Rick Williams and Marcel Yunes, longtime creative partners who most recently served as executive creative directors at R/GA NY, have teamed to launch fable.works, which they describe as “an entertainment incubator for brands.”
Williams and Yunes’ fable is rooted in what they contend is the marketplace reality that people generally don’t like ads and can look elsewhere to get to what they want. As their website states, “the reason the best ads don’t look like ads is because they aren’t.” Thus fable.works sees brands as part of the entertainment industry and will look to partner with platforms, showrunners, TikTok creators, innovators and “storytellers of all stripes.” This will lend itself to “shape-shifting to weave ideas into the fabric of culture. Because brands are only as powerful as the stories they tell.”
Williams and Yunes have a track record of engaging storytelling–honed over a decade together at BBDO NY, two years at R/GA NY, and freelancing for W+K, Netflix and Mischief, among others. Over the years, Yunes and Williams have created for clients including AT&T, Bud Light, Ally Bank, HBO’s Game of Thrones and True Blood.
Among the creative duo’s most notable work is Procter & Gamble’s “The Talk,” for which Yunes and Williams served as creative directors during their BBDO tenure. Winner of such honors as the primetime commercial Emmy as well as a Film Grand Prix at Cannes in 2018, the P&G piece–directed by Malik Vitthal of The Corner Shop–features different African-American parents having “The Talk” with their kids about racial bias and how it can make life more difficult, and at times even more dangerous. In one of this film’s most poignant moments, a girl behind the wheel of a car insists she’s a good driver and her mom doesn’t need to tell her what to do if she gets pulled over. The girl has no intention of getting pulled over because she obeys the speed limit and the rules of the road. Mom doesn’t doubt that but she has to explain to her daughter, “This is not about getting a ticket. This is about you not coming home.”
In the spirit of work such as that, Williams and Yunes pledge that from day one at their new independent creative shop, “We’ll be as diverse as the stories we tell, championing important causes, throwing our hats into politics when it’s right, setting out to be a B-Corp, using any opportunity we can to do good out there with the talents and connections we’re so lucky to have.”
