Ronny Northrop was worried that he might end up hating real-world advertising after majoring and earning his undergrad degree in that discipline at the University of Florida. So after working at a little inhouse agency where he turned out what he described as “crappy catalogs,” Northrop put off taking the next step in his ad career in order to take on life experiences. He was a professional drummer, a bartender, an apple picker, a fisherman’s guide, an appliance delivery man and primarily a low-budget world traveler as his work in a band took him to varied locales.
But finally Northrop realized that he had to commit–albeit with trepidation–to the advertising field that continued to intrigue him. So he enrolled at The Ad Center at Virginia Commonwealth University. “I was fortunate in that the founding faculty had come together there with [noted creative] Jelly Helm and I got a great education.”
Northrop went on to land an art director’s gig at New York agency Dweck where he enjoyed a year-and-a-half stay. But then 9/11 happened, the agency folded and Northrop returned to Florida. Fortuitously he got a chance to help Crispin Porter+Bogusky, Miami, with its Ikea pitch and on the strength of his performance got hired as an art director there, later making the transition to copywriter.
During his four years at Crispin, he worked on such accounts as Burger King, MINI, Molson Canadian, Virgin Atlantic, Giro helmets and the American Legacy Foundation’s “truth” campaign.
Then California beckoned and Northrop went over to Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, San Francisco, where his credits include serving as copywriter for S.F. Connect’s “Volunteering is Sexy” campaign, associate interactive creative director for the got milk? GetTheGlass.com campaign and now group creative director for the Sprint account.
SHOOT: You’ve had the good fortune to work at two of the industry’s leading creative shops in Crispin and Goodby. What did you take from your experience at Crispin?
Northrop: I learned so much there. For one, Alex Bogusky realized I wasn’t the greatest art director in the world–and I wasn’t. I was more of a painter and drawer, not that great a designer. While most of the time your boss coming to that conclusion would mean the end of your career at the agency, Alex suggested I try writing. Crispin is that kind of place. It recognizes your talent and hard work and opens up other opportunities for you. I had written most of the ideas in my book at school and he saw I could come up with good ideas. Once I became a writer there, I never looked back.
I also gained from being at Crispin because they were one of the first to integrate campaigns. While it doesn’t seem like a revelation today, putting the idea before media was huge back then. We simply looked for the best solution and that’s how you can end up immersing a brand into the culture in relevant ways. Just look at Burger King’s “Subservient Chicken,” which showed the industry how interactive can generate attention in the marketplace and give a new dimension to a brand.
SHOOT: You’ve been at Goodby for a couple of years, during a stretch when the agency seemed to reinvent itself and successfully diversify into interactive. Would you reflect on how the agency has evolved?
Northrop: The press reported on it like it was an overnight transition. But under Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein, it’s been more of an organic process. The change wasn’t overnight. They were smart enough to bring in people who knew interactive. Now more than half of what we do is interactive. We just don’t know how to charge for it all. But even in work that doesn’t have a big formal interactive piece, it’s important to think in terms of engaging people with content that they want to seek out. The S.F. Connect work, which I was a writer on, is about the most proud I am of any work I’ve been involved in. The goal was to get people to devote a day to volunteering in the community. Jeff Goodby set the tone in that he wanted us to explore how you can make this something that people want to be a part of. We didn’t want yet another invisible, let’s make people feel guilty public service campaign. We came up with “Volunteering is Sexy.” T-shirts carrying that slogan were on sale in boutiques throughout San Francisco. I like to think of it as more of a movement than a campaign. In the TV we wanted to convey and celebrate the inner beauty in a wide range of people in San Francisco. When you give of yourself, you feel good and look good.
SHOOT: What about the more formal interactive work that you’ve done at Goodby. What stands out for you?
Northrop: The team of Pat McKay and Feh Tarty, the lead art director and copywriter on got milk?, has done great work, including the website based on the Aliens/Cow Abduction fully integrated campaign that showcased the benefits of milk, the “magic” health elixir that aliens from outer space covet. The site raised awareness of “cow abduction,” we showed evidence of it–cow bells in a field of grass–which prompted people to post their “evidence.” We had a cow-crow [scarecrow-like creature] diagram to help people scare off alien abductors. We worked with the North Kingdom guys from Sweden, those mad website makers, who also did the currently running GetTheGlass with us.
SHOOT: You were associate creative director on GetTheGlass, in which commercials about a family seeking “the glass” drive viewers to a website with a board game through which they pursue that family’s quest. And now you’re group creative director–along with Franklin Tipton and Christian Haas–on Sprint. You seem to have made a fast ascent at Goodby.
Northrop: There’s been a lot of opportunities for me here in just two years. To advance in that short a time, to have doors open for you, is gratifying.
But there’s a lot of work. Three months of no days off and five presentations in Kansas City helped to land Sprint. That’s how I became a group creative director.
SHOOT: Discuss the Sprint pitch.
Northrop: Online wasn’t supposed to be included in the pitch. But right out of the gate we said, “Let’s do some great interactive stuff in this pitch. If they want Goodby, that’s who we are.” The only way you can succeed is with an integrated approach so everything we did had an interactive component.
SHOOT: And that has now translated into Waitless.org.
Northrop: We saw an opportunity in the telecom space. There’s so much negativity–to me, “fewest dropped calls” is like a restaurant saying it has the fewest cases of e-coli, or a power company saying it has the fewest blackouts. We instead opted to celebrate the technology, a joyous interaction with technology that moves at the speed of light. Sprint speed is our special turbo sauce. With a 7 p.m. start to free calling, you don’t have to wait, you save time and when you go to waitless.org, you find other ways to fast forward through the boring parts of life, with estimates of how much time you can save doing certain things. “Sprintcuts” featured on the site show you how to quick peel a hard boiled egg [saving four days of your life], or how a beach-goer can instantly remove wet sand from his or her body. These tips can be shared via email and now we’ve just started offering visitors the chance to share their user-generated Sprintcuts, to do their part to help the world wait less.
