How did you discover your passion for advertising and learn the skills to enter the industry? It was a pretty straight path, coming from Syracuse University with a fine arts degree and a focus on advertising design. There’s something in my DNA that likes toiling; if there’s a harder way to do things, I’m going to go that route. Advertising is good for that because of the endless possibilities on how to solve a communication problem with creativity. Creative inspiration is all around us. Whether there’s a word that inspires you or a phrase, art style or specific artist, there are just so many different ways to do it. The more experience you have, the more you know how to channel and flow with the creative process. You know when to abandon things and when to stick with things, and you do get a little better.
When you’re first starting out, there is a little bit of paralyzing fear. “Stuck gets stucker,” as my old professor used to say. How do you work through it? I think the more you’re in the business, the more you work at it and the more you understand it.
What do you do in your role as chief creative director and partner at social impact agency WRTHY? Primarily, my job is to make sure that the caliber of all our work is the best it can be. It’s thought that agencies are supposed to have this “25 percent rule” for good creative shops, meaning that 25 percent of your work should be top notch. At WRTHY, we really try to have everything we do be the best it can be, so I’m really mindful of that. With some of the budgets we work with, it’s tough to produce the caliber of work we want and work with the people we want. But because we’re working on meaningful issues, there’s a real selling point to that: people want to be part of positive things and make a difference.
When I worked at bigger agencies, I would try to get on issue-based or nonprofit briefs, but that wasn’t obviously the bulk of what the agency did. The nice thing about WRTHY is this is all we do. We don’t sell anything; it’s about taking on complex social problems and getting to something sharp and simple we can communicate.
What are examples of WRTHY campaigns that had a small budget and a huge execution? What steps did you take to deliver something that felt like it had a larger budget? During the height of the COVID pandemic, we developed an effort for ONE Organization to combat all the crazy politicking, misinformation and nuttiness we were hearing at the time. Who we weren’t hearing from were the people that had the most knowledge about pandemics. ONE had this incredible roster of experts that were open to being vocal. These included experts across global health like doctors, frontline health workers, scientists, economists and government officials all over the world—an incredible resource, but nobody really knows these people. So, our idea was to take celebrity social channels and hand them over to these experts. That way, they could reach millions and have really informative discussions about COVID. It was a really simple idea.
Coming from ad agencies trying to work with celebrities, you always have your wish list; it’s almost impossible to work with them, and there are all kinds of complications. For this campaign, we went out to sixteen big names, and then it suddenly just steamrolled into about 45—more celebrities than we could handle. To name a few, we had Millie Bobby Brown, Hugh Jackman, Julia Roberts, Zach Quinto, Sarah Jessica Parker and Tessa Thompson—all this incredible talent handing over their accounts to people like Dr. Larry Brilliant, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Dr. Ngozi and Dr. Craig Spencer, among so many others. It was inspiring—taking a big world problem and giving it a simple solution, and then seeing the amount of high-caliber interest and involvement in the idea. All on a small budget.
Another reference would be our campaign to protect children from online sexual exploitation and abuse for ChildFund International. Our clients had the patience to hold off on launching a campaign because they believed in an idea that would require more production than their budget allowed. The campaign was called Take It Down, and it was a public pressure campaign to get the United States Congress to regulate Big Tech and remove child sexual abuse material from their platforms. ChildFund put the campaign on ice for six months while raising the additional funds needed to produce it. During this time, we shored up our production partners. It was an incredible partnership that enabled us to make a big campaign with what started as a modest budget. In addition to the PSA, we produced a documentary series, a website and other digital components. We made some noise and gave people a way to take action at the same time. We had a creative attention-grabbing piece first, and then the more educated pieces of experts explaining why Big Tech needs to do more to remove sexual abuse material from their servers.
What would you say makes an effective public service campaign? I think we know we’re on the right track by the response we get from organizations involved in that specific issue. Positive feedback shows the idea has some traction. Where you might expect some pushback, these organizations surprisingly respond to work that doesn’t feel like it belongs to a nongovernment organization (NGO). For example, there was a concern that Take It Down could come off a little harsh. However, the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with so many NGOs joining to support the campaign.
The other measure of success is breakthrough—like any branding effort, you’re in a competitive environment. You’d think these terrible issues we’re all grappling with merit immediate attention. But there are so many social ills where people are attached to one issue or another. How do you get them to pay attention to your specific issue? How do you engage them to take action? How are you using that action to influence legislation and policymakers as well? So, press and attention—they really make all the difference.
Tell me more about Project Dandelion, an initiative to tackle the climate crisis that WRTHY is participating in. Our belief is that the climate crisis is a communication crisis. What we really need to do is combat all the misinformation from fossil fuel companies, unite the public, and pressure policymakers to be accountable for the promises they’ve made but aren’t delivering on. Connected Women Leaders, a network of women leaders addressing global challenges, came to us to develop Project Dandelion—led by former Irish president Mary Robinson—to rally people around the world to make some noise.
Was Project Dandelion created in response to António Guterres’s remarks at COP29, asking ad agencies to drop fossil fuel companies? The initiative launched a bit before the remarks, but we all celebrated when we heard it. I think Project Dandelion is a good model for other climate initiatives as well. Don’t celebrate lone activists or create single activist campaigns; instead, figure out how to unite people and organizations. Look at fossil fuel companies—they all get together and spend billions to create an entity that they’re all speaking under, repeating the same talking points. We can learn from that.
What helps WRTHY be relevant gets back to what I was saying earlier on about tackling tough issues. It comes down to developing meaningful work for organizations who are dedicated to making a positive difference in people’s lives.”
Have any public service campaigns changed your perception of what you can do in advertising? Another campaign for ONE, titled Pandemica, followed Pass the Mic after celebrities wanted to be involved in the next evolution. At that point, we were well into the vaccine stage of the pandemic, but the rollout was not going well. All the conversations were around vaccine equity. The idea was to leverage celebrity voices to talk about the inequality of vaccine access around the world and how the rich countries were stockpiling vaccines. How would we alert the public to what’s happening again around the world?
It was clear that the pandemic was not going to end anywhere until it ended everywhere, or else it would continue to circulate around the globe. So, we took that sentiment and created an animated series called Pandemica. It was a concept that didn’t require getting celebrities into studios; it only required talent to record simple dialog lines on their smartphones, and we took those to produce a whole series of shorts. Because of the level of celebrity and the subversive tone of the series, the press was significant and global, creating discussions in many different countries.
Another is LifePack. The Eleanor Crook Foundation, a US philanthropy fighting to end global malnutrition, came to us with a problem that required a new funding model specifically amassing more funds to help end childhood malnutrition. The organization wanted to increase funding to produce ready-to-eat therapeutic food (RUTFs), which is a similar to peanut butter. It’s a heavy-duty protein that’s inexpensive to create and distribute. The effect is kind of miraculous, as far as how it puts weight on malnourished infants and children. Our approach was to recruit gaming companies to create some kind of in-game mechanism that could raise funds for RUTF and the organizations Eleanor Crook works with. It gave the gaming industry an interesting social impact story to tell and a new way to engage influencer gamers. There were in-game purchases where a portion of the proceeds went to LifePack, a subsidiary of the Eleanor Crook Foundation that we created, named and branded, as well as charity gaming events and benefits. It was a simple solution to combat a huge problem—malnutrition, the number one killer of children around the world.
One theme I’ve identified in all these projects is that you work on connecting people who want to help raise awareness of issues and establishing relationships. How do you find establish these networks and keep them strong? We have to show that WRTHY is down to really put in the time and effort to make the work successful. And that is a level of issue understanding. These are complicated issues with complicated solutions. The partners have a lot of history within the impact space, and we’re generally only a few degrees of separation away from people that want to be connected. WRTHY itself comes from relationships from Bono’s organization (RED) and lobbying organization ONE, both pioneers in the social impact space. Partner and cofounder Sheila Roche and chief executive officer and cofounder Jenifer Willig worked together at (RED), and cofounder Erin Thornton was the global policy director at ONE. There were also connections in advertising where Jen and partner and founder Katie Harrison worked together at BBH, and Jen and I worked together at Chiat/Day.
A lot of our growth has come organically through all the different kinds of relationships that we’ve all had.
What trends in advertising are you interested in, and why? Jen and I don’t have kids, but we’ve obviously got a lot of kids around us in our friends and family. Seeing social media and its effects on kids, as well as how advertisers are handling it—I think it’s an interesting thing to watch. Dove has been winning some creative awards around a campaign they’ve developed to raise awareness of social media’s negative impacts on young girls. I think it is an interesting trend to keep an eye on.
Another trend I’m interested in is AI, which people can’t stop talking about. I personally don’t use it at all, but WRTHY does for strategy, landscaping and cutting some corners here and there to get quick information. It’s really helpful for that, but creatively, how it’s going to affect us and where it makes sense to deploy is to be determined. Right now, we might use it for generative high AI and comping, but I don’t really see us jumping into an AI-specific execution.
The other interesting thing is AI’s environmental impact through data servers and the massive amount of energy it requires, which means huge carbon dioxide emissions. As a result, tech companies will be even farther away from reaching any of their climate goals, specifically because of AI. That’s scary.
What is one challenge facing ad agencies right now that they need to address to remain relevant? A few years back, a really respected writer said, “I’m so embarrassed to be working in this industry.” I think he was speaking to the burnout and pointless churn that results in unsatisfactory output and what creates that kind of culture. What helps WRTHY be relevant gets back to what I was saying earlier on about tackling tough issues. It comes down to developing meaningful work for organizations who are dedicated to making a positive difference in people’s lives.
Do you have any advice for people starting out in the ad industry today? Be in an environment where you care about the work and the people you work with. ca
