Rob Reilly: The Way I See It

You can tell a lot about a man by the way he imagines his future self. In this year’s AICP Awards call for entries, Craft Your Legacy, which saw leading ad folk write spots envisaging their lives in 35 years, Rob Reilly, McCann’s global creative chairman and co-creator of the campaign, depicted himself as a jolly, geriatric prankster who likes to pee in fridges. 

It’s clear the multi-award winning creative lives by his own rules, i.e. don’t take yourself too seriously. Along with a bunch of great stories, he reveals to Carol Cooper his other maxims for life: be fearless, not reckless'; curb your anger not your enthusiasm; care about your clients and never wear shorts.

I was born outside of Philadelphia in a town called Haverford. We lived there for about six months then moved to New Jersey. I think I was good at school but I was probably best known for being a good soccer player. I played at school, at college and I still play every week when I’m in town. I play for two teams and I’m the worst on both teams by far. But that’s because I’m 46, the old man of the team. I’m like [Steven] Gerrard during the last World Cup, I’m out there but I’m really not moving fast.

I’m a West Ham supporter. When the original North American Soccer League disbanded in 1984, I made my father buy British soccer magazines because I loved the game and couldn’t follow it in the US. There was no ESPN, nothing on the television, you lived by magazines back then. I picked West Ham based on the colours. I liked the claret and blue! 

My mother raised the kids and my father worked for IBM, but my grandfather was an artist, I don’t know if that inspired me. He worked in advertising and I definitely felt a connection with him. He had done these four pencil drawings of nude women and they were hanging in his study. When I was about five or six years old, me and my cousins used to like to sit in his study. We didn’t really understand why, we just wanted to sit there. I ended up with two of the drawings. So I have two nudes hanging in my apartment and people think they’re pictures of my wife. But unless my wife has been reincarnated from 1962 they’re not.

As a kid I was always interested in brands, commercials, packaging… Then at university I studied mass communications, which included a bit of marketing and advertising and television. I didn’t exactly know I wanted to be a copywriter, I just knew that some day I wanted to do something that was culture-moving. 

After college the first ad I wrote was one of those ads that a bi-plane trails across the sky over a beach. I was working as a bartender and I ended up writing the airplane banners. I can’t remember my first tagline, I reckon it was something cheeky like ‘Come to my bar, it’s where the girls are at.’ This was in a place called Dewey Beach, on the southern tip of Delaware, between Philly and Washington DC. A great little town, about a mile long. All the city people meet up there. You just park your car at the beach and everybody has fun. 

I worked in that bar for a year but I was also working for a local ad agency in Wilmington, Delaware. I’d call myself an account executive but mostly I was doing admin. Then I realised I wanted to become a copywriter, so I moved back to New York and my father was like, “What are you doing here?” and I said I want to be in advertising. I didn’t have a portfolio or anything and it was before there were all these ad schools. I managed to get a job at a very small ad agency called Taylor, Gordon & Partners. We’d rent space from other businesses and by chance we’d ended up renting in the offices of Grace & Rothschild, one of the classiest agencies in America at the time. 

Roy Grace was my hero. I had taught myself advertising through looking at all the work books and kept seeing his name. He was famous for his work at DDB. 

So there I was in the Grace & Rothschild office. To me this was as if I got to work inside the Yankee Stadium. I so wanted to meet Roy Grace and I’d think, ‘When I meet him, what will I say?’ At the end of our first day I was just going to leave and I went to the rest room. It was small, with two urinals. I’m just about to do my thing and in walks Roy Grace and he’s in the next urinal, staring straight ahead, as you do. Nothing is happening for me, I’m so nervous. But for him everything is happening, I mean he was like a racehorse. And this goes on and on until eventually he finishes, and he turns to me and says, “How about them Yankees?” and I said, “I love the Yankees.” It was as if I was saying “I love you Roy Grace.” He is still an idol of mine.

I was in the Grace & Rothschild offices for about 18 months and he was always very nice to me, and so were his staff. I was working on my portfolio and I’d show it to these award-winning creatives. One guy in particular, Allen Richardson [now VP/CD at CP+B], a CD there at the time, spent a lot of time helping me. Years later, I ended up hiring him at Crispin. He worked on Small Business Saturday [AmEx campaign from CP+B with Digitas that won two Grands Prix at Cannes 2012]. So, always be nice to people is the motto.

So I’m 22, I’m living at home and my dad, who helped put me through university, is saying, “What’s happening son?” I keep working on my portfolio, but still nobody will hire me. You get down, you know? But my Italian mother says maybe she can help. I’m like, “No offence Mum, but how can you?” She says she’ll spread the word about me. So, she’s in a housewives’ bowling league; they meet weekly and she’s telling everyone about me. One of the women has a friend who works in advertising, a woman who might talk to me. So I call this agency and the woman talks to me and I say, “I wanna be a copywriter and nobody will hire me.” She says, “I got a friend here who could help, let’s conference him in.” So now it goes from me talking to this woman, which was making me nervous enough, to talking to someone who basically has the job I have now. When I think about it now, it’s amazing that a guy in his position would talk to me. So he says I can show him my portfolio. I do and he’s like, “It’s not very good. But why don’t you work on it and come back once in a while and show me.” I keep going in. All the assistants know me, they love me, but he still doesn’t think it’s good enough.

Then after a year he looks at it and says, “You know what? You’re ready. But I don’t have a job for you. Just wait by the phone and I’ll call you when I do.” I wait for months and the call never comes. Everybody knows the guy’s name; his secretary’s name; my whole family knows I’m waiting for this call. I tell my folks, “If the call comes when I’m out, don’t fuck it up, just take a message and I’ll call him back.” After a year and a half I decide to take one day off. It was a Friday and I thought, ‘I’ll take a day’s holiday, have some fun.’ So that’s the day the guy calls. He says, “Is Rob there?” and Dad goes, “No, he’s at the beach.” So I get home, and I’m like, “Why didn’t you tell him I was out doing charity work or something?” But I called him and got the job. The guy was Bruce Nelson, then the executive VP of McCann-Erickson Worldwide. So that’s why I’ve come back to McCann after 20 years. It feels like karma. McCann was the only agency that believed in me back then.

It’s hard to choose my favourite campaigns I’ve worked on. I’m lucky I’ve been involved in so much great work. I think my favourite of the humorous ads was the Whopper Virgins film in 2008, where we did the world’s purest taste test. We had to find remote places in the world where people hadn’t had a burger, or knew any burger advertising, to prove a Whopper tastes better than a Big Mac. It was very provocative. Burger King had a lot of balls. Russ Klein, the CMO of BK was spectacular. He spent all this money flying round the world, it all had to be all legit, all sanctioned by research companies, and we didn’t even know what the taste test result was going to be.

Another of my favourite campaigns I was a part of was Small Business Saturday, because that’s an idea that’ll outlive all of us. It was not about how can we sell more of a product but how do we keep small businesses alive – it shows you the power of what we advertising people can do.

You always have to be a player/coach if you truly want to be good at this type of job. Sure, I wish I could write and create more, but I do more than people probably think. The AICP Craft Your Legacy spot was the first thing I had written in quite a while, though. I worked on the overall concept with Gerry Graf [Barton F. Graf founder], Tor Myrhen [global CCO, Grey], Tiffany Rolfe [partner/CCO, Co:Collective] and Ted Royer [CCO, Droga5 NY], and then we each wrote our own scripts. I loved working with Brian Billow, the director. He’s insanely talented. He shot all five films in one day. But the best bit was sitting down and writing what your life might be like in 35 years. It was fun taking the piss out of ourselves. We could do with more of that in this industry.

My good friend Ted Royer talks of us ad creatives in the US as being a tribe – when we work together and support each other we’re a powerful force. Many of us grew up in the industry together and we all kind of root for each other, whether it’s Mark Fitzloff [global ECD, W+K], Ted Royer, Nick Law [global CCO, R/GA], Tor Myhren or Susan Credle [global CCO, FCB]. There is enough work to go round. It’s a fun time to be in the business, especially in New York.

It’s not just the advertising industry that’s using creativity to solve problems. I think we are increasingly using creativity to solve the world’s biggest problems. I find it inspiring.

Creativity isn’t just about the ads you make, it’s about how you approach a problem. That’s partly why I wanted a job like this rather than starting my own agency. I didn’t want to be one of five guys sitting around in a room selling burrito ads. Setting up your own agency is super invigorating, but there’s something great about doing a job that’s bigger than you’ve done before and putting yourself in harm’s way. When your mission is to help big brands with a big, global footprint be a meaningful part of people’s lives, it’s exciting. There’s a lot of creativity in that.

I have time to work on other projects because we have no kids. I started working on the White House Entrepreneurship Task Force with Ted Royer, it was cool to help work out the branding for it. Governments get a lot of flak for a lot of things. We’re tough on our leaders, as we should be, but they also try to do great things. The Task Force helps promote entrepreneurship, not just in the US, but other countries, and it’s not just about setting up new businesses, it’s about encouraging people to be entrepreneurs within companies. It’s about being a force within an organisation, being a force about a cause you care about. 

I always say be fearless, not reckless. That came from Alex Bogusky, he was the biggest of all my mentors. Fearlessness is a great quality to have in advertising. You can be fearless when you know you have the client’s backing and you get that when the client knows you care about their brand and their goals.

I remember coming out of a meeting the first time I was at McCann, I won’t mention the client, but it maybe wasn’t the most sexy of companies. And someone said to me, “Wow, you really seemed like you care.” I guess I was fairly animated in the meeting. I said, “That’s because I do care. That’s the job. Caring is the job.” You can’t convince yourself to care about every product, like cigarettes for example, but for the most part, there is good in every brand. If clients trust you more because they know you care, they’ll enable you to do better, more provocative work. I ask all of our people to be ‘charming provocateurs’.

I do sometimes send emails to myself before sending them out to a group. We’ve all sent emails we didn’t want to send. When I was at CP+B, we were working on ideas for a presentation, emails were flying back and forth and a creative director sent me someone’s idea admitting it wasn’t quite there yet, and I said, “Well we don’t want to present some half-arsed shit.” I accidentally sent that to the whole agency. It wasn’t like I was talking bad about the person, but to publicly say something isn’t great isn’t cool. In some ways it was helpful though – it was a mistake with a silver lining. After that, people sure didn’t want to bring me any half-arsed shit.

I don’t like people to be afraid of me though. They should be afraid of disappointing themselves, but not afraid of being fired. I think that’s a terrible motivation. I want people to be in a place where they feel they’re going to learn stuff, not a place where they’re afraid for their jobs.

People talk too much about the culture of an agency – the culture of this, the culture of that. I tell you what is the best thing for culture – winning. Winning fixes everything. I don’t mean winning awards, I mean winning new business, winning out there in the real world, people talking about your work. Awards are part of it. McCann has done very well in awards. But they are the by-product, not the motivation.

All the awards shows are different. With AICP there is this real purity to craft and I like that the work is archived in MOMA. The One Club and D&AD are these great non-profit organisations that give back to the industry. Cannes is its own thing. People complain that Cannes has too many clients involved now, but I think it’s great that clients and brands are exposed to the creativity, it inspires them to do better work. Some say it’s less fun because you can’t let your hair down as much, but I don’t see any fun being stopped! 

I MC’d at the AICP Next Awards this year and I don’t know if I’m a natural public speaker but I enjoyed it. Nerves come up but you just have to go for it. I’m not sure if I always wanted to be a performer. I was a singer in a band at college – I wasn’t very good. I was a bartender too and I guess you have put on a show there. Now it’s part of my job to get up and talk to people so I’ve had to learn how to do it. I have many people helping me, though. It takes a team to put together a great presentation. At CP+B we used to call a presentation ‘the show’. 

Do I have any weaknesses? Oh my god, where do I start? I think my greatest weakness used to be that I’d get angry a lot. I would have the loudest voice in the room when I wasn’t getting my way. It was a problem; I had to get an executive coach for it while I was at CP+B. My great friend and partner for a long time, Andrew Keller, said to me, “Everybody knows you’re great, but as soon as you raise your voice, it’s all they remember.” It was a really sobering thing. I’m glad he said that to me. 

I had a great coach and I highly recommend it. You have got to inspire people, but be hard on them too sometimes. But you should “be hard on the work not the people”. That’s not mine, that’s a quote I read somewhere. I’ve set up coaching for some people here at McCann and I will continue to push these things. If you’re a creative person and you’re suddenly thrust into a management role, getting help isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign you want to be the best you can.

I have to work on it every day. Somebody just moved my desk and scratched the floor in my office and, well… anger still comes out once in a while. But it’s usually not about work. It doesn’t mean I’m less passionate about the work, I’ve just learned how to discuss it more constructively. 

My wife Laura [Bowles], worked at Crispin for 20 years. She was a partner/managing director. She built the place, she was one of the real superstars there. When I shared an office with her there were pros – we got to see each other once in a while during the day, and there were cons – working with your wife means she gets to monitor your lunch choices, which kinda blows. Now that she’s out of the business we actually have more things to talk about. Mainly how impossible it is to renovate a bathroom in NYC.