David Kolbusz: The Way I See It

Newly appointed as ECD at W+K New York, David Kolbusz was previously deputy ECD at BBH London, where he worked on such witty spots as The Guardian’s Own the Weekend, and Axe/Lynx campaigns, including Lifeguard. Other work, such as Logitech’s Kevin Bacon, which he produced while at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, displays his flare for wry humour. Yet the Canadian native modestly claims that as a person he’s not actually that funny. Carol Cooper disagrees and finds that the way he sees things is…

I was born in Ottawa, Canada in 1976. Most people outside the North American subarctic don’t know this but it’s the nation’s capital, which is a real point of pride. Also, Margaret Atwood was born there.

I have a wealth of random early memories stored up. They’re environmental rather than situational. Rooms that I was in and what was in those rooms. How objects defined spaces. All breathtakingly boring stuff.

My dad was a headmaster, or high-school principal, a general term might be ‘disciplinarian’. My mother was in human resources working for the government. So you can clearly see my pathway to advertising.

My childhood was very happy. Conventional. Uneventful. I wanted for nothing. I had loving parents. If there was anything truly terrible about it, I’ve done a bang-up job burying it deep within my psyche.

At school I was good at English and the arts. Everything else was a mess. Maths, sciences, geography, history, physical education – I was hopeless at all of it.

Growing up, my ambitions saw me vacillate between every artistic discipline under the sun. Writer, actor, director, illustrator, musician – the list goes on. Anything I consumed I considered a career in. Lack of talent eliminated most professions from the running.

College was a continuation of my inability to focus. I began as a political science major, then switched to English, then film studies, then journalism. I was a good student when I applied myself, but my God was it a chore. I have an aversion to learning by listening. To this day I prefer the trial and error methodology. That said, I don’t have much patience for error.

I got into advertising when I moved to Toronto where a disproportionate amount of Canada’s film and media came from. I was freelancing as a journalist, but had no aptitude for it. I was much more interested in making stuff up than reporting facts. Advertising was something that had always interested me – the art house cinemas in Canada used to tour the Cannes reel every year – and it seemed like a more lucrative practice than what I was doing. I took a year’s course at Humber College and seemed to have a knack for it.

In the early days of my career at TBWA I was full of ideas and misguided confidence. I’ve always had too much energy and enthusiasm. My entire life has been a long, slow process of calming down. I was probably pretty annoying but all my actions were good-natured and in pursuit of a superior creative product. I still have good relationships with my peers and managers from those days so I can’t have been all that bad. 

I moved to London in 2003. My mother’s English and she was already living there, working for the Commonwealth Secretariat, so the move itself was pretty painless. I’d been for frequent visits over the years so the place never seemed foreign to me. There’s always an acclimatisation period, though. I had to learn how to drink. I’d never been much of a drinker before.

I’d made a couple of things I was proud of at TBWA but I didn’t really have a clue how to do it again. Not with any degree of consistency. Mother was a great place to learn the trade. I was working with the best minds in the most exciting agency of that era. The great thing about the leadership team there was how multidisciplinary they were. The creative types were business people and vice versa. It made me realise how important a well-rounded skillset was.

By the time I got to BBH, I was more in control of my faculties as a creative person. It was a hard place to leave because there are so many amazing people there – and every one is set up to succeed. The support structure is incredible. That said, they’re not cheerleaders for the sake of it. If you make average work, people let you know. But I think that’s a good thing.

I think attitudes toward advertising have remained pretty static since the industry’s brief flirtation with glamour in the 80s. The public has a healthy disdain/mistrust of the discipline that varies country to country. Of course, I can only speak about English-speaking markets in which I’ve worked. The UK embraces advertising a little more than most. It’s part of the cultural conversation. The US hates it with the exception of Super Bowl Sunday. Canada falls somewhere in between. 

It’s hard to say which is my favourite piece of advertising. Even the greatest ads are such tiny snatches of brilliance. It’s easier to have a favourite book or movie or opera because you have a lengthier relationship with these objects. You can run the gamut of emotions with a play or a television show. With an ad you’re responding to something very specific. From the outset there’s a strategic brief that’s written which is designed to inform the work created so that people think or feel a certain way as a result of having been exposed to it. I like feeling a lot of different things so I’d probably pick an hour’s worth of my favourite ads that covered the broadest spectrum of human emotion.

It’s hard to judge your own work as you have a different relationship to it than the viewer. It’s impossible to divorce the experience of making it from the finished product. You gain a bit of perspective in hindsight but it’s tough to look at a thing you’ve made and not see the seams. A bad take you were forced to use. A better line you thought of after the fact etc. And sometimes, things are better in your estimation on account of how bad they could’ve been if you hadn’t cast a particular actor, or the client hadn’t caved on an extended and unnecessarily horsey product shot.

Sometimes it’s the weird little things that don’t get the recognition you felt they deserved that end up holding a special place in your heart. The one caign I return to was a batch of break bumpers for the Orange mobile phone network [from Mother]. The series featured balloons shaped like animals floating toward solid objects – a wall of speakers, a golf cart, a shed and a shoe display case – but at the point of impact, the objects reacted like balloons instead of vice versa.

It’s a great feeling working on brands that you consume and feel passionately about. That’s why working on The Guardian and helping them to promote open journalism [Three Little Pigs] was such an incredibly rewarding experience. But that was a pretty special case. The reality is, on a day-to-day basis, the brands that I get excited about doing work for are ones that have got some sort of image problem or are in a bit of a crisis. The brands that have nothing to lose and a CMO at the helm who’s not afraid to take a chance often yield the most interesting results.

For The Guardian Own the Weekend we created a ‘modular’ spot that could be of variable length. I love the fact that the online cut of an ad has now become the version of record into perpetuity. If your ad launches as a 60-second spot but shortly thereafter switches to cutdowns, it’s nice to know that people can go online and enjoy the original in its full glory. As for extended length films offered by digital platforms, the length of the film should service the idea. If you create something long because you can, and it doesn’t hold up, then you’re wasting people’s time and your client’s money.

I need to believe in a brand team’s ability to identify what its product’s strengths and weaknesses are. Ultimately, you’re working with people, not a box of washing powder or a deodorant or a car. If those people have a realistic perception of their charge and understand that there needs to be an honesty to the communication, I can usually get on board. As for products or categories I take exception to working on, it’s the same age-old list every faux-intellectual ad agency hipster type rattles off.

The best piece of advice I’ve been given is to be generous. With your time, with your ideas, with your talent. The more you give away, the more comes back to you. Though return-on-investment shouldn’t really act as incentive for behaving like a decent human being.

I would advise anyone wanting to work in advertising that though the industry is in a state of flux and everyone’s in a panic about what’s next, there will always be demand for people who can think. People with taste. People who understand the basic tenets of craft in both the writing and art direction disciplines. Don’t worry about fads and trends – brilliant ideas executed well will always win the day.

The worst day of my career is a tie between pretty much every day that I’ve ever had to see the first cut of an ad that I have been working on. I am usually overcome by the feeling that I’m a fraud and a charlatan and that I have no business being in this industry. Then my mind turns to what I could do as an alternative career to advertising. I literally go into panic mode. It doesn’t matter how many times it’s happened before – or how many times everything has ultimately turned out to be all right. I always feel like a hack after the first screening. Nowadays, I try to see as few first cuts as possible.

Music has always been an enormous part of my life. I was in bands from age 15 and until 30 years of age I clung to the dream that I might one day make a living on stage. But music is a young person’s game and there is a set amount of time you have to credibly break into the industry before you just seem a bit sad. So I gave up. In the end, it’s not me who loses out. It’s the world; denied the joy of hearing my gift.

There is an endless list of directors, photographers, designers and all around creative people I’d love to collaborate with. My current obsession is the work of architect Bjarke Ingels. His firm’s inaugural North American structure is being built 10 blocks from my flat. Watching it go up floor by floor has been a thrill. I monitor the progress on my morning jogs.

In terms of creative inspiration, I love the arts and spend as much time watching and listening to other people’s work as I do creating my own. The more stuff you can see – both good and bad – the stronger your barometer gets. If I spend an extended period of time in the absence of culture I get bored and depressed.

There may be a lot of hilarity in my work but I’m actually not that funny a person. But I think I have a good gauge of what’s funny. I rely on other people’s talents to bolster my feeble attempts at humour. The stuff that makes me laugh the most has a timeless quality about it. Smart, layered work that benefits from repeat viewings. The Apartment is one of my favourite funny films. Billy Wilder was a genius. And I love pretty much everything Peter Sellers did. The Larry Sanders Show and Arrested Development are probably my two favourite sitcoms. One of the things I always bang on about with my teams is the distinction between wit and comedy. Comedy dates; wit endures. I don’t like gags for the sake of gags. Something amusing that makes you think generally tends to wear better.

It feels great to get awards. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. But if you place too high a valuation on winning, then losing takes on a greater significance as well. This strikes me as unhealthy. The reality is, the moment a show is out of the trade news cycle, no one ever remembers what won what. It’s the work that people remember, not the hardware. A great exle of this is with Levi’s. In the early noughties Twist and Odyssey came out of BBH within six months of each other. During awards season Twist took every prize under the sun and Odyssey got fuck all. 12 years later Odyssey is a still-referenced, stone-cold classic but you have to jog people’s memory as to which one Twist was. 

Apart from advertising, creatively I do odds and ends. I’ve had a couple of plays on the go for God knows how long. The problem is, when you give so much of your creative self during the working hours, it’s hard to make time for personal projects when you’re off the clock. I’ve got other bits of writing that’ll see the light of day eventually.

If I could change one thing about myself, it would be that I would be able to focus more. Reserve a bit of time and energy for my personal projects. I feel like I don’t make enough work for myself. It takes a master and a paycheck to motivate me to be creative. 

If I wasn’t in advertising, my idea of what I would be doing changes daily. Today I’d probably say creative director of a Paris fashion house. But that’s only because I spent the better part of two hours perusing the Fall/Winter collections in a department store this afternoon.

I’m as self-confident as I need to be to get me through life. To fool people into thinking I know what I’m doing. Anyone who doesn’t experience some measure of self-doubt is either a sociopath or irretrievably stupid. 

People say I speak too fast. It’s pure enthusiasm. I get excited by ideas. By work. By the potential to make beautiful, wonderful, exciting, funny, heartbreaking things. My mind races during the creative process and words follow.

I don’t think I have ever had a nickname. People with nicknames – and I’m not talking terms of endearment, I mean proper nicknames that end up replacing their real names – are willing participants in their own abuse. They look to others to define who they are because it gives them a form of social validation. To me it feels undignified. I prefer to tell you who I am, not the other way around. Of course, there’s always the possibility that someone’s given me a nickname that I’m blissfuly unaware of. I could be ‘Fuckhead’ for all I know. It wouldn’t surprise me.

If I could time-travel I’d definitely go back in time rather than forward as I hate surprises. I’d probably visit Paris in the 20s and try to get in with the modernists. Wait – that sounds self-serving. I’d go back to 1939 and kill Hitler.

My biggest fear is poverty. Destitution. Life is so long, exhausting and uncertain. Independent wealth would be a wonderful thing. Then I could relax a bit. And yet I can’t bring myself to play the lottery.

I never been close to death as I don’t put myself in harm’s way. I’m not a thrill-seeker. I have friends who throw themselves out of planes for fun and I don’t understand it. I’m over-cautious and, to date, unbelievably lucky.

The best days of my life have been too numerous to count. The worst day was my 25th birthday. A switch flipped inside me and I became accutely aware of my own mortality. Now I worry about death way more than I should.

Moving to New York and starting a new job has been fine. I find it a lot easier to cope with big life changes if a lot of them are happening all at once. The more you are busy and preoccupied, the less time you have to focus on the jarring horror of change. Settling in New York has been easy, though. I’ve been a frequent visitor here for more than 20 years so the city feels like a well-worn shoe. Also, Wieden+Kennedy have been very welcoming. They’ve made it easy to hit the ground running.

Regarding hobbies, I swore I would nevertake up golf but when I got old

My heroes are the people whose work I have an irrational love and respect for but I have a hard time putting them on pedestals. When you categorise someone as a hero, you’re voluntarily positioning yourself as their subordinate. I personally find it healthy to believe that anyone has the potential to be better or worse than you, it just depends on the circumstances.

Sloth and slow movement make me angry. I’m an excitable, impatient person. If you spend too much time talking, deliberating, moving in a less than economical fashion, I tend to get irritated.

The last time I cried was probably at an ad. Tearjerker ads have a finite amount of time to manipulate you, so you don’t see the suckerpunch coming like you do with film. I rarely ever cry at films. I tend to cry at those ads where the women think they’re ugly but the soap makes them feel better about themselves. 

My greatest weakness is food. It’s why I exercise as much as I do. So I can eat whatever I please. Not much depresses me more than a wasted meal.

I don’t Google myself, or anyone else. I use Dogpile or DuckDuckGo. Google doesn’t need my business.

The single greatest and worst human inventions are the same one thing – the Internet. It makes us lazy, stupid and even more narcissistic as a species than we once were. Conversely, it’s an invaluable resource that connects people, promotes freedom of expression and acts as a great equaliser. You never hear about the wheel or sliced bread igniting such debate. 

I have a lot of life and a lot of career left ahead of me. Hopefully my most memorable work is still to come. Whether it lives on after I do is of little consequence to me. I’ll be dead.

At the end of the day, what really matters depends on the individual, doesn’t it? Some people might exclaim with their last breath, “I wish I’d spent more time with my family,” while others shit themselves and die smiling as they know someone’s going to have to clean it up.