Creative Profile: Rey Andrade

For a guy who grew up personally in El Paso, Texas, and professionally in San Francisco, a move to 72andSunny’s office in not-so-sunny Amsterdam should be a culture shock. But not so for Europhile Morrissey-hugger Rey Andrade. The creative director tells Tim Cumming his background makes him the perfect choice to take his diverse band of creatives on line-crossing, provocative campaigns

El Paso, Texas, a city that kisses the US-Mexico border, is some way from Amsterdam, geographically, culturally and meteorologically, but for El Paso native Rey Andrade, moving to the latter – with its moody weather and European films and music – to become a creative director at 72andSunny Amsterdam was like coming home. Having some of the biggest 21st-century brands on his books, like Google and Activision, just made the move even sweeter. 

An abiding memory for the young Latino creative is climbing up on stage at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom in 1997 to hug Stephen Patrick Morrissey. “I was obsessed with him as a teenager,” he says. “Recently, when I saw him in LA, where he has a huge Latin fan base, it was just like being back in El Paso, at high school. He’s the son of an immigrant, and I think some of that resonated with first-generation kids like me in the States, feeling this sense of not really being part of the culture.”

Diverse eye for the white guys

That sense of borders, of cultural borderlines, and the unexpected spaces that a polycultural society throws up at us, is much on Andrade’s mind at the moment. In January he moved from 72andSunny’s LA office to Amsterdam – a place with real seasons, not permanent sunshine (he freely admits to lacking the surfing gene). As an office, a workplace and a cultural, creative space, it is, he says, like nowhere else he’s worked.

“Our office in Amsterdam is probably the most diverse I’ve ever been in and I think our work is better because of it. It forces us to get to deeper human truths and more universal themes… It also means our meetings and sessions take longer.” He’s adamant that the industry as a whole needs to be radically more diverse, with more cultures and genders represented at all levels. “If not, then I think the work we put out into the world will be terribly out of touch, like a lot of it is now.”

He expands on his theme. “If you don’t have that balance of cultures and genders at the table, you’re limiting your voice and you’re only talking to one audience. That is a big problem in entertainment. Look at what is happening in Hollywood.

A movie based on a famous Manga character [Ghost In The Shell] has Scarlett Johansson in the lead, and there’s been this massive uproar. Like, what the fuck! Find an Asian actress. It’s just lazy. We’re being held under scrutiny and it will continue, and it’s good. It’s the right scrutiny. We must reflect the world as it is, not the idealised one. Content is coming in all kinds of different forms, forms that are closer to reality. So it makes no sense to have a table full of American white guys writing what they think the world looks like.”

Getting the London book

He describes his own route in to the industry as “a very winding and improvised path”. Following a period as a “somewhat difficult kid” in high school, he enrolled in design school after his sister got a job in PR and started hanging out with advertising folk, then got an internship at a local Hispanic agency in San Antonio. “I loved it straight away. I loved the challenge of the work, I loved how much the roles changed from one week to the next and also how many different mediums you could be exposed to.”

He focussed – and focussed hard – on what he needed to do to get to the position where he could make exciting work and carry on loving what he did. That took him to Miami Ad School. Crucially, the last six months of the course sent him to London in 2002. “It was a blast, exactly what I was hoping it would be like.” It was also, he notes, a gloriously fast lifestyle. There were six of them, squeezed into one Islington flat, taking on London’s nightlife for all it was worth – and its work ethic too. “The London programme was all about portfolios. Four days a week you went to a different agency – Mother, W+K, Fallon – and met with a team there, and they’d give you assignments and then judge them.”

He left with a book he felt would get him a job, and it did, at Venables Bell & Partners in San Francisco, as art director, before stints at agencytwofifteen and Attik, by which time he had become a creative director, joining 72&Sunny’s LA office in 2012. Becoming a creative director was always his goal. “I love it,” he says. “It’s such an awesome thing to walk into a room and see what insane, ridiculous, beautiful ideas spill out of people’s heads. And then to help them turn those ideas into meaningful work. It’s about letting those people express themselves and me being an engine for momentum and creativity.”

Managing creatives is about letting them go, he says, but the client relationship is always going to be a more difficult business. “They have much more at stake than just making interesting dynamic creative and they’re accountable in ways that most of us will never be.”

Then there’s the eternal challenge of engagement. “It’s always been tough finding and telling great stories. I don’t think that will ever be easy, but at the moment one of the biggest struggles is cutting through when we now compete with all content, not just other marketing.  But that’s great – it doesn’t just force agencies to stop relying on the same tricks, it forces brands to step up their game beyond marketing. It’s making room for the unconventional.”

Darkness, addiction and violence

Amongst Andrade’s most prominent work are: his campaigns for Activision’s mighty Call Of Duty game franchise; D&AD-winning 15-second spots of breathtaking visual artistry for Sonos wireless speakers (with the Buenos Aires collective, Tronco, through 1stAveMachine); and one of his own favourites, from his time at VB&P San Francisco, a campaign for the Montana Meth Project with director Darren Aronofsky, which addressed the horrific effects of meth on users and their families in the state. “I expected a brooding, darker personality, but he’s a normal guy,” says Andrade of the Hollywood director. “Crazy-smart, but lovely to work with. We shot it all in New Jersey while he was prepping The Wrestler, and it fitted really well together. He knew all these backdrops and environments that were perfect for the film.”

They also worked with a counsellor and visited rehab centres and jails to get a better idea of the problems and people they were dealing with. “Generally we don’t reach that deep to do something,” Andrade comments, “so it had a real impact.” When Montanans protested the graphic nature of the work and demanded the council tear it all down, a group of school children spoke up for the campaign and the hard truths it depicted. “That was a powerful moment for us,” remembers Andrade. Even more powerful was seeing the stats on meth use plunge as a result of the campaign.

Andrade’s work for Activision benefited greatly from the head of marketing there, Tim Ellis, being a former ad man, which meant the Ghosts trailers – which took the Call Of Duty franchise away from the fiction and towards a more fan-focussed ESPN-style approach, concentrating on the activity of playing – was given the green light.

“Of all the stuff we did, that was the most divisive thing we ever made,” Andrade says. “A lot of fans loved it, felt that it was true to them, and a lot of others felt it went over the line – by glorifying violence or taking it too lightly.” The impact of violent games is a hot-button issue that needs careful handling. “Like music and films, there’s no direct causation into people doing bad things, but it does add to the noise out there,” says Andrade. “So in the marketing we were always very careful about knowing where the line was.”

Pushing a provocative premise

It was also Tim Ellis who pushed for another line-crossing campaign, the hook-up with VICE on Advanced Warfare – Superpower For Hire. “There were a lot of people within Activision who didn’t want to do that. They said, ‘You’ll get calls from Fox News,’ and he said, ‘Exactly, that’s the whole point!’ That was a fun one to do. We had played in the genre a little bit before and knew there was more room to blur the lines. So we wrote a provocative premise and outline and then called VICE.” As a result, he points out, “We pushed the tone of the Call Of Duty marketing into some unique and unexpected corners, and I think it’s pushed the category as a whole.”

Right now, the big job is Google – about which he can say little, except that the topic of diversity, in the workplace and the culture, is very much on the tech giant’s mind, and on Andrade’s as CD of 72andSunny’s radically diverse creative workforce. “They are looking at what role they play in the changing landscape here in Europe,” he says. “What responsibility they have, when it comes to the hate speech that comes out with the refugee crisis, all these extreme minority voices becoming solid on social media. It’s good to be a part of those conversations,” he adds. “And I’m glad it’s finding its way towards us in advertising.”