Ad Icon: Chuck McBride

Chuck McBride’s distinctive work in the creative field has collected numerous awards that include 20 One Show pencils, five D&AD pencils, 21 Cannes Lions, one Emmy and 23 Clios on marquee accounts, such as adidas, Nike, Levi's, Jeep, Ray-Ban and Fox Sports. Simon Wakelin discovers – to coin McBride’s adidas verbage – “Impossible is Nothing”

Chuck McBride has shaped some of the most memorable commercials in advertising history working at many acclaimed creative agencies, such as Wieden + Kennedy, TBWAChiatDay and Goodby Silverstein & Partners (GS&P). Recognised for eclectic, fresh and vibrant advertising that challenges audience expectations and perceptions of products, McBride came to advertising quite by accident after setting his sights firmly on politics at college in San Diego, California.

“My first passion was political speech writing, so I came out of the gates focused on it becoming my career. I treated creative writing in college like a trade back then.”

It was while McBride interned at news stations to garner work experience that he fell into a job at a photography company, an experience that first opened his eyes to the potential of a career in advertising:

“I met photographers shooting print campaigns who loved what they did. They were the coolest people I’d ever met. That’s when I threw my hat in the ring and started writing copy for print ads.”

Inadvertently uncovering his calling, McBride worked tirelessly writing copy that pushed the envelope and challenged people’s assumptions of the world.

“I discovered that political speech writing and advertising were very much alike – both tap into universal truths, find things that people are looking for, yearning for or participating in.”

Those early experiences led to McBride finding creative work at his very first agency, Franklin & Associates in LA:

“It was a small shop with a fantastic team who broke the rules and made award-winning ads. At this point, I realised that advertising was just another form of persuasion. I also recognised that writing for TV was going to be the most powerful craft I could learn.”

A short stint working on the Lexus account at Team One in LA followed, as did time at Wieden + Kennedy Philadelphia before his tenure as senior copywriter at GS&P in San Francisco.

It was here that McBride began shaping some of his most memorable work, becoming part of the iconic Got Milk campaign with director Michael Bay via Propaganda Films. It was an account that allowed McBride and his team to experiment with ideas and shape advertising that had never been seen before:

“We had very small scripts that could have become incredibly small ideas, but what we loved about Michael was his ability to make everything big. We knew there could be a lot of damage done if we handed him simple scripts due to his tendency to magnify and torque the idea. We ended up using giant sets with special lenses that made small things appear very large.”

The ads were truly unique, injecting personality and character into the brand. Aptly entitled Got Milk, the team’s very first spot won gold at the Clios and a silver Lion at Cannes.

It was the beginning of what would become a bevy of awards for McBride. Asked of their importance, McBride answers that although they are not the goal, awards are still an important measuring stick for the industry as a whole:

“Awards are for ad peers to appreciate those that have created the best work in the business. They are absolutely necessary from that standpoint, but I’ve never walked into an idea wondering how it could win an award. But, like anything in the arts, it’s nice to be shown, wonderful to be purchased and pretty amazing to have your colleagues appreciate the work.”

Following his success at GS&P, McBride settled in as creative director at Foote Cone & Belding where he took on duties handling the Levi’s account until an opportunity to join W+K Portland emerged.

Heading up the agency’s Nike account, the experience taught McBride many things – including what not to do:

“There was already an amazing body of work for Nike that showed me exactly what I shouldn’t do. There was no reason to repeat what had been done before. We focused on creating something raw, changing the parameters and made something different for Nike by bringing in music to drive the idea, as opposed to the other way around.”

By this point McBride has worked with some of the best directors in the business, talent he describes as, “brush strokes on the creative canvas.”

“The entire science around production is absolutely fascinating to me. I love creating work with different directors because you inherently create something new each time. The best value for someone like me on set is to write down ideas, as I watch the event unfold. Then you get to see if slight deviations or subtle aberrations may create something better. Often the idea becomes more interesting through subtle mutations of the original script. It suddenly becomes fresh again.”

A successful run with W+K ultimately led to McBride becoming executive creative director of North America at TBWAChiatDay, a six-year spell where he handled the Sprint, Mars and adidas accounts. McBride saw the agency triple in size during his tenure, leading to conversations with Lee Clow and the formation of Cutwater, where he resides today as its founder/ECD.

“We decided to created a separate brand in San Francisco to maintain a presence there. It also offered me an opportunity to separate as a brand and build my own name.”

Cutwater has its hands full today servicing clients including Leica, Ubisoft, Jeep, adidas, Levi’s and Ray-Ban. Yet with audiences now on multiple screens across different media, hasn’t branding become far more complex than ever before? “Not necessarily,” responds McBride:

“If you take away media for a second it still comes back to captivating the viewer with a strong narrative. You have to tell a compelling story and create an adventure that builds intrigue. There is nothing like being on a roller coaster ride and not knowing where you’ll end up.”

Having serviced so many iconic brands over the years, what is it that brings the best out of him? How can he take a benign product and grace it with enough fame to make it an incredibly contagious and important thing?

“You find that common denominator, then figure out how to script it. My feeling is that if you have the stage and the microphone is in your hand you’d better bring the house down. What great ads are able to do is capture in words what needs to be said to a broad audience.”

One might expect cynicism to seep into McBride’s psyche after so many years servicing so many global brands. He is, however, as optimistic as ever:

“We eat them, drink them, participate with them as ‘consumers’ – which is a horrible word – but we need to validate brand consumption, so it’s only natural to form alliances, if not affinities, towards these publicly traded companies. Sure, they are doing their fare share of manipulation, but I have found that if you really break down their purposes you uncover a virtue, just as much as in journalism or speech writing.”

While the agency life is McBride’s bread and butter, he is still drawn to the set where the best articulations of his scripts successfully re-frame those pictures in his head, and work to make everything better.

“As much as I love the writing and business side of the creative equation, I do love the production side. I always want to be incredibly encouraging, but also outspoken because most clients don’t appreciate the amount of craft that goes into it. They stop at the storyboard and expect you to deliver.”

McBride also notes that a healthy dose of anxiety is important during any production to create memorable work:

“There should be a general sense of nervousness on set because creative meetings don’t mean shit if it doesn’t happen in front of the lens. You can put forward the best presentation in the world and get a standing ovation, but it means absolutely nothing if you can’t deliver [when the camera is on].”

While the past has graced McBride with enviable success, the future looks just as promising from his Cutwater vantage point. For McBride, the road ahead is figuring out exactly what he wants Cutwater to become and, more importantly, figuring out what an agency should be in our modern era:

“One of the challenges I have right now is taking everything I’ve learned and plugging all of that into something new. New media and multiple screens are fine because to really have a rich language you need to use multiple dialects. I’ve enjoyed coming into brand assignments where the rules of engagement have changed. It’s not so much a time slot purchase anymore because it’s not a guaranteed audience.”

Pondering the road ahead, McBride takes a moment of reflection before excitement mounts with an idea.

“I would love to do this at some point. I’d love to use a serious director on a comedy. Think about it. It would be really fascinating to see if the audience understood that artifice. There is an obvious tension between the two.”

Somehow one gets the feeling that McBride will deliver on this promise while he navigates the complexities of consumerism to better furnish his clients with the kind of branding that will make them famous.

“At the heart of it, if a brand is good at building an audience it is inherently building a consumer base as well. We just need to figure out the best ways to build up those audiences.”