Creative Profile: Steve Stone

Steve Stone started his first agency because of a drunken offer at a party, deciding that the world didn’t need another ad agency, just better ideas. Iain Blair finds that 20 years later he’s still coming up with those, leading the second incarnation of his shop, Heat, a home for great creatives, great clients and great work, all aiming to do one thing – surprise

San Francisco has long exerted a powerful – and often underestimated – influence in the advertising world, not just on the West Coast, but throughout the US and internationally. A central contributor to that hub of creativity is Steve Stone, chairman and ECD of agency Heat. An industry veteran with more than 30 years in the business, Stoney, as his colleagues dub him, has the final say on all creative decisions for such A-list clients as Electronic Arts, Dolby, The NFL Network, Kendall-Jackson, Teva and Bank of the West.

Stone sums up his company’s mission and philosophy as: “We make commercials, films, tweets, posts, print ads, digital ads, outdoor ads, radio commercials, experiential pop-ups, deep digital experiences – and shallow ones, too. Before we make any of that, we make sure we have a strong strategy based on real consumer insights. And along the way we constantly remind ourselves what gets people to remember advertising – surprise. We use the filter of surprise to judge the work. We believe in the power of surprise to build brands, solve problems and turn ordinary customers into raving fans. We’ve studied this quite a bit and found that people feel most comfortable when they hear or see something they’re used to. But they feel most alive when they’re surprised. And we believe people who feel more alive are more likely to be loyal to a brand and spend more money.”

But Stone doesn’t define ‘surprise’ as doing “something crazy or unexpected like shooting gerbils out of a cannon”. For him, it’s about “being relevant in new and unexpected ways. It’s about a brand reacting to something in real time. It’s about a brand being somewhere it’s not normally seen but blending in effortlessly. It’s about taking your entire Super Bowl budget and putting it all on one celebrity tweet. Our definition of surprise changes from client to client but the results are all the same. This is something that works.”

Photographs: Dan Escobar

Stone’s original vision for Heat was to create a different kind of ad agency. “Yeah, everyone says that,” he admits, “but few really do it. We wanted to start not just a business, but a home for great talent and great clients to do the best work of their lives. We wanted to create a place that brings high concept, great storytelling and craft to digital. Mostly we wanted to create an agency that didn’t force clients to choose between great work and great people to work with. We’re 75 like-minded people who want to make stuff and make a difference. We believe ideas can come from anywhere. We attract talent and keep them. I hoped to make a great place for people to work when I started Heat 10 years ago, but I never dreamed we’d be named by the San Francisco Business Times as one of the best places to work in the Bay Area. We’re doing something right. And the best part is it feels right. Over the years we’ve developed into a truly strategic creative agency with outsized digital chops.”

Sounds like a great idea

Current and future projects at Heat include breaking two new campaigns for iconic brand Dolby, a new client. “They have a saying – ‘Sound matters’ – and that’s something I’ve believed for years,” says Stone. “Sound and music have always played a strong part in our work. And will continue to.” While one campaign is “top secret”, Stone can talk about the other, for Dolby’s new Atmos system, which he terms “surround sound on steroids. It allows directors, sound designers and mixers to place sound physically in 3D space. We’ve got outdoor, print, digital video and social media running throughout the summer. We also have some experiential events that will demonstrate the power of Atmos. Fantastic sound design combined with the ability to place it anywhere can tell a better story. We even have ideas where sound alone can tell a better story than sound with pictures.”

Heat is also currently working on EA’s soon-to-be-announced largest mobile game launch, as well as several of their biggest console franchises, including Madden NFL. “We also have work breaking in a month for Hotwire, another new client,” he reports. “We’ll be creating commercials and programmatic/real time digital ads that will change the online travel category. I can’t give you much detail on that yet.”

The company is also in the final stages of perfecting three proprietary tools for clients, geared to winning new business. “All three prove data and creativity can work together to build brands and help them build business faster,” Stone says. “The Heat Index is a measurement of advertising’s contribution to business results. The Heat Radeator [sic] is an approach to creative and media that uses small bets in earned media to guide big bets in paid media. And the Heat Reactor is a programmatic content engine that generates real-time personalised content.”

Growing up in Ohio, Stone had a “really intuitive and honest art teacher” in high school to thank for his initial interest in advertising. “She said, ‘Look, you’re not very good at painting or fine art, but maybe you should think about commercial art or advertising,’” he recalls. “She helped me get a scholarship to the Columbus College of Art & Design. Four and a half years later, I had two portfolios – one for design and one for art direction. I loved the conceptual part and liked to write as well, so advertising sounded better to me.”

Stone interviewed at design firms and ad agencies and landed a job at Ketchum Advertising in 1983. “I met Rich Silverstein’s girlfriend at the time who said ‘Call him, he just started an agency – I think he’d like your work. Back then, San Francisco had these double-decker billboards where one ad would be stacked on another. As luck would have it, an ad that I designed for the California Egg Commission was posted under one that Rich had designed for KGO, a local radio station. So I went out with my camera, took a picture of our billboards, printed it and made a poster which said something like ‘Steve Stone is already working under Rich Silverstein.’ Pretty lame,” he laughs. But that inspired idea, combined with his portfolio, got him hired at Goodby, Berlin & Silverstein as their 16th employee.

“I worked there for three years, then went on to New York to work for Ammirati & Puris where I had the chance to work on bigger brands,” he says. “I came back to Goodby a couple of years later, for another three years, before I went out on my own. I had my own thing for a year called The Stone Group – there was no group, just me.”

He then took a CD job at Hal Riney & Partners for a year before a drunken night out changed everything. In October 1995, Stone was on a shoot for Eddie Bauer, “and the client, the account guy and I got drunk on Halloween and went to a party the photographer was hosting,” he recalls. When the client suddenly suggested that they start an agency – and said that she’d give them her business, Stone didn’t hesitate. “John Yost, the account guy, called Mark Barden, a planner who worked on Eddie Bauer, and asked him if he was into it,” he says. “And I called Bob Kerstetter, a writer I worked with at my second stint at Goodby, and asked him. They both said, ‘Let’s do it.’ But first we asked ourselves, ‘Does the world need another ad agency?’ No. We believed the world just needed better ideas.”

Black Rocket started in January 1996 with Eddie Bauer as its founding client. “We pitched and won Yahoo! a few weeks later,” adds Stone. “After four successful years during the dot-com boom, Yahoo! wanted to run our work worldwide, so we needed to team up with an international network.” After meeting some holding companies, they decided to go with Euro RSCG/Havas. “We worked under Havas for a few more years, building the company to about 45 people, until one day Yahoo! switched CEOs and decided to make a change. A year later my partners decided to move on too, and I had the crazy idea of buying the company back and renaming it Heat. That was 10 years ago and we’re approaching 80 people now – and not stopping anytime soon.”

Heat was forged in November of 2004 and 10 months later Stone brought in John Elder as partner and president. “John was a terrific account guy from Goodby who started the digital department there. We both shared the same optimism in this crazy, ever-changing business.”

Advertising? That’s entertainment!

So what does Stone think of the changes over his 30 years in the industry? “In a way it’s better,” he states. “It’s still all about the work here in SF, but obviously it’s a whole new ball game these days. Gone are the days of crafting type on print ads until the cows come home. Gone are the days of TV being king. But an interesting thing is that the high concept/low budget scrappy stuff that helped put SF on the map for creativity would make for great viral content today. It has come full circle. It’s still about content and storytelling. Only now there are many more channels for it.

Entertaining our consumers has never been more relevant and now there are more opportunities to do so. One thing I have noticed and I’ve been talking about for years is a lack of craft in digital. Yes, a lot of it’s disposable but there’s still room for craft.

“There’s never been a better time to be in this business. There are more opportunities than ever. There are more places than ever to experiment. I also think advertising is going to become more explicitly entertaining, as brands realise that they can’t just pay for attention any more, they have to earn it from consumers. We’re not in the information age any more – we’re in the entertainment age. Entertainment is driving behaviour. If you look at how people make decisions, entertainment is integrated at every stage of the purchase process. Combine those thoughts and you get brands producing a huge volume of entertaining, relevant content, tailored to virtually every aspect of the consumer’s life.”

Steve Stone is the cover star of the latest issue of shots 156, The Brazil Special, out now.