencies doing all the theatrical marketing. So Sony and Paramount called us, and suddenly we had three big clients in short order, and we rode that for a pretty long time, sticking within entertainment media space for about five years. It was great because it let us do the kind of work that was fun for us, and paved the way for the work we do now.

Soon after this, we had our first opportunity to work on actual brands. One day we got a call from Gucci, who had seen the site we built for the Halle Berry film Gothika. They really liked the way we treated the imagery and type, and soon we were doing work for them. And shortly afterwards, the advertising agencies started to call.

ihaveanidea: I guess that’s right around the time traditional ad agencies started to getting interested in digital. They started their own digital departments and offshoots. How did that make you feel to work with them, as someone who has been involved in it much earlier than just about everybody else?

Michael: I guess I feel differently in different cases. It was interesting for us because for the longest time we were working directly with our clients. I never even realized that I was in or adjacent to the advertising business until about three or four years ago, when the ad agencies started calling. None of us had any traditional advertising backgrounds, and we were located in Brooklyn, far away physically from the ad scene. So when the agencies started calling us, we were like “oh that’s cool, they have some fun brands to work on, let’s do it! Let’s work with them!”

“…big agencies have big challenges because they still make the bulk of their money off of traditional work, and when that happens it’s hard to put digital in the center of it all. ”

We’ve had our successes and our failures in working alongside agencies, and it really just depends on the people in those agencies. I find that big agencies have big challenges because they still make the bulk of their money off of traditional work, and when that happens it’s hard to put digital in the center of it all. I don’t envy the people who are trying to make digital a bigger part of large agencies. There are some really smart, talented, thoughtful people who are taking that challenge, with varying levels of success.

That said, I think the whole “traditional versus digital” conversation is a bit of a distraction. The real question is how do we play nice with each other, because there  are way too many different services available now for one group to hold them all in-house. Besides, the real world doesn’t think this way. Real people don’t say “I’m going into my digital life right now.” They’re just living their lives. We need to think of insights and solutions like that.

ihaveanidea: You’ve been praised and reviled for taking a stand in Cannes on HBO’s “Voyeur” and BBDO’s win for that campaign. There weren’t too many fence-sitters in that debate. How do you feel your stance has affected either Big Spaceship or digital shops in general?

Michael: (laughs) Well I took some lumps for it, but I don’t regret it. Part of the challenge is the whole “big idea” mentality that comes more from the traditional side of advertising. I’m not saying the big idea is dead. I’m saying that any idea unexecuted is of no value whatsoever. In the digital realm, execution and idea are inseparable. Just because the agency-production company dynamic worked in television doesn’t mean it works in digital.

What I’m really happy about after all that nonsense is that it was a pregnant issue with a lot of energy behind it. You wouldn’t have seen such a response, both positive and vitriolic, if people didn’t need to talk about it. The result is that the conversation is happening a lot more.

It led to interesting conversations with a lot really smart people. Not everyone agrees with me, but I value their thoughts just as much as the ones that did agree. I got hundreds of emails, I even received a fax. (laughs) They’re applauding a digital revolution by sending a fax. I’ve had the good fortune to speak to senior leadership at a lot of big agencies, and they tend to “get it.” They want to play nice in the sandbox. I feel very encouraged overall.

“Look at it this way. There’s more than enough sunshine to go around when something succeeds. Let’s all celebrate each other, because all boats rise in high water.”

I’m glad the conversation is out there, and I think everybody needs to have this conversation more. I think the key to it all is for agencies and the companies they work with to have the conversation upfront.  We need to ask “what’s our role in this?” There’s nothing wrong with being a production company, lots of production companies specifically don’t want to be acknowledged as agencies. They’re happy to be production, and I love and respect that, it’s just that we have a different thing going on. And when we have this conversation up front, we don’t want anyone to go back on it once the awards and accolades start rolling in.

Look at it this way. There’s more than enough sunshine to go around when something succeeds. Let’s all celebrate each other, because all boats rise in high water.

Still, on “Voyeur” I think I was fair. I continue to say that BBDO shot an incredible, innovative film. It was our job to figure out how to make that film a natively digital experience, which goes a little beyond being hired coders.

ihaveanidea: But really, some will say that awards aren’t even relevant, and that this type of argument is such people scratching and scrounging to win a medal…

Michael: That’s not what it’s about. Every industry in the universe has awards. It’s how industries value themselves and figure out what’s valuable within them. The Nebraska Meat Purveyors Association has an award show. Real estate groups in every region have their award shows.

ihaveanidea: I bet they all call each other hacks behind each other’s backs at the reception too.

“…as I start to understand the advertising industry a little better, I find it’s one of the most self-loathing industries I’ve ever seen. ”

Michael: (laughs) Probably, but as I start to understand the advertising industry a little better, I find it’s one of the most self-loathing industries I’ve ever seen. We get to do the coolest, most fun shit. If I wasn’t having so much fun I wouldn’t do any of this, and I don’t know why we hate on ourselves so much.

ihaveanidea: Let’s step away from all of that for a sec, and I mean really step away. What does a guy whose so into digital do to get away from it all? Can you live without your computer for a few minutes?

Michael: Hell no, certainly not my iPhone! I’m pretty attached and logged in all of the time. It’s a seamless part of my life. I have a couple of kids, and I can put it away for them because that’s a different kind of focus, but my nearly three-year-old son can unlock an iPhone. Mine has games on it just for him. Digital is in his life too, and is going to be more so than any of us.

ihaveanidea: I realize that this is a silly question, seeing how technology is changing and evolving at a breakneck speed, but where do you see yourself in, say, ten years?

Michael: It’s funny. The Harvard Business School wrote a case study on us that was published in February of this year. The in-depth research for it was done six months before that. Reading that case study today makes me laugh. The core fundamentals haven’t changed, but it’s describing a company that’s very different than we are now.

I can’t say where technology will be, but I do like some of the ways it’s trending. That digital and real world split is getting fuzzier and fuzzier. Augmented reality is the new shiny toy that everybody wants to play with, but it represents something much deeper, with people are bringing their digital lives wherever they go in their mobile devices, augmented reality is actually starting to cause that blur. Pretty soon, saying something like “I’m going to sit at a computer and go on the internet” is going be as archaic as “I’m going into a room and turning on the electricity.” It’s going to be so natural that you don’t even think about it.

Where do I see myself? A little fatter, a little greyer.

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Interview by:

Brett McKenzie
Chief Writer, SBN2
ihaveanidea