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:

Brandon Burns
Copywriter
ihaveanidea Correspondent

Executive Creative Director
Pereira & O’Dell

Kash Sree is one of those guys who could tell you how to make your ads better and then proceed to kick your ass.

You see, before he made the logical transition to copywriter, Kash spent his time studying and teaching martial arts, while moonlighting as a designer at Ogilvy in London. His journey then took him all around the world; first to Singapore where he helped Batey Ads become agency of the year in Asia, then to Australia, where he helped DDB Sydney become Campaign Brief’s agency of the year, and then to Wieden+Kennedy in Portland, where he worked on some of Nike’s most memorable campaigns and helped them become the most awarded US agency at Cannes in 2002. So yeah, you get the picture, he’s won more awards than most of us have had commutes, so there must be something he’s doing right.

These days, you’re most likely to find him in and around San Francisco where he acts as Executive Creative Director at Perreira & O’Dell, and oversees clients like Lego, Corona, UBISOFT and Yahoo!

ihaveanidea recently had a chance to catch up with him to hear about how his phenomenal career came about and pick up a few pieces of wisdom along the way. Oh, and he speaks with an East London accent, so please read the interview accordingly.

ihaveanidea: You started your advertising career at 30. How much of a different perspective do you think it gave you as opposed to the other juniors in the department?

Kash: There are a couple of answers to this one. One, everything I’ve done before had shaped the way I think. Most of my life before that was martial arts, even though I was a designer. That shaped the way I think and look at things. People are sick of the martial arts analogies I use for everything. A lot of what I write, and a lot of what most people write is shaped by their previous experiences. You have to have done something first. That’s why when I see students I say “For Christ’s sake go and get arrested or go and run naked somewhere. Do something, because it’s going to change the way you write.”

Finally, it left me desperately hungry to catch up. I would work myself to death to catch up - and I still haven’t. I think it’s a great thing because you just try harder.

ihaveanidea: And did that experience prevent you from making mistakes other juniors were making around you?

Kash: Well I’ve made some really big mistakes, so I am not one to talk. I have a volatile nature and I’ve had episodes of shouting. It felt good for five minutes until I couldn’t sell a piece of work for about six months after that.

One thing that I am noticing now, and I hope it’s not true, but since the advent of specialised advertising colleges, there seems to be a propensity towards self-entitlement. The whole “Now I know advertising, so I won’t do that; I want to do this” or “I am not gonna do anything unless it’s gonna win me a One Show gold”.  All they think about is “that’s not a good enough brief”. I think most people forget that nothing is a good brief to begin with. Or very rarely at least do you get a good enough brief to begin with.

When you do something great, people get jealous and start asking “how the hell did they get such a good brief for that?”. The reality is that you made it into a good brief, and you made that into a good client.

Another mistake I’ve seen is people being in a rush. It’s good to be in a rush, but it’s also how you go about it. It’s good to be in a rush when you work yourself to death; it’s not good when you start to take too many shortcuts.

There was one guy who was pretty close, I was helping him put his book together, asking him to make changes and I think he felt that he wasn’t progressing fast enough. So he went to my boss with his book, who gave it back to me and asked what I thought.

Even if he was in a good position, I could never hire him because I could never trust him. But I can’t really point fingers at people for being stupid because I’ve done all kinds of stupid myself.

ihaveanidea: Do you think those who get into the business a bit older get to move up the echelons faster?

Kash: That’s entirely dependent on you. I’ve seen people join late and do nothing. Sometimes because they just don’t have the energy or because they become set in their ways. But no, I think it depends on the individual, how hard they work and on how they keep their minds young and stay fresh.

That’s why I think old people have more difficulty, because they say “I know how the world works”. And as soon as you say that, it means you’ve stopped growing.  The same goes for companies; you can see when they start thinking they know it all. You can go okay, that company is stuck in 1997, that one is in 91, that one in 2003. And that’s when they’re screwed. That’s when they need to tear it off and start again.

So I thought “You know what, screw all of you. I am going to do exactly what you say”. I was just being a baby. “I’m gonna stop working, I’ll just play video games all day.”

ihaveanidea: When you got to W+K in Portland you said that you had to forget about the work till you bleed mentality you find in most agencies, especially in Asia, and that the quality of your work got better once you started taking it more easily. How does that work exactly?

Kash: I think it’s stages.

That story goes back a little bit further. It goes back to where I first started in London. We were trained in the old GGT style and approach towards the work, which is “you work yourself to death. You do a thousand ads, of which 100 might be good, of which 10 might be great.”

So I came from that school of thinking. I used to think that you built brain like you built a muscle. You do all the work, and even if you do it wrong, you’re still building the muscle, and that’s why when people come to you, you come-up with ideas fast because you train your mind all the time.

But when I got to W+K, I was petrified. First, I felt that I’d been hired as a clerical error. My art director (Andy Fackrell) had 10 yeas more experience than me, so I got there and I was expecting to be fired at any moment. It’s funny, there was this phone list at W+K and it had my name on the same list as Jim Riswold, Dan Wieden and Jerry Cronin. So I kept thinking “even if I get fired, at least I’ve got this now!”.

It’s good to be in a rush when you work yourself to death; it’s not good when you start to take too many shortcuts.

I would work myself to death to try not to get found out, and at one point I was working with a partner who wasn’t working as hard. So I wanted to complain that he didn’t want to work at 11 o’clock at night and went to Melanie Myers who said “no, you have got calm the fuck down”

So I went to somebody else, and they said the same thing: “You’re too intense, you’re burning out your partners.”

This is maybe two years into W+K, and I was having some success, but I still didn’t have the feeling that I was where I wanted to be. So I thought “You know what, screw all of you. I am going to do exactly what you say”. I was just being a baby. “I’m gonna stop working, I’ll just play video games all day.”. I even started a video games tournament for people to take part in. We had Soul Calibur tournaments and were just fucking about all day, and the funny thing is that my work got a hundred times better. I got into a playful state of mind, and in that state of mind, solutions come easily, they are more surprising and you can feel the work. You surprise yourself.

I compare this to Bruce Lee. He used to say “You train 100%, and then you fight completely relaxed. That way you don’t hold yourself up, you’re faster and you’re more spontaneous and relaxed”.

So I was ready to fight relaxed.

ihaveanidea: You also said that when you came up with the best work in your career, you had to convince yourself to hate every ad ever made before and everything that’s too “addy”…

Kash: That what I learned from Wieden. When we came in, Andy and I were the hottest team in Australia. We had 23 finalists in the Australian and Asian awards and we’d just taken five pencils. We were on top of our game. We knew how advertising worked. Or so we thought. And when we got to W+K, they told us they hated advertising and all those formulas you do.

It left us completely vulnerable, but it made us step out of ad language. Even award winning ad language had its formulas. And when you do that, you start trying to find your own voice.

If you think about advertising, it goes something like this: there’s the Cannes visual pun formula, in America there’s the headline full of product pay-offs ones, and for D&AD there’s the “let’s make it like art” formula. And then you say “where do I fit in?” “What can I offer, and what can this brand say that’s different and feels honest?”

Usually when you go there, you don’t know how to judge. And this means you could either fuck up royally, or do something spectacular. But even if you fuck up, if you do something spectacular right afterwards, people tend to forget about the fuck ups.

ihaveanidea: For the people who aren’t lucky enough to work at W+K, what would you say are the best tricks - if any- to get into that mindset?  How do you make yourself completely forget about ad formulas?

Kash: Always be unhappy with your work. Look at work that inspires you, but don’t emulate it. Get involved in more things; more life experiences. See art, see movies, talk to interesting people, get yourself in situations that are outside of your comfort zone.

Look at other things that’ve got nothing to do with advertising. Go and talk to someone who makes kites, or to someone who’s obsessed with dogs. Why don’t you get into their world? It’ll affect the way you think.

Not everybody is gonna get into W+K to begin with. But if you can get into a good group, or you find a good mentor and MILK THEM. Pick their brains until they don’t take your calls anymore or until they throw you out of their offices.

There’re many people out there who want to help, and who want to help you get better because they get a sense of pride and a sense of giving back.

So the first day I got there, I thought: “Oh, fuck”

ihaveanidea: Yeah, most senior people in the industry are way too nice and helpful for their own good.

Kash: It’s funny you say that. I find that at the top of the business there’re two types of people: You’ve got the sharks, who got there by politics and usually aren’t particularly talented.

And then, you have the really talented people who are usually quite nice and innocent. They don’t have to resort to games. I believe that most people who are really good are like artists. And most artists need to stay pure and honest. That’s why so many great ad people don’t make money.

PJ (Perreira) is one of those rare exceptions since he’s really good at the business side as well as being really good at the concept side. Me? I can barely dress myself without thinking about advertising ideas, and art ideas and just ideas in general. So i’m trying to learn more from PJ on that. I recently bought some clothes that wouldn’t embarrass PJ at client meetings. I’m almost trendy. Almost.

But back to your question. Even at JWT there were some good people. You can be at a an extremely challenging agency (or what’s perceived as a bad agency) and find a good group or a good person to work with. What you don’t want to do is learn bad habits and think that’s the right way. So even if you’re in a less than ideal situation, you can find people in your town at least who you respect and who can teach you how to do good work. It might involve doing extra-curricular activities . But it’s like going to the gym; that’s extra curricular work, but it’s there for a reason, and you’re getting better for it.

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ihaveanidea: You’ve worked on both sides of the spectrum, on some pretty cool clients and on what are admittedly some pretty boring ones too. Is it easier to sell crazy ideas to the so called good ones?

Kash: There’re two parts to that question. Yes, it’s easier to sell good work to good clients, but if you’ve got any pride and if you are like me, and constantly in need of validation (because I am really sad), you don’t want to be the person who did the ordinary Nike ad.

So my greatest fear when I was at W+K was being the guy who followed up that great spot with something mediocre or just ordinary. In some ways it’s harder because you have to beat the best in the world.

ihaveanidea: Post-Wieden your partner Andy went to another boutique agency in 180, whereas you went to Leo Burnett. So what do you think is the difference between working at a hot shop and at a big agency?

Kash: The way your ass whistles afterwards.

Kidding aside, I nearly went to 180 a year before Andy went there, but I decided against it for several reasons. One: financial. I’ve always been really consistent with money in that I’ve always lived 10% beyond my means. (laughs)

What happened was that Dan had to fire people. And he hates firing people. So he gave us all a pay cut overnight. What that did for me, since I didn’t have any savings, was that all my credit cards bills went unpaid and the interest rate jumped from 6% to 27%. I very nearly lost my house, and had to take all sorts of debt just to keep it. So that was one factor; I needed to make more money.

Another one was that when I was at W+K, people would say that it was all very well and good doing great ads on Nike since it’s an easy client. So I needed to find out if I could do great work on ordinary brands. And that’s partly ego, but it was also uncertainty. Maybe I was crap without Wieden’s team around me.

It took people like Jim Riswold and Dan Wieden to say “Now where’s your voice?”, and I thought “Wow, you’re talking like Bruce Lee…”

So at the time, I was choosing 180, Leo Burnett and another agency. I knew a guy that was already at Leos who kept telling me how great they were and how they wanted to change things. So I thought at least I’d have a partner if I went there. But when I got there, it was horrendous. I realised that they had never interviewed me outside the agency, they always interviewed me in restaurants and bars but never in the agency. So the first day I got there, I thought: “Oh, fuck”

I do believe that everything happens for a reason and I learned so many lessons there about how certain types of people work and how some parts of the business work.

In a sense, W+K is great, but it’s also its own cage. It’s a creative haven that keeps you barefoot and pregnant. You don’t really have to understand how clients work or how business works. You can just remain an artist, protected from the business. I think many boutiques do that too. Which is lovely, but it’s not sustainable for the individual and it can leave you ill equipped for the “real world” if you leave. it doesn’t mean that i don’t miss that haven. but it would be like going home to mum and dad.

So I went to Leo Burnett and learned some very hard lessons. At the same time, I wasn’t gonna go there and just earn a lot of money. i didn’t go there to sell out. I was killing myself to get good work out. For Nintendo, even though there is that one good spot, we had to give them a whole new brand campaign of about 40 ads to get to that one out. and we had to go up against everyone one in the creative department, which was about two hundred people. it made me stronger though.

ihaveanidea: What are the differences between Asia and North America as far as awards obsession is concerned?

Kash: I wouldn’t say there’s a big difference, but I would say it’s harder to get caught at scamming in a market where judges don’t see it. Most jurors come from the bigger markets where the bigger work’s done.

If I am in America and you show me a scam from here, I’ll say I’ve not seen it before and that it smells fishy.

But if it comes from Papa New Guinea, Asia, or somewhere else, you’d go “Oh yeah, that’s pretty good” and you won’t know if it’s run or not. Also, when you’re in Asia - at least for me - you want to get to the big agencies. I wanted to get to W+K, I wanted to get to Fallon, to BBH. So I was doing whatever I could to get noticed. As small an industry as it is, there is still a lot of competition.

Sometimes you do work for the sake of awards so that you could get noticed. In America people do it too; Fallon built themselves on small clients. Saatchi & Saatchi in the UK built themselves on very small clients, and sometimes very suspect ones too.

It’s funny, but award obsession sometimes trains you to try harder. Once you become obsessed with awards, or something close to that, you don’t want to settle for what’s just good enough. You want to push it further and further to the point where you’re proud and your peers like it as well. And oddly enough, those ads will make you try harder with your real clients too.

I’ve got nothing against scam. I was caught for scamming, and myself and Andy Fackrell were the scapegoats of Australia for that. But at the same time, it gets you to a place where you can do some things for real clients. And if you can’t back it up for real clients, then you’re masturbating aren’t you?

It’s a creative haven that keeps you barefoot and pregnant. You don’t really have to understand how clients work or how business works.

If you’re in a bigger more traditional agency, and someone gets noticed by doing something on a small client, it’s infectious. Everyone wants to start working like that, everyone wants to work a bit harder, and everyone wants to think about things differently. And it can go two ways: It could be that then people don’t want to touch the big accounts OR that kind of thinking then infects the way people think about big accounts.

They then start to think about what would make the client do something great and different. And now is the perfect opportunity to experiment with clients. Because media is so fragmented, and because everything is so niched, there’s almost no need to spend much. You can say “I am going to do a web portion, or something ambient that’s not going to cost a lot of money out of your budget. Think of it as research and development. That’s what you do when developing your products, so allow us to do it when we’re developing our ads”.

Sometimes, if you allow us to develop something we haven’t had an opinion on, it will become brilliant because it’s fresh and pure.

I once asked Jim Riswold about research. He’s my mentor and still scares the crap out of me, even though he’d like to think he doesn’t. He said here’s the greatest thing about research : “You don’t ask people what they want. Because if you asked a bunch of kids what they’d want in a cake, it’ll be 99% icing and 1% cake. And then they’d eat the cake, be sick and they’d blame us”. Which is what often happens in advertising.

ihaveanidea: Since you’re an accomplished martial artist, how do you think the two disciplines cross, and where’s the bridge between the two?

Kash: If you think about martial arts, it’s pure effectiveness, taken to the point where it’s an art. If you could just do the art part of it, you’re gonna get your ass kicked. And if you could just do the effectiveness part of it, you’re not gonna get the respect of your peers and you’re gonna become predictable.

I’ll get back to Bruce Lee (laughs). At the height of his teaching career, he closed down all of his schools. People asked why he was doing this, and he said that they weren’t getting it : “You’re all trying to fight like me, and I am trying to get you to fight like yourself. Yes you can kick and you can punch, but don’t try to mimic me. Don’t try to be Bruce Lee. Try to be yourself”.

And I think that’s the other part of martial arts that most people forget. When you get good at it, you’re not fighting like anyone else. You fight the way your brain, your body and your education allows you to fight.

That’s a big part of martial arts that affected me in advertising, and I didn’t know it at the time. It took people like Jim Riswold and Dan Wieden to say “Now where’s your voice?”, and I thought “Wow, you’re talking like Bruce Lee…” (laughs)

ihaveanidea:  Knowing all this, who do you think would win in a fight between Dan Wieden and Neil French?

Kash: Dan Wieden. Because he’s real (laughs)

Neil French is a physical being, he’s been a bouncer and a matador before so he might be physically there. But I think Dan is one of those guys who would never give up, he’s got a strong spirit and he would fight like himself. Dan’s a big guy as well, so yeah, I think he’d win.

ihaveanidea: (laughs) Well I am sure they’ll both be very happy to hear that!

Interview by:

Rafik Belmesk
Operations, AKOS
ihaveanidea

Co-President, Chief Creative Officer North America
JWT

Normal. That’s probably the best way to describe Ty Montague. He’s not into lecturing or pontificating. Doesn’t claim to know “the” way to save the industry. Got sidetracked by “women and beer” in college, worked odd jobs and did a bunch of other things normal people do. And now he’s trying to create a culture at JWT that’s less about pointing out the differences between traditional and digital advertising, and more about uniting all media via the common threads of storytelling and basic human emotion. You know, the stuff that gets all those normal people who experience our advertising to get up and buy things.

On top of controlling the reins at JWT, Ty is also the Co-Chairman of the 2010 ANDY Awards. Most of the time, only the most super of superstars get to be on that jury, but this year Ty decided to flip things around a bit by allowing us, the general public, mere peons in the kingdom of advertising, to select the jury! I figured that as long as we had Ty on the hot seat about his career, I’d ask him about his Dr. Frankensteinish approach to handling the ANDYs this year.

ihaveanidea: How did a guy like you get into an industry like this?

Ty: Mistakes and coincidences.

ihaveanidea: Ooh, that sounds mysterious…

Ty: I dropped out of high school in 12^th grade. An act of rebellion. I was bored, I had teenage angst. High school was the most horrifying thing I could imagine. I ended up getting my GED and enrolling at the University of New Mexico. Did that for a year as a Bio major and then dropped out again. I like fixing things and helping people, so I ended up working as a mechanic for a guy with an Italian car shop during the week and as a raft guide on weekends. I got bored, so moved to New York City and worked as a bartender in various places — The Olive Tree Cafe, the Comedy Cellar. I met a random bar patron who said, “You’d be good at advertising.” She introduced me to the head of personnel at McCann. I got a job in the print forwarding division, stuffing envelopes on the Winston account.

ihaveanidea: I always thought that whole “getting you start in the mailroom” thing was an urban legend in our business. How’d you eventually become a creative?

“Advertising isn’t about anything academic. It’s about people. What makes them tick, what makes them work.”

Ty: I would see the creatives at McCann and say, “How do you get that job where you just sit around and think of stuff?” I took a 10-week class taught by someone teaching out of her house (and many years later I married her). I worked at getting a job for a about a year and finally got one at Scali McCabe Sloves. I couldn’t have been more directionless.

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ihaveanidea: For being ‘directionless’ certainly ended up with a sweet first creative gig.

Ty: Advertising isn’t about anything academic. It’s about people. What makes them tick, what makes them work. It’s about life experience. Having done interesting things and having gone interesting places.

ihaveanidea: Yeah, well, you’ve certainly lived. Looks like the women and beer direction treated you well. What do you think about the ad school route that most creatives take these days? Is it serving the next generation of creative talent, or is it a bit on the cookie cutter side?

Ty: Whether you choose to go to an ad school or not, if you do go make sure you question authority and that you don’t follow directions too well. Because, you know, speaking for myself purely, I’m looking for people who are individuals. I’m not looking for cookie cutter people who have come out of a factory. I think there are some great programs. Miami. VCU — Rick Boyko has done an incredible job there. I don’t think the ad schools are bad, I just think that in general, cookie cutter anything is bad. I think diversity of thought is good. That’s what I’ve always believed and I’ve done well in agency cultures that also believe that.

ihaveanidea: Well one thing that is breaking the mold is digital. How are you guys making digital work at JWT?

“People are pretty much the same today as they were 100 years ago. So if we’re betting somehow that a change in technology is going to change people, that’s a bad bet in my opinion.”

Ty: Technology changes. It’s always going to change. But people, they’re not changing all that much. People are pretty much the same today as they were 100 years ago. So if we’re betting somehow that a change in technology is going to change people, that’s a bad bet in my opinion. People are hardwired to appreciate certain things — and one of them is great storytelling. Storytelling is how we make sense of the universe. It’s how we transmit culture. That’s what I think a culture is; a shared story. So even if the delivery system is different, always tell great stories. That’s where we are at JWT, figuring out how to tell the best stories in the world. Technology will help us to tell those stories in new ways.

ihaveanidea: How are you structuring JWT to make this integrated traditional/digital storytelling culture happen?

Ty: I think having a separate digital department is crazytown and not modern. We hire people we consider to be digital natives directly into the creative department. In the beginning that was really, really hard — the first few just died. They were like a fish out of water. But now it’s working much better. Today we’re trying to pair digital natives with great storytellers, and put them on equal footing. People with a traditional background shouldn’t by nature be in charge; that creates a culture where it’s too hard If you are a digital creative, why would you ever want to report to someone who doesn’t understand you?

There’s no one at JWT who will tell a digital native that their idea has to been done a certain way. At the ECD level, there are both digital natives and traditional creatives — and they have to fight it out to decide what work is going to leave the building. I, and now Harvey (Marco, CCO JWT NY), we have to play tiebreaker. The best idea should win and we don’t care where that comes from. And now we’re having better retention, with this kind of environment.

ihaveanidea: As Co-President and CCO, how do you work with your senior managers to make this kind of environment possible?

Ty: Well, creatively, rather than dictate I just try to give my creative leaders advice. I tell them what I’ve learned and tell them what I find to be inspiring. When it comes to helping creative leaders with their own creative management style I try to give the most direct feedback I possibly can. No one benefits from vagueness. One thing I expect from creative leaders is the ability to help younger talent. If a senior creative can only do work, and doesn’t have the skills to help younger creatives make their work better, it’s going to limit their career. My job is to help them round themselves out that way. And to inspire, hopefully.

ihaveanidea: Not everybody who’s a brilliant creative talent can be a brilliant creative director and manager of creatives. Who were the people that helped you to become the acclaimed creative manager that you are?

Ty: I’ve been lucky enough to work for some extraordinary people. I was the first writer that Sam Scally hired at Scali McCabe Sloves. Sam kinda took me under his wing and at a very formative point in my career and sorta just helped me out. And I’ve been lucky enough to work for just some of the best people in the business. Jay Chiat and Lee Clow. Bill Hamilton and Rick Boyko. John Hegarty. Dan Weiden. Gary Goldsmith.

“There are some creative directors that tell you very specifically what’s wrong with your work and what specifically to do about it, and I’ve personally never found that very inspiring.”

ihaveanidea: How did working with these advertising greats help you navigate your career? Did they do anything specifically for you to make you see the light?

Ty: More by just being around them, really. I don’t really consider any of them to be “active” mentors of mine. Everyone has their own style and they were all really different. I’d have to say that the two guys that I learned the most from were Lee Clow — although he probably doesn’t even remember me — and Dan Weiden. These are guys who creative direct in a very indirect way. There are some creative directors that tell you very specifically what’s wrong with your work and what specifically to do about it, and I’ve personally never found that very inspiring. With these guys, they don’t say a whole lot but you can see it in their face when they’re disappointed in you. And that disappointment drives you to do better; it that style drove me to do my best work. I try to do that now as a CD; I try not to give explicit instructions. I just try to just make some helpful comments as to where some solutions might be found, but leave it up to the creative people to work it out. I feel that someone’s body of work should represent their point of view, not my point of view. As a CD you have something in your head that you know is the right answer, but I find that you get better results from the people working for you if you hold back and let them discover the solution themselves.

ihaveanidea: Let’s fast forward to today. You’re the Chair of the 2010 ANDYs jury, and in your first order of business, you announce co-chair Michael Lebowitz. Not that Mike isn’t worthy, of course,  but why did you make this decision?

Ty: It was both a symbolic act and a selfish act. Symbolic because I wanted to make the statement that digital natives must have an equal seat at the table. The future of our business is emerging from collaboration between traditional and digital creatives. Selfish because I just really like Michael and its fun to hang out with him.

ihaveanidea: This year’s ANDYs campaign has the general public selecting your jury. How did this idea come about? Any surprises so far? Will this be a one-shot thing, or do you see this audience participation to be here to stay?

Ty: It’s a total experiment. The goal is to let the industry pick the jury to see if we could get a truly balanced jury. A jury that represents all of the disciplines, geographies and cultures that are creating the future of our business. A jury that contains a few of the usual suspects, a few people that most in the mainstream have never heard of and a few people from adjacent businesses or pursuits (art, music, design). I have been really psyched by the response. The spirit of it has been really friendly and supportive and good humored. We just ticked over 20,000 votes, which when you think about the relatively small size of our industry is pretty cool. I’m super excited by the list of nominees but I have no idea how it will turn out. I will say that if we closed the voting and picked our jury today it would have too many white traditional guys from North America. So get voting people!

Interview by:

Brandon Burns
Copywriter
ihaveanidea Correspondent

Worldwide Chairman
Creative Juice, Bangkok

There’re always grounds for suspicion when an award show jury is announced and Thirasak Tanapatanakul’s name isn’t on the list.

Or on the shortlist, as is the case. During his six years tenure at the helm of Creative Juice Bangkok, he scored major accolades at all the local and international award shows, taking home everything from Gold Lions, Gold Clios, D&AD Yellow Pencils and two Grand Prix at AdFest. Perhaps most notably, his Bangkok Life Insurance campaign was the fourth most awarded TVC in the world in 2006 according to the Gunn Report.

On a personal level, Thirasak was awarded the extremely coveted No. 1 Creative in Asia crown for 2006-2007. He was also named Asia Pacific Creative of the Year in 2005 by Media Asia.

When I was in Bangkok last June, I had the chance to catch up with him and listen to how his phenomenal career came about. As I was walked into his office, I have to admit I was a bit taken back by the ridiculously cool finger recognition technology they use to get around. As soon as I came down to my senses, and stopped making superfluous spy film references, I sat down for a very informing and inspiring chat with the man everybody calls “Guy”.

ihaveanidea: Tell us about your first baby steps in this business. The Pre-Worldwide Chairman days…

Thirasak: I started as a graphic designer in Bangkok some 16 years ago, and then I went to the United States to study at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. After I’d graduated, I got a job at Y&R San Francisco and worked there before moving back to Thailand.

ihaveanidea: And what were the main differences between working in Thailand and the US?

Thirasak: One of the biggest differences is that over there they do a lot of research, whereas here, many Thai clients believe in the instinct and use their gut feelings to approve work. They’re braver about it and more likely to approve something that’s fresh. But as an Art Director, my job in Bangkok and San Francisco was pretty much the same. It’s the same everywhere. It’s all about finding fresh and new ideas.

ihaveanidea: Lots of people I’ve spoken to tell me “Oh, I wish I could work in Thailand. Their consumers actually love advertising, so the clients are more inclined to buy crazy ideas”. Is it really that easy to push the funny crazy ideas through?

Thirasak: Sometimes it’s easy, but most times it’s still pretty hard!

Again, it comes back to the clients using their gut feeling to approve the work thing. Some clients are more emotional than others and some clients have better taste than others. (laughs)

So, it’s good for us, and it’s a very good environment for creative people.  It’s also true that we have a very unique, fun loving culture, and maybe that makes it easier too.

ihaveanidea: How do you get around the language barrier in award shows?  It’s usually the countries that speak English who end up cleaning up for the most part, but you guys consistently do very well in that regard?

Thirasak: We’re very proud that people in the rest of the world love our communication pieces.

I think the language barrier is good. Usually when you have your own culture, it’s pretty hard to adapt and reach people that might not share the same values. I am so proud that the rest of the world can understand and love our works.

You’ve got to understand that sending work to international competitions generates very good PR for the client. And for the agency obviously.  It’s important to have an international proof that you’re good.

My favourite award show is Cannes. I’d say it’s the most important one for Thai people and it gives the industry the best PR since it’s got more of an international reach than the other ones. The Clios have that as well.

But I have to say that the One Show and D&AD are starting to catch up on that front.

ihaveanidea: You sat on the jury for Neil French’s World Press Awards a few years ago, were you the youngest person on there? Tell us about that experience

Thirasak: I think so (laughs). It was all the gurus and masters of advertising so I had a lot of fun hanging out with them. I was so glad to be chosen.

The main thing was that it was all about print work obviously. Every judge had a very strong opinion and would defend a piece of work they liked till the end. But I think that was one of the good things about it. They’re very honest and very fair towards the work. Very nice people too. And of course Neil French is like the godfather. He’s a slick entertainer; people laugh and it’s a very relaxed atmosphere as far as juries go.

Compare that to Cannes where it’s very serious. It was kind of nightmare for me to be honest. I was judging film 2-3 years ago. First of all there were so many entries (it was a record year) and everyone kept fighting…it was like an advertising world war! (laughs)

ihaveanidea: And did you feel the need to raise the bar a little bit higher when you were with Neil French & Co than when you judge a local award show?

Thirasak: No. Same standard, always. It has to be fresh work, and ideas that touch people and move the brand forward. That’s how my philosophy is and always will be. International or local.

ihaveanidea: Your Thai Insurance campaign in 2006 was one of the most awarded TV spots in the world. How did you come up with that idea and how did you convince such a traditional client to go the humour route?

Thirasak: At that time Bangkok Insurance was ranked number two in terms of notoriety and our goal was to make it number one.  We had our initial workshop meeting with them to brainstorm and show off the initial ideas and wanted to do something different. Many insurers at the time used very emotional ads. So we knew we had to do something different.

They hadn’t advertised for about 25 years, it was the first year they did something. Brand awareness went through the roof. A lot of the credit has to go to the client for being brave and for approving those types of ideas.

ihaveanidea: And do you find it harder to sell those types of funny ideas to local clients than it is for international ones?

Thirasak: It’s different. Local clients understand the market.  Some international ones do as well, because they’ve been in Thailand for a while and learned. Maybe they ate too much Thai food, and that’s why they like and understand the hot and spicy tone we have. (laughs)

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

 

ihaveanidea: The Bangkok Yellow Pages ad that you did last year had a lot of positive feedback. Tell us a bit more about that.

Thirasak: As you know last year was pretty hard for everybody and the client had cut the budgets quite severely. We usually we do TV commercials for them every year. But this time, the brief was to do a print and that’s what we came up with. We took a map of Bangkok’s train station and it works very well.

We bought the photo from Google Maps and used CGI to cut the buildings so that we could press the Yellow Pages ads one by one. The buildings in Bangkok don’t have a perfect shape, they aren’t as square as they are in Manhattan for instance. All in all, It took four months. It was huge.  It had to be done one building at the time. The guy who did the retouching has yellow eyes now (laughs).
Four months for a print ad man. Think about it. It’s crazy.

ihaveanidea: Thailand has been known for doing some pretty amazing TV commercials and it usually shows when award show season comes along.  Why do you think it’s easier for you to express yourself in TV as opposed to all the other mediums?

Thirasak: We’ve also been doing a lot of branded content recently and a little bit of interactive, but not much to be honest.

Thai people love to watch TV, it’s the medium that reaches the whole nation. Thais are also very visual; they like to look and to feel things but not so much to read. It’s not like in India or Singapore where they love to read.

This year many clients dramatically cut their budgets, so we had to come up with other stuff, but TV is usually the best way to reach the whole nation.

ihaveanidea: What do you think about the creative rankings that go on every year in Asia? Do you think it’s good to care so much about it, to the point where there is a league table, as you would have for a sports league? Or is it a bad thing?

Thirasak: It’s hard to tell if it’s good or bad. What I care about first and foremost is creating work that’ll resonate with the clients first. If you do well on that front, I think the results will be good and that the rankings will follow. But it’s not a major thing for us.

I’ve never looked at the rankings to hire somebody. It’s not like that; I always look at the work and most importantly the person’s attitude If they’re willing to do good work and are very honest people, that’s what will make me choose them.

ihaveanidea: Are the turnover rates in the creative departments as big here as they are in North America?  For instance, back home a few thousand bucks will make most people jump ship, how does it compare?

Thirasak: Sometimes it’s like that. But you have to let your man go without being bitter about it if they get a very good offer. One of my Art Directors just moved to Saatchi & Saatchi New York and I encouraged him to go out there  and check it out.

Some people go on to be CDs somewhere else, or sometimes as you said just for a bit more money. That’s why I’ve always got to keep my eyes open for young talented people. We often organize workshops to recruit new people and give them a chance to shine bright here before they become too expensive! (laughs)

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

 

ihaveanidea: Is there anything that keeps you inspired outside of advertising, or does this business keep you too busy to think of anything else?

Thirasak: Right now I am doing my own personal project. I bought a piece of land in Khao Yai, two hours away from Bangkok. It’s a Unesco site. It’s called “Burg Barn Buri” which means “The Village of Joy” in Thai.

I am building an inspiration and creative camp. People can come to take seminars or give them if they want. On any topic they’d like. All the seminars are done in fresh air, by the water. It’s all about green energy. When I do workshops, I sometimes like to invite my clients. It’s a great place to look for inspiration and to think of new ways to move a brand forward. It’s a very natural atmosphere. I’ve cut a canal around the land so you can navigate around it.

It’s a creative village.  There are many small resorts for people to stay, a big library, …etc. Hopefully it will work.

You can give a talk anytime!

thirasak@burgbarnburi.com

Interview by:
Rafik Belmesk
Operations, AKOS
ihaveanidea

It’s kinda funny that it has taken me all these years to get a legend like Terry O’Reilly to grace ihaveanidea’s Creatives section. On a personal note, Terry is the first advertising creative I ever met, and several months after that, he was the first ad guy to ever see my portfolio (and probably a little too kind with me regarding its contents.) Terry served as the very first host of ihaveanidea’s very first Portfolio Night, and he’s also indirectly responsible for Ignacio and myself meeting in the early days of ihaveanidea.

But even if you ignore those little connections, you still have a man who’s among the most awarded and respected radio copywriters on the planet. He’s won hundreds of national and international accolades, and bestowed these honors on others as jury members for shows such as the Cannes Lions and Clios. He founded Pirate, an award-winning audio and video shop in Toronto and New York that directs “from a writer’s point of view.”  He’s an inductee into the Marketing Hall of Legends, and a recipient of the Advertising & Design Club of Canada’s Les Usherwood Lifetime Achievement Award. He also hosts a wildly popular radio show about the world advertising on CBC and Sirius satellite radio. 

And now Terry can check “author” off of his list of things to accomplish. The Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate Our Culture goes on sale across Canada this week and in the US this coming spring.

Before he embarks on a nationwide book tour, I had a chance to catch up with Terry to talk about his fascinating life, from his early days in a mining town, to his first ad gig, to the beginning of his own company. We got his thoughts on why he loves radio so much, and whether it’s a dead or dying medium in a creative’s arsenal in 2009.

ihaveanidea: You grew up in Sudbury, Ontario, which, for the benefit of our readers, is a small nickel-mining city about 240 miles north of Toronto. That would seem to be a very unlikely place for an ad guy to grow up in.

Terry: I’ve often thought about this, and I do believe that growing up in such a place was quite influential in shaping my career. Sudbury was a very isolated town, and its geographic location and its topography, with all the dense rock that you’d find in a mining area, made it very difficult for television and radio signals to reach us clearly. When I was young, we had only one TV station, the CBC, coming in, with a handful of others when I got older, plus only two radio stations in town. This meant us kids were getting very little pop culture coming into our lives, and we had to have very, very active imaginations to keep stimulated, which I believe really helped me in my career.

Sudbury’s physical isolation also affected me. It was a blue-collar mining town with very common, real people, people who weren’t affected by big-city trends and ideas. Having that sense of the common folk is really important in our business, and unfortunately that sense is so easily lost, since ad people generally move to the big city, make big salaries and start wearing black turtlenecks while driving expensive cars.

ihaveanidea: So how did Mr. Common Folk end up in the big city?

Terry: Well I think I was beyond fortunate that my high school back in Sudbury had a full radio and television production program from Grade 9 to 13. It’s remarkable to think that a high school in an isolated mining town would have a full TV and radio studio. So for five years, I was writing and directing a lot of TV and film projects that would even air in town. I can’t tell you how excited that made me, and when it came time graduate, I applied for Ryerson in Toronto, in their Radio Television Arts program in 1978. I know I didn’t get accepted to Ryerson because of my marks, but rather because I was one of the only students who actually had a portfolio of work because of my high school program.

ihaveanidea: That left you in perfect shape for a career in TV and film, but how did you catch the advertising bug?

Terry: Well there were no advertising courses at Ryerson, but every Wednesday morning there was a lecture series, where they would invite various people from different careers and industries to come speak to us about what they do. We’d have people like Llyod Roberston talk to us about TV journalism and reading the news, we’d have Bob Homme, “The Friendly Giant” speak about children’s programming.

But when the ad guys came in to tell us about their lives, I was fascinated. I was on the edge of my seat. The business, the need for ideas, the pressure, the deadlines, shooting commercials, working with actors, I just loved it. I knew then and there that I wanted to be a copywriter. So it was the lecture series and not any of my actual classes that dictated where I’d end up in life.

“…I sent out sixty — yes, six-zero — very elaborate résumés to agencies all across Canada.

I promptly received sixty rejection letters.”

ihaveanidea: And all without taking ad-specific courses and classes. That’s a major change from what kids go through today. How difficult was it to break in without an advertising background?

Terry: When I graduated from Ryerson, I knew I wanted to be a copywriter in a big ad agency, so I sent out sixty — yes, six-zero — very elaborate résumés to agencies all across Canada.

I promptly received sixty rejection letters.

Now my fiancée at the time lived in Hamilton, [note to readers: Hamilton is a city about 40 miles southwest of Toronto] and I would take the bus to go visit her every weekend. On each trip, I would pass this little radio station on the highway, FM108. One day, on a lark, I got off the bus and gave them one of my résumés.

They hired me.

Yes, they brought me on as the station’s Copy Chief, which was a laugh because I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. It was a big compromise for me, since I still wanted to work in a big ad agency, not in some radio station, but hell, it was a copywriting job in the middle of the ’81 recession, so I couldn’t complain.

But wouldn’t you know it, I fell head over heels in love with radio advertising as a result of that job. I got to experiment, being the “Copy Chief” of a staff of one — myself. I was the writer, the producer, the engineer, and since I was the Chief, I approved everything I wrote, so I could get away with more things. I got to see how much of a broad canvas radio was. I could be on the moon in one spot, or in a person’s heart valve in another, as long as it was written well and the right sound effects were used. TV couldn’t do this, at least not on the budgets that radio had.

You know Malcolm Gladwell’s theory about putting in 10,000 hours in order to become great at something? Well we had about 150 ongoing clients at the radio station, and I was writing solidly for twelve to fourteen hours a day just to keep up with the demand and deadlines. I had so much radio under my belt in such a relatively short time span that it became my comfort place. But I still wanted to get into a proper advertising agency, so while I wrote huge amounts of radio by day, by night I was building a print portfolio.

ihaveanidea: So when it came time to take another stab at getting into an ad agency, how did that go about?

Terry: Well for one, I didn’t send out sixty résumés this time! Instead I only sent out letters to a handful of agencies whose work I truly admired. I managed to set up three or four interviews with creative directors, and the first one was with Trevor Goodgoll at Campbell-Ewald. Trevor flipped through my book at a hundred miles an hour, closed it and said “I’ll take you on for two weeks. At the very least, you’ll have an ad or two for your book and a couple of bucks in your pocket.” I asked him “well if you like me, will you keep me?” He looked at me, paused and said “we’ll see about that after two weeks.”

Before the two weeks were up, he came to me and said “you’re hired.”

ihaveanidea: Finally! But it must’ve been quite a change, going from essentially doing your own thing at a radio station to having an actual creative director.

“A lot of creative directors can say no, but it’s rare to find one that can say no and inspire you in the same breath.”

Terry: It was a huge shift, but one that I was so thrilled to get into. I yearned to have a creative director. At the radio station, I was learning on the fly, and I wanted someone with wisdom to guide me. Trevor was a godsend to me, and was my first mentor in the business. I couldn’t have had a better CD at that time in my career than Trevor. He loved big ideas, and would never settle for anything that was a small idea. He had a way of pulling huge ideas out of us that we didn’t know we were capable of. He had this way of turning ideas down that would set you on fire, getting you so excited about going back to the drawing board that you ran back to your office. A lot of creative directors can say no, but it’s rare to find one that can say no and inspire you in the same breath.

ihaveanidea: How did it feel to finally get to work in other media, instead of just radio?

Terry: I loved print and television, but I learned very quickly that in the ad world, most writers were afraid of radio. When a radio assignment came up, the writers sorta backed off. They felt it was tough and didn’t give you the same tools that other forms of media gave you. So here I was in an agency and the writers didn’t really want to do the radio, which is where I felt most secure. I found myself taking all the radio briefs back to my office time and time again.

After a while, my radio work started to generate buzz and win a few awards, and I became known as “that radio guy.” I always felt it wasn’t because I was so good, but rather I was so passionate about the medium at a time when nobody in the ad agency world was really embracing radio. No agency was known for their radio work.

But like I said, I did enjoy other media. At the time, our flagship client was Fiberglas Pink insulation. The agency had had one huge hit prior to my arrival, but was having tons of trouble creating a follow-up spot. The client wasn’t liking any of the ideas. So here I come, a really green writer, and I ask Trevor if I could take a crack at it, figuring the worst he could say is no. Trevor gave the okay, and I went away that weekend, and on Monday I showed him my idea, and he loved it. He flew to Chicago and presented it to Joe Settlemeyer, the director behind Wendy’s “Where’s The Beef?” Before you know it, I was filming my first TV spot with a legendary director. It went on to win a bunch of awards, and that gave me a lot of good confidence, letting me know I was heading in the right direction.

ihaveanidea: That aside, it’s obvious that radio was where your heart was at…

Terry: Yeah. I worked at few other agencies. I worked at DDB under the great Allan Kazmer, then moved onto Chiat\Day when they first opened up in Toronto. There I worked under Geoffery Roche, Dick Hadden and Ken Wieden, Dan’s brother.

But I eventually got to the point where I wanted to be my own boss. I wanted to start my own company, but I didn’t really think I wanted to start an ad agency. It just didn’t feel right for me. I sat down and thought about what kind of company I wanted, it was pretty obvious that I wanted to start a radio company. I had the reputation, and it was what I enjoyed doing most.

I also felt that when I was on the agency side and needed a production company to direct radio for me, be it Toronto, New York, Chicago, Detroit, LA, I often found myself fighting to save my work from the director. They never just respected the idea and enhanced it, they’d run away with it and change it. That drove me crazy as a writer. So I teamed up with Rick Sherman, the only director I knew who “got it” and we founded Pirate together.

Basically we built the company I couldn’t find: a company that directed radio from a writer’s point of view. One that understood the hurdles a writer has gone through to get an idea to this point, and knew instinctively what could be enhanced and what should be left alone.

ihaveanidea: The copywriters in town must’ve let out one big “Hallelujah!”

Terry: (laughs) we were so busy so quickly! Plus, since I was a writer, we weren’t just directing agency written scripts, we had our own direct clients who didn’t have agencies. When that work won awards, it would attract more agency work. Running a production company with its own creative department was a big risk; if the creative work we created wasn’t top-notch, nobody would want to bring their own work here.

Me being a writer was also a benefit to the writers who came in with their projects. If changes need to be made to a script while directing it, if we back ourselves into a corner, I can really jam with the writer and we write ourselves out of the corner.

ihaveanidea: Over the years you’ve become well known throughout Canada for holding big seminars devoted to writing and producing radio ads. I’ve been to them myself, and I noticed that the audience isn’t just writers, but a whole slew of art directors, designers, account people and even clients and marketers. Why did you start doing these conferences, and what brings all these people out for a medium that is really a writer’s domain?

Terry: Radio is the toughest medium to master, but once you master it, you realize it’s the most freeing medium. But even though it’s the toughest medium, it usually gets relegated to the juniors in an agency. So juniors are saddled with these tough radio assignments, and I knew that they’d love to gain some wisdom and tricks about the medium.

The first few years of these conferences were pretty much all writers, but over the years the audience expanded. I’ve always welcomed art directors to attend. Radio, really, is just like any other medium; the idea is conceived by a team. A writer might actually be the one writing the spot, but the art director is providing input, and it’s great to see that they have an interest in what radio entails. As for account people, the smart suits are the ones who attended (laughs) And clients, God bless them, they really got to see what the creative process was like, which made them better clients.

ihaveanidea: People got a lot out of these seminars, but it wasn’t long before you started speaking to a much, much larger audience, namely your CBC radio programs, O’Reilly on Advertising and The Age of Persuasion. How did these come about, on government-backed commercial free radio, no less?

Terry: Four times a year, myself, writer Mike Tennant, and Larry MacInnis and Mike Occomore, the co-creative directors of CHUM FM — we call ourselves ‘The Radio Boys’ — we all go out and have lunch. During one of those lunches, Larry says “you know, your seminar would make a great radio series.” I didn’t take him seriously, and asked who would run such a show. He looked back at me and said “The CBC.”

I glared back at him. “You mean the advertising-free CBC, the network people go to escape advertising?”

But I sat back and thought about it. Mike Tennant already had a relationship with the CBC. He was sort of their go-to guy, whenever they did a news story on advertising, and he felt we were onto something. So Mike and I wrote up a pitch and took it to the head of CBC Radio. Our pitch was basically that there was a lot of misinformation about advertising in the general public. People thought it was stupid, annoying, and Mike and I wanted to make a show that explained advertising to people, that let people into the boardrooms where decisions were make. We wanted to tell great stories about the strategy that went on in the business, And of course it would be told by us, two real ad guys, not journalists or pundits. We’re in the trenches, so we know the ad world is not like Bewitched. We felt if the general public knew more about the ad world, they’d have a better appreciation for it, and they’d become better consumers.

CBC agreed, and planned to put us on as a ten-episode summer replacement series. That show was called O’Reilly on Advertising. Mike and I did the ten episodes. The feedback was so positive that it was scary, to us and to the CBC. I guess that’s because we expected so much revulsion from the CBC audience. But the CBC extended the show right into January, and since then, we’ve been an annual program, stretching every year from January to June.

“Hate advertising. Love your show. Still hate advertising.”

That first season, we didn’t know it was going to last, so each episode was painted in very broad strokes, but once we got picked up again, we knew we could focus on things in far greater detail, and we renamed the show The Age of Persiasion. This coming January will be the fifth season of the two shows. Never in a million years did I expect it to be so popular.

We get hundreds of emails from across Canada every week about the show, and there are two very common kinds of emails. One” “I’ve never given a ny thought to advertising, I’ve ignored it all my life, but your show has made it a fascinating place.” And two: “Hate advertising. Love your show. Still hate advertising.” But I have to feel that even if they say they loathe advertising and its intrusiveness, we must be getting through to them in some way.

ihaveanidea: And it’s become so popular that the show has now become a book, going on sale this month. Isn’t that every copywriter’s dream, to write a book?

Terry: (laughs) It was definitely mine. We got an email one day from Diane Martin, Senior Editor of Knopf/Random House. She said she loved the show, and asked if we ever considered writing a book. She added “I bet you leave a lot of great information on the editing room floor.” That was bang-on, as our show is only 27 minutes a week, and there’s a lot that we have to leave out. So here was our big opportunity! And that left us in the unusual position of having a book deal, but no agent, instead of the other way around!

Our show was always aimed at the general public, but I always received a lot of comments about the show from fellow ad people, as well as marketers and small business owners, so I knew it wasn’t too basic of a level. So the book was written with the intent to appeal to both groups. We touch on so many different topics, and link them so that ‘civilians’ understand what’s happening, and ad people walk away with thoughts and ideas that they always had but weren’t able to articulate. We’re really excited to see if the book will be as successful as the show is.

ihaveanidea: It’s 2009, and everybody’s talking Mad Men this, and ’social networking’ that. But radio is your first love, and I have to be blunt in asking this: is radio dead? I mean, I haven’t heard any buzz about radio ads since DDB and Bud Light’s “Real Men of Genius” some years back. I don’t ever hear ad students talk about it at all, and they’re the next generation of the business. What’s the story?

Terry: I think radio will always survive. It’s the first broadcast medium, and it has survived TV, film, video, DVD, MP3 and everything else.

That said, I think radio needs a massive overhaul. Most commercial radio is not great anymore, not riveting in the least. I love satellite radio, and people always gasp when I say that, because so much of it is commercial-free. But I listen to a lot of satellite radio, and the reason why is because I love the programming. It really what radio could and should be. Bob Dylan has the most fantastic radio show on Sirius XM. Even the Playboy station has an afternoon call-in show that’s one of the best call-in shows I’ve ever heard.

My hope is that radio will reinvent itself, and become more exciting and dangerous. I hope it will cease to be such a music jukebox. Everybody’s got their own personal ‘jukeboxes’ and you can’t compete with that. So sooner or later, radio will be forced to be innovative.

ihaveanidea: What do you say to the junior or student writer that scoffs and says “Radio? Listen grandpa, I don’t need to write that stuff!”

Terry: I believe that no truly great copywriter would ever say that out loud. Geoff Roche used to say “if you can write good radio, you can write anything,” and when he looks at junior writer portfolios, he often asks to see their radio portfolio. I think that’s very astute of him, because like I said earlier, radio is the toughest thing to master, and that should be a challenge. Angus Tucker, the CD at John St., once said “writing radio is like trying to hide on a squash court.” You are so exposed as a writer on a radio spot. You can’t hide behind wardrobe, locations, pretty faces and editing, the things that other media give you. It’s just you and your idea, and it’s very easy to see if your idea is any good or not.

“I believe that no truly great copywriter would ever say that out loud.”

Even if you only end up writing radio for the first few years of your career, until you are senior enough to be handed the big budget TV shoots,  those are your formative years, so it makes sense to master that skill.

Besides, what writer wouldn’t love radio? It’s the biggest canvas you can play on. It’s as conceptually freeing as any medium we have in our business. Forget widescreen television, radio is widescreen brain.

ihaveanidea: When asked what’s the greatest ad of all time, most people go for Apple’s ‘1984’ or they might pick those VW “Think Small” and “Lemon” print ads. With a lifetime of listening to, writing, directing and producing great radio, what would you say is your favorite radio spot of all time?

Terry: (laughs) That’s like asking who’s your favorite kid!

I’m not sure if it’s the best of all time or not, but the one ad that has inspired me more than any other from the first time I heard it in the early 1980s was for Pearson’s Peanut Nut Roll. It was written by the late, great Craig Weiss. It’s just a phenomenal dialogue spot between a researcher and a woman who sounds like she has just woken up. Beautifully written, paced and cast, it couldn’t be any simpler, and it has always been my flagship for how great radio can be.

Another spot, much more recent that I put as one of the best is a Bud Light spot by David Chiavegato, the co-founder of Grip Limited, called “Conversational Landmine Detector.” It is so funny, yet so simple, and no matter who I play it for, be it a room full of ad people or a room full of accountants, it brings the roof down.

ihaveanidea: From all the years I’ve known you, you have had two passions outside of the world of advertising, two huge interests that, in my mind, couldn’t be more different: The Beatles and mixed martial arts. Please. Explain.

Terry: (laughs) The Beatles, well I’ve been hooked on them ever since I was about nine years old. They mesmerize me to this very day. I love the music first and foremost. I love their story. I have every book ever written on the Beatles, I’ve got sealed albums that have never been opened, I have the actual recording contract for Helter Sketler, and all sorts of other one of a kind memorabilia. The Beatles have always, always, always been a great source of joy and creativity for me.

Mixed martial arts? I can’t really say, other than I love it. I’m a martial artist myself, so that’s a big part of why I love it. I’ve been a boxing fan my whole life, from back when Muhammad Ali was in his prime, but when mixed martial arts came around, I couldn’t watch boxing anymore because it seemed too boring for me. I never thought I’d say that in my life, being such a die-hard boxing fan. My wife and three daughters simply don’t understand, but I’m okay with that.

Interview by:

Brett McKenzie
Chief Writer, SBN2
ihaveanidea

Creative Director
Dentsu, Tokyo

A good friend of mine always says that “Living in Tokyo is the closest you’ll to get to living on another planet”.

While the accuracy of that statement is debatable, it made me realize that ihaveanidea’s considerable interview vault had yet to include someone from the land of the rising sun.

Masako is the first female Creative Director at advertising giant Dentsu and one of the most recognizable faces in the Japanese ad industry. When her company wanted to teach the world about the diversity of the Asian advertising scene at last summer’s Cannes Lions Festival, they choose her to represent her country alongside China’s Carol Lam and Thailand’s Jureeporn Thaidumrong. She’s a regular feature on the award show circuit, having sat numerous times on the One Show, Clio, ADC and Cannes juries, and has recieved quite the collection of local and international accolades for her work.  When she’s not busy making commercials for the likes of Toyota, Coca-Cola or Thai Airways, Masako gives lectures at the local university.

ihaveanidea dusts off the old space suit and makes the long journey to Tokyo to hear about her career and learn a thing or two about the Japanese ad industry.

ihaveanidea: When and how did you decide you didn’t want to pursue your law studies and would rather embark on a career making ads instead?

Masako: I kept this a secret for a very long time. It only came out a few months ago actually, and even my own colleagues didn’t know about this fact.

You need some background about the Japanese employment system first. It’s a little bit different from other countries’ as most companies only hire graduate students and then train them with their corporate culture. So as you can imagine, job interviews are kind of a big deal! It’s a movement among students and everybody goes at the same time.

Dentsu was really popular among students but I didn’t know anything about them at the time, and was very curious to understand why. So I did some research and it looked to me like a job where you could touch people’s hearts with other people’s money. I was really interested in that system! They were going to pay us to come up with ideas. It sounded amazing. I became very serious about entering this company, and if you have a strong will, you can do everything. So I went to interview there. The queue on interview day circled around the building. I was astonished and I couldn’t wait to find out what it was all about.

“I caught hell from my boss … and had to write a letter of apology”

The Equal Employment Opportunities law had just been installed a few years before that, and Dentsu, and all other Japanese companies opened their gates to female students, so it was the right time for me to graduate I guess.

Now back to the reason why I wanted to be a lawyer!

I’ve always been very good at solving other people’s problems, ever since I was a kid. Ever since kindergarden actually. Everybody, including my teacher would tell me their problems and I’d help them figure out the answers. I’m a very easy person to speak to. I don’t know why, but everybody always felt comfortable asking me for advice. So I thought that I might choose something like for my future and went to the law department in university. It was also one of the most difficult programs to enter so my parents were happy about that. At the time I was fascinated by some TV shows like Ally McBeal, so that influenced me as well (laughs).
But what really turned me off law was that some lawyers I spoke to, told me most women usually work on divorce problems and other smaller issues. I was interested in the bigger stuff and it was made clear I wouldn’t be handling that. Keep in mind this was 20 years ago; it was a very closed society at the time.

On the contrary, the Dentsu employee I spoke to told me they didn’t have many female employees, and no female creatives but they were looking to change that. So it was almost the same conditions, but they were very welcoming and open to change. So I thought it would be the best decision for me, and I decided my life that way.

A few years ago my parents asked me if I was happy doing what I am doing right now or if I regretted not having pursued the lawyer thing, and told them I was very happy. I have no regrets at all. It’s a tough job, but it’s very fun also. Plus, lawyers go on very few business trips. No Cannes. No Las Vegas (for LIA judging). No anything! (laughs)

But I guess if I had to make a bridge between being a lawyer and a creative, it would be that both our jobs are about giving our clients some kind of solution to make them happy.

ihaveanidea: You’ve worked at one agency for your whole career which you’ll admit is quite rare for most creatives. Is there anything that would make you jump ships?

Masako: In Japan people tend to stick around for a long time. Although I have to say that has changed in the last couple of years, you see people doing more of the proverbial agency hopping. Normally we have a life-long employee system. I am very happy to be here, I think Dentsu is the best place to work at in Japan.

ihaveanidea: Would you like to work outside Japan?

Masako: I only recently started to pay attention to what’s going on in other countries to be honest, so if I have a chance to work overseas I might move, but I am not sure. I am a very latecomer to the international market, and I am also a very passive person actually. My life is a life of reaction, so I am not sure if it’s something I would go after.

ihaveanidea: I’ve heard there’re 800 odd creatives working at Dentsu, is that true?

Masako: Yes. 800 in Tokyo. I am one of the creative directors and right now I have 50-60 people in my team as I handle 6 or 7 accounts. But remember that we have more than a thousand clients. Some of them are smaller obviously, but we do have a lot!

ihaveanidea: Another thing you guys are kind of famous for is celebrity endorsement and the huge cachet western stars command. How do you think it became such a common thing to use?

Masako: I think it cannot be helped because we have so many products. For example, if you go into any convenience store, you can find around 40 to 50 different kinds of green tea. It’s insane. So the most effective way to get your product noticed is to use a celebrity endorser. The fact that most Japanese TVC are only 15 seconds also doesn’t help, so it’s very important to recognize the product quickly.

I don’t like endorsements so much to be honest with you, although I do like celebrities (laughs). In most cases I don’t use it, but there was this instance where a female actress that was assigned to a brand wanted me as Creative Director so I had to do it. Maybe she felt more comfortable because I am also a woman.

“it looked to me like a job where you could touch people’s hearts with other people’s money”

ihaveanidea: Rumours going around the internet have you as a big big Tottenham Hotspur fan.is that true?

Masako: Not Tottenham, Chelsea! I really like Frank Lampard.

Actually my love for football is tied into my advertising career. I first took interest in it because of Michel Platini.

When I was freshman at Dentsu and working in the PR division, one of our clients, the Drug Addict Prevention Center, wanted to organise a new PR event. I proposed they’d invite Platini to Japan to talk about drugs’ dreadful consequences with young Japanse people. I knew he had his own rehab clinic in France, so I thought he’d be a great fit. I negotiated with him myself via phone and fax (no email at that time). I had to be reckless, but fortunately both him and the client agreed to do it.  When he came to Japan I attended him for the whole week and he kept telling me how football was great and even whispered which games and goals are worth watching (Top secret!). He also took the RAI uno, Italian TV team with him to make his own program featuring Japanese martial arts like Judo and Kendo, while he was here.  I had to organize everything for him, so as you can imagine, I didn’t get much sleep during those times!

“our jobs are about giving our clients some kind of solution to make them happy.”

When he went back to France, I watched videos with his direction many many times and became fascinated with the sport. I had my Royal road and a short cut to a football manager’s job. If I were a man!  A few months later I was asked to promote billboards at his retirement match in Nancy, France to Japanese companies and sell broadcast rights to Japanese TV stations.  I was just a freshman and that Dentsu has a bunch of specialists for sports business, so I tried to ask the professional in my agency to do what was very much a “mission impossible” instead of me.  But Platini said “No, definitely no. The reason I asked you is because I believe in you.  If you don’t, I will ask another agency in Japan”. So I set my teeth and I made it with many other people’s help and advice.  Eventually Platini was very happy with the result and my agency got a lot of profit, but I caught hell from my boss (He came very close to firing me) and had to write a letter of apology. I was – still am - so reckless. Since then, I’ve done tons of TVCs with football scenes and also done spots for the World Cup.  Some people say “Masako’s work is easy to recognize because there’re lots of football scenes”.

ihaveanidea: Can you make parallels between the job you have and that of a footballer or a manager?

Masako: I think how you manage and encourage your team is quite similar. When I am stuck on a problem I always read great football players’ books for inspiration and courage. I also like to watch great goals compilations before a big pitch, it helps put me in the right mood to win! My favourite goal is Johan Cruyff’s goal in 1974.

ihaveanidea: Japan always does very very well at all the award shows especially in the mobile and interactive categories. Could you tell us about some of the trends you can see coming in these mediums?

Masako: You’ve got to understand the mobile market is quite different in Japan. Most people watch dramas and TV series on their phones so there’s a bigger need to make ads for that medium. It’s a very important medium for us.

We have a different media consumption than most countries. For example, instead of  YouTube, Japanese people prefer a site called NicoNico Douga.  It’s also a video sharing site, but it allows comments to be overlaid directly into the video. Viewers can comment directly as things happen in the video. I don’t think it’d be very popular in other countries since people tend not to like other peoples’ comments, but Japanese people like those kinds of interactions.

Sites like Facebook, Myspace and Twitter also aren’t so popular. I’m on Facebook, but I noticed that a lot of Japanese people don’t like to register on there. The main reason is that our English tends not to be the best. We also have a very typical Japanese social network called Mixi that’s kind of a mixture of Facebook and Twitter. Most people in their 20s and 30s use it.

ihaveanidea: Is there a campaign that really caught your eyes in the last year or so? Something that made you really jealous?

Masako: The Great Schlep from Droga5. I was very interested in the presidential campaign in the US as I’ve already worked for the former prime minister here. I was very curious to see how the campaign worked. The idea to get kids to convince their grand parents to vote for Obama was brilliant, and it was pretty cheap too. Very little money, and great results.

“We have a different media consumption than most countries.”

ihaveanidea: What about some campaigns from Japan?

Masako:  The Melody Road, a safety awareness campaign for Dunlop Tires. To prevent drivers from speeding, they made a road that plays a nice melody when the car goes past 40 km/h on a long and winding road in the Nagano prefecture.  By making a groove on the road, a melody will be played by the friction. It was a joint campaign between the Agency, Dunlop, the road construction company and the local town.

I was also impressed by the Love Distance campaign for condoms that won this a PR Lion and a Film Lion in Cannes this year.

ihaveanidea: Who do you think is going to win the Premier League? What about the Champions League?

Masako: For the Premier League, Chelsea definitely . For the Champions League, if Cristiano Ronaldo gets on well with his teammates, I’d have to say Real Madrid.

Interview by:
Rafik Belmesk
Operations, AKOS
ihaveanidea