To commemorate its 50th anniversary, which comes upon us in December, SHOOT continues a special series of features that will run through 2010 in which noted creatives, executives and artists reflect on the changes they’ve seen over the decades, as well as the essential dynamics that have endured. These folks additionally share their visions, concerns and aspirations for the future.
In our first four series installments, we tapped into the insights of: Lee Clow of Media Arts, TBWA Worldwide, and TBWA/Media Arts Lab; Robert Greenberg of R/GA; Rich Silverstein of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners; Dan Wieden of Wieden+Kennedy; Susan Credle of Leo Burnett; Stephen Dickstein of The Sweet Shop; former Interpublic Group CEO Phil Geier; editor/director Larry Bridges of Red Car; and directors Bob Giraldi of Giraldi Media, Joe Pytka of PYTKA, Noam Murro of Biscuit Filmworks, and the legendary Joe Sedelmaier.
This time around, we garner observations from Tony Granger, global chief creative officer of Young & Rubicam; Kevin Roddy, chief creative officer, Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), New York; and Kristi VandenBosch, CEO of Publicis & Hal Riney.
Granger joined Y&R in May 2008 after five years at Saatchi & Saatchi, first as CCO in its London office and then transferring to the New York shop where he helped drive a creative renaissance. In ’07, Saatchi became International Agency of the Year at both the Cannes and Clio Festivals, and was ranked the number two agency worldwide by the Gunn Report.
Roddy began his role as CCO at BBH NY in ’04, and during his tenure has advanced the agency into new creative territories, underscored by such work as The Gamekillers series on MTV for client AXE, a YouTube sensation “Tea Party” video for Smirnoff Raw Tea, and the launch of the Oasis album “Dig Out Your Soul” via a grass-roots campaign entailing NYC street musicians performing in public their renditions of the songs on the album before its release,
VandenBosch joined Publicis & Hal Riney in ’09, becoming one of the first CEOs of a “traditional” ad agency drawn from a non-traditional background. She led a regional network for TBWA Worldwide, as North American president of digital agency TEQUILA.
Tony Granger “The agency of yesterday thought that everything needed to be solved by a brand anthem. The ‘Big TV Idea’ governed everything. And that worked really well when TV was the all-powerful medium. But today, this approach often leads to ‘matching luggage,’ meaning what worked for TV was being forced into other formats, diluting agencies’ ability to master the media it had to work with.”
Today, continued Granger, “Our multi-platform, digital world now demands an idea that creates a desired brand experience. Whether online, off line, in line–we can’t think ‘top/down,’ but ‘bottom/up.’ A great brand today looks more like a Chuck Close painting, with lots of small pixels making up the brand portrait, which must be continually refreshed. It requires constant focus, listening, tracking and responding, or you simply have a bunch of tactics and cool stuff.”
Granger noted that in “Twitter-time, brand equity moves at light speed (just ask Toyota, Blippy or Blockbuster). Yet so many of the tools we use in market research and in the way we plan campaigns assume an idea is like a statue in a square. (If you build a brand this way, remember what pigeons do to statues!) Instead, our industry is evolving to a more nimble and fluid way of thinking; rather than campaigns, we think about the brand in culture. We need to constantly tack like a sailboat to seize on moments and exploit competitive opportunities. For this reason I like things like bitly.tv, which tells you what online videos are trending at this moment. And I like many of the other leaders of the ‘real time web’ like Twitter, Tumblr and Gowalla, because they remind us to keep it fresh and change it up constantly. The digital world can be very powerful, but it can also be very destructive–work that ticks all the boxes in consumer research groups but doesn’t touch the soul is hopelessly irrelevant.”
Change is constant, including for those dynamics seemingly in vogue. “Honestly, who knows if Facebook will reign two years from now? Two years ago blogging was king, but today ninety percent of blogs are abandoned. That’s why we have to constantly experiment and not be ashamed of ‘tactics.’ Because sometimes a great tactic becomes a great strategy. Think about Hyundai’s ‘buyer reassurance program’–lose your job, return the car. A tactic that helped the company grow twenty percent in a dismal automotive market in 2008-’09.
“In this technology and social driven world, brands have to be transparent,” he observed. “The rapid rise of social media sites have taken the oldest form of communication–word of mouth–and made it arguably the most powerful. Today, we don’t market to consumers, we market with them. The impact of simple product ratings cannot be underestimated. It’s hard to imagine buying anything without first reading what others think today. The challenge for marketers going forward is not just to assemble a social network for a brand, but to learn how to harness that power and help activate it in a positive manner. No small task.”
Transparency, though, is good. “Companies can no longer hide their dirty laundry,” related Granger. “They have to do the right thing regarding how they treat the environment, how they make their products and what they put into them (especially into food). Women are the dominant force in up to ninety percent of all purchase decisions. They spend a lot of time online researching you and your product. They had better feel good about you. The proof is in performance, so brands that connect with inspiring innovation, design and communications are the ones that will thrive.
“Today,” continued Granger, “we have great crowdsourcing technology like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and Behance. There is access to a myriad of talent to experiment with. Now, some of that crowdsourced talent isn’t right and isn’t great, but often the quality is amazing and this opens us up to working in different formats and media. As Susan Boyle (Britain’s Got Talent) taught us, don’t write off the amateur. This is now a Pro-Am world.
Paradoxically, in an ever evolving marketplace, Granger finds deep relevance in an observation made some 86 years ago. “While I was searching for Y&R‘s DNA,” he recalled, “I found a line that Ray Rubicam wrote in 1924: ‘Resist the Usual.’ He encouraged people to be ‘Anti-Usualists.’ This really resonated with me. I thought, if there ever was a time for our agency and our clients to resist the usual, it’s now.”
Kevin Roddy “This business has changed in almost every way–in terms of advertising’s relationship with consumers, consumers’ relationship with brands, agencies’ relationships with clients, the process of working–I could go on and on,” said BBH’s Roddy. “This business, though, is at its best when it is led by creative people. If you believe that, then creatives have to be the first to embrace and lead change. It must start up top with creative directors.”
But the top hasn’t always been quick to adapt, with some choosing to stay within the confines of what is familiar and putting everything new off to the side, if not outright ignoring it.
“A lot of creative leaders struggled,” related Roddy. “I will be perfectly honest. At first, I got pretty damn scared. It’s the fear of irrelevancy, the world passing you by. But what I recognized is there’s something here I don’t know how to do. Back when change was taking hold, I had never written a single thing that had to do with the web. I was one of those creative leaders who didn’t grow up in this environment. I grew up in TV. My career had been built on a one-way conversation. And now consumers were given a voice, a role, and interactivity emerged.
“What I had to do was recognize that I could no longer ‘control’ the situation and that I needed help,” continued Roddy, “My job is to help things get better. I needed to bring people in who knew how to do this and who would do it with me. I learned and continue to learn. The work has gotten better. Have I controlled the work the same way as I had in the past? No. Have I been the puppet master? Not at all. I still have a level of decision making but it’s in a different context.”
That context, though, is still essential and enduring. Even with constant change, there are constants that remain, core values that are imperative–the art of storytelling, of respecting an audience’s intelligence and giving consumers something of value.
“Regardless of how the world has changed, I can always see a good idea. I can help tell a story no matter what means we use to distribute it. You will always need creative talent to come up with the idea and make it great. That won’t change. It’s just not as simple as it used to be. And it goes beyond getting interactive on the web. The most interesting stuff is bigger than any medium. The Oasis campaign is a perfect example of what excites me. It’s creative thinking that wasn’t constrained by media. There are so many ways to connect with people.”
Asked to define his role as CCO, Roddy observed, “It’s more important for me to set the stage for all the talent here to do great stuff. It’s not necessarily about me putting my thumb print on every piece of work. It’s more about how I create an environment that allows good stuff to happen. I’m looking to break down some of the walls this agency and every agency has around it. Again, it’s about getting away from the idea that we control the world. I want to set the stage within BBH to say we have the capabilities to do X, Y and Z. But I also know that A, B and C are very important and we may need to find those people externally so that we can tap into them. The world is changing too fast for me to bring it all into BBH. You could never keep up and it would cost too much.
“We need to create relationships with who’s best in class outside of BBH,” continued Roddy. “This industry is way too siloed. We have to be willing to share revenue, ideas, to share people. The idea is to win here. It’s not about who gets the most credit, the shiny Pencils, the most money. It’s the idea. Whatever will make the idea great has to be most important. Today that means BBH can’t control everything and I don’t want to try. I see my job as getting the walls down. People you normally consider competitors, maybe you have to stop thinking of them in that way. They may have expertise I don’t have and don’t want to have but that I need. I’ve been spending a massive amount of time seeking out these people and resources–and I have people helping me do that. It’s going to change our output significantly.”
Kristi VandenBosch Kristi VandenBosch is a member of a small club, breaking new ground for digerati when she became one of the first to transition from leading a digital agency, as North American president of TEQUILA, to taking the helm of a “traditional” ad agency, the venerable Publicis & Hal Riney where she has served as CEO since May 2009.
“I’d followed the agency since I was an art director, working out of Detroit in the 1980s,” related VandenBosch. “I knew all about the epic film work, the iconic voice of Hal [Riney]–it was like hearing God talking to you through your TV. I thought I knew everything there was to know about this agency.”
Much to her surprise, VandenBosch said she found a company that had gelled into a quick, clever, funny, downright playful organization, extending its brand of storytelling into digital channels, not because they thought it was cool to show that they “got” digital, but because the creative department naturally behaved that way, and believed that brands should, too.
“Riney has brilliant instincts. It’s a very self-aware organization–it knew what it was, and was open to having me help shape what it could become.”
One of VandenBosch’s first hires was Julie Liss as chief strategy officer. She formerly served as head of account planning at TBWAChiatDay, L.A. Liss teamed with VandenBosch to form a partnership with CCO Roger Camp (a veteran of W+K, Fallon and Cliff Freeman), and the three began to codify the offerings of the “new” Riney.
The process began of looking within, she said. “How did we, as an agency, solve problems? What inspired us? How did we interact with one another, and our clients? How could we make our creative product less dogmatic, more relevant, more instrumental to a brand’s success?”
VandenBosch recalled, “We ran a Field Day workshop–one of the tools we use for clientSãon ourselves, and included every single person who worked at Riney. We needed to understand the role our past played in our future, and what we aspired to be.”
An interesting outcome of the Field Day was the agency embracing the role that “play” had in its culture and creative product. And as a group, they began to consider how this simple truth might become a way forward for Riney.
“The nature of ‘play’ is something we gravitated to, from both the planning and creative side. Play is the beginning of true knowledge. It lets us solve problems from different perspectives, to look at things in a new light.
“We talk about what ‘play’ is, and what it’s not–for example, ‘play’ lets you be unapologetic in the process of creation. But it’s not frivolous or irresponsible. It’s a natural way to learn, through the process of making and doing. It’s how insight unfolds. But perhaps one of the most important tenets of ‘play’ is that it’s always best when done with others. Let’s face it, we’re a society of gamers–not just video-game gamers, but people who interact every day with metagames, often without realizing it. They use Mint to manage their financial life, and FourSquare to ‘collect’ recognition for their everyday behaviors, and have never read a manual for their iPod. As a culture, the tools of technologies we embrace most readily are grounded in ‘play.'”
VandenBosch continued, “It’s such a perfect parallel for how we steward brands today. Every ‘traditional’ agency is scrambling for digital cred. But they’re missing the larger point. It’s not about digital for digital’s sake. We need to understand how actions connect with one another. Sure, digital is a huge enabler of that, but these connections happen in the real world, in retail stores, when you interact with packaging, when you use a product, when you talk to someone about a brand you love. If we’re to be really, really good stewards of a brand, we’re always thinking about how actions connect–asking ourselves the question: ‘And then what happens?’ This is fundamental to both digital design and game theory, and in our minds, a great thing to explore through the tools of play.”
Riney’s adoption of “play as a process” has led to new ways of thinking about content, form, information and interaction. “It’s less about what you could do, and more about what you should do. We look at how brands play in the world, the people who play with them, and how those interactions are created and managed to achieve the brand’s objectives for success.” VandenBosch smiled, “These are amazing times for brands that play well with others.”
Click here to read Part I of this series. Hear from…
Lee Clow, chief creative officer/global director, Media Arts, TBWA Worldwide, and chairman, TBWA/Media Arts Lab
Bob Giraldi, award-winning director, Giraldi Media
Larry Bridges, director/editor & founder, Red Car
Robert Greenberg, chairman/CEO/global chief creative officer, R/GA
Click here to read Part II of this series. Hear from…
Rich Silverstein, co-chairman/creative director, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco
Stephen Dickstein, global president/managing partner, The Sweet Shop
Phil Geier, former Interpublic Group CEO and current chairman, The Geier Group, New York
Click here to read Part III of this series. Hear from…
Joe Pytka, award-winning director, PYTKA
Bryan Buckley, award-winning director, Hungry Man
Joe Sedelmaier, ground-breaking director
Click here to read Part IV of this series. Hear from…
Dan Wieden, founder and CEO, Wieden+Kennedy
Susan Credle. chief creative officer, Leo Burnett North America
Noan Murro, award-winning director Noam Murro, Biscuit Filmworks, Los Angeles
Click here to read Part VI of this series. Hear from…
David Lubars, chairman/chief creative officer, BBDO North America
Jon Kamen, chairman & CEO, @radical.media
Stefan Sonnenfeld. president/managing director, Company 3 & oversees features and commercials business, Ascent Media’s Creative Services
