Marshall Ross

Chief Creative Officer
Cramer-Krasselt

Marshall Ross is chief creative officer of Cramer-Krasselt (C-K; www.c-k.com) where he’s been a part of the leadership team behind the agency’s rise to the second-largest independent agency in the United States, with $1 billion in annual billings. C-K has grown by nearly 50 percent since 2005 with clients such as Corona Extra, Edward Jones, Hilton Hotels Worldwide and Porsche.

As chief creative officer, Ross has crafted award-winning campaigns for numerous clients, garnering everything from Effies to Webbys to Cannes Lions. Ross’s creative passions are never ending. His ability to nurture cross-platform creativity—paired with the agency’s integrated structure and culture—has helped the agency consistently deliver on its mission to “Make friends, not ads” long before it became trendy to do so: from CareerBuilder’s Monk-e-Mail viral sensation; to helping Corona fans “Find Your Beach” online, offline, or wherever they find themselves; to enlisting passionate Porsche-philes to help create relevance for the expanding lineup of Porsche cars.

Before joining C-K, Ross was a copywriter and creative supervisor at Foote, Cone & Belding. At the age of 27, he started a creative boutique, Mitchiner, Ross & Kahn, which after a successful run was acquired in 1992 by Campbell Mithun Esty, where Ross assumed the post of executive creative director.

Tracy Tuten: What led you to advertising as a profession? Did you grow up wanting to work in the field?

Marshall Ross: Well, I don’t know that I understood what the field was. I knew that there were two things that had a gravitational pull for me. One was that my father was a lifelong salesman. That’s what he did. And he worked for Encyclopedia Britannica—actually, World Book Encyclopedia. He sold it door to door. And then by the time I was around in his life, he was a furrier and worked for a large furrier in Chicago and managed the store and always had this amazing rapport with customers and was able to help them see their way to saying yes.

I think some of that has to be hereditary because when I was thirteen, I remember working in my uncle’s store and being a pretty good salesperson. I mean, I was a little kid, and I was selling clothes to adults. When I was in high school, my father got me a job at a big clothing store. And I was sixteen, seventeen years old, and I was selling suits to grown men and their wives.

I always sort of had this sales thing in me, and at the same time, I was a designer. I was an illustrator. I was always drawing. I was very fascinated by the worlds of art and design. I had no idea what I was going to do with either of those things. I don’t even think I was thinking about what I would be doing. I had a high school teacher whose husband worked at Leo Burnett,¹ and she said, “You should be an art director in an advertising agency. You’re very facile at this.” I didn’t even know what the word “facile” meant. And I said, “Okay. That sounds like a good idea.”

I learned a little bit about it. Somebody had gotten me some unwarranted interviews around town. I met some people from Leo Burnett and met some people from Ogilvy & Mather, and I decided, “Yeah. That’s what I want to do.” I started applying to art schools and universities, and that sort of became my identity fix all the way through my education—my sort of upper-education career. And that’s kind of what I did.

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The weird thing was I thought I was going to be an art director, and I was. My first job was as an art director for Foote, Cone & Belding.² I was actually hired as an art director, but it became obvious to me early on that—at the time—art directors really got sort of bogged down in the execution piece of things and were out of sync with their writers. I was an English minor, and I’d always liked to write. I thought I was pretty good at it. I taught myself to write better, and I switched from art direction to copywriting. About a year into it, I became a copywriter. So, anyway, that’s how that happened.

Tuten: How long had you been art directing when you realized that copy was more of your passion?

Ross: Maybe two years.

Tuten: And did that feel right once you did it?

Ross: Yeah, absolutely. The speed was right for me. I think I am a decent art director, but I am a much better writer. I was much more adventuresome with language for some reason than I was with design. And I don’t know why that is. I think it’s because it was faster and it helped me play more easily. Playfulness is a big part of this job. You have to be willing to put yourself in a place where you are having fun and it was easier for me to do that with language.

Tuten: How does that translate into your work now?

Ross: Well, the writing piece or just the beginning piece?

Tuten: That beginning shift from art and design to language.

Ross: I think that what it does, or what it did, was instill in me a tremendous amount of empathy for all kinds of craft in the space in which we operate. I completely empathize with the struggles of photographers and illustrators and designers and art directors, and at the same time, I think I understand what marketing directors have to do to synthesize their points of view and how to help them synthesize their points of view. I think that I understand or empathize with the idea of the creative process from a lot of different angles.

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Tuten: What about the sales piece, that growing up and having the sales experience? Do you find yourself selling now?

Ross: I think that all successful marketing people are successful because they understand how to link desire with solution, and so I think I do that. Probably seventy percent of my work is figuring out what that linkage is or articulating what that linkage is in a way that becomes really compelling. Sometimes that’s helping writers and art directors or user experience people or developers turn that linkage into experiences. And sometimes it’s about helping an audience of marketing people recognize why the path we’re heading down is the right one.

Tuten: Kristen Cavallo at Mullen says sales is a major part of her job because you have to persuade someone to let you “run your idea with their money.”

Ross: I think that’s a very nice, succinct way of saying that the art of persuasion is to make sure that your idea is actually their need. That’s why I call it “linkage.” I think sales is about connecting. The art of persuasion is making that connection feel obvious, innate, and inarguable. If you’ve done a good job of making their issue and your solution become indelibly connected, their response is, “Well, what else would I do?”

Tuten: Perfect. Would you describe that as the C-K philosophy?

Ross: No, I think C-K’s philosophy comes from a couple of other different things, but it does involve connection in a way. It’s just a deeper one. C-K’s philosophy is really simple, and it’s about the idea of value. We think that a relationship between a person and a brand, or a group and a brand, is far more valuable, far more worthy of investment than buzz, than click, than even transactions. And so our philosophy is about how do we get past those first sort of shallow engagements, which could even mean a sale? How do we get past those shallow engagements into something that’s long lasting, into something that’s repetitive, into something that kind of brings joy to both groups?

And we have a little line that everyone here has to learn and learn what it means. It’s simply, “Make friends, not ads.” That’s what we try to get the organization to do: think not about this thing you’re about to create, but think, how do you help a brand and its publics become friends. We’ve been actually doing that long before Mark Zuckerberg took the word “friends” and did something with it—before he could probably shave. Anyway, that’s our philosophy, and we actually have an interesting organizational structure. We have no profit centers between any of our disciplines. We don’t have any sort of wholly owned subsidiaries. We have T-shaped subject matter people³ who can flow all around the organization and work on anything they want as long as what they’re providing is relevant, without worrying about where the budget is going. So that’s our philosophy.

Tuten: Can you give me an example of how “make friends, not ads” has come into play for one of your clients?

Ross: Sure, I’ll just give one of our really recent examples, because it’s easier for me to think a few weeks ago than a few years ago. But if you look at the “Everyday Magic” campaign for the Porsche 911, it was about helping people who see a weekends-only sports car to see the 911 as a car they could drive every day. But what made it, I think, “friendship building” was that it was a campaign designed to help connect prospects with existing owners. The campaign let the owners tell their stories—how they used the Porsche 911, what they think it does for them—directly to prospects. The campaign created an intimacy that the brand was never able to achieve before with people who weren’t directly a part of the owner group. So that was a really cool thing. You can see the stories from owners at www.porscheeveryday.com.

Tuten: Okay. Great. I’ll take a look at that. Now, the second question, a follow-up to the philosophy question: you talked about how people can flow, and as long as they’re adding value and what they’re doing is relevant, they don’t have to worry about where the budget is coming from. Is that something that’s made possible by Cramer-Krasselt being an independent agency?⁴

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Ross: Yeah, absolutely. We are not required to write a check every year to London or New York or Paris. We’re New York. So we get to decide what our profit goals are, what our efficiencies are. Obviously, we’re not in a vacuum. We benchmark on what’s smart and what’s appropriate. But, because we’re independent, we simply get to operate in ways of our own choosing. It’s unusual for a company of our scale to still be independent, and then even more so to run things without profit centers.

Tuten: Are there challenges that go along with that?

Ross: Well, it’s very messy. It’s definitely very messy. That’s the biggest challenge, creating the right kind of connectivity all the time is messy. But the upside, more important than the challenges, the upside is that there’s zero internal competition. We used to have a saying in this business, and it was kind of BS: “ideas can come from anywhere.” That was sort of a code for “Well, everybody kind of has to be creative, and our creative departments are not egotistical, so ideas can come from anywhere.” But the truth is now ideas must come from everywhere, and that’s because the marketing landscape, the communications landscape, the media landscape—all of those “scapes” are so remarkably different, require so much coordination, that if you don’t have tennis players on all sides of the court, and the courts are now six-sided, if you don’t have somebody that can hit the ball back in every corner, you’re just not going to make it. Your thinking is just not going to work. So it’s a real imperative that this kind of play happens.

We found that if people don’t need purchase orders to work with each other, if people don’t need job numbers even to work with each other, collaboration becomes a lot easier.

Tuten: Is time tracking different at C-K than it is at other agencies?

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Ross: I think probably not. I think what’s different is that we don’t have gates between disciplines, that things can be more informal, and you don’t need department heads approving everything. People can seek each other out. People can agree independently. People can make the call independently. They can say, “Yeah, I think I can add value to that. It makes sense that myself or a number of people in my group be a part of this project.”

I remember when I was at a large holding-company agency [Foote, Cone, & Belding, part of the Interpublic Group] and recognized one of the motivations for starting my own agency. I literally just started to keep track on a piece of paper where my time was spent. I figured out I was spending something like seventy percent of my time negotiating internally for what I could show to a client versus working with clients and working on the craft of making things great. That statistic just sort of blew my mind. I said, “This is insane. We’re tougher. You know, we’re a bigger hurdle than the world is.” So that didn’t make any sense to me. I think if you did an interview of folks around C-K, they probably would not list as a complaint, “It’s too hard to get ideas in front of a client.” If they had complaints, they wouldn’t list that among their complaints. They might have others, but they wouldn’t list that.

Tuten: Now, you mentioned your own agency, the shop that you created with your partners. How did that come about?

Ross: It was a combination of a couple of things. All of us had some sort of sense of missed opportunity at the places we were at. We all felt like, you know, “If we were doing this in our own way, it would be a lot of fun.” I wish I could say it was headier than that, but it really wasn’t. At the same time, we had compelling reasons to make Chicago our home. At the time, there really weren’t a lot of interesting agencies to go to in the city of Chicago that would have been dramatically different from where we were.

In my case, I had a family. My wife was doing well, very well, in her [career], and her work was Chicago-based, and I didn’t think it was fair to ask her to come to New York or some other place for me to seek something out. We have family here. And, you know, Chicago’s a great city. So my partners and I thought, “Let’s just try it.” We had been kind of doing it anyway. We had this little company called After Hours Advertising. We never spent any of the money we made. We just kind of chucked it in the bank. We said, “Well, one day we’ll either go for a trip around the world with our wives, or we’ll just start an ad agency.” So we did the stupid thing, and we started an ad agency.

Tuten: What was that like compared to what it’s like to be with a big shop, like C-K?

Ross: At the start of the agency, we didn’t know anything about anything, which was kind of amazing. The only thing we knew how to do was what was very specific to our jobs, and we quickly learned in the first two weeks that there were a lot of other jobs that got done that we didn’t even know about. I mean, we literally didn’t understand the manufacturing process at the time, which was pre-Macintosh. So we didn’t know how to get an idea into the newspaper. “What? Like, how do you do that?” So, you know, we had to use our network of people at other places, made lots of horrible mistakes—some hilarious now, you know, [that made us] absolutely panic-stricken at the time, but hilarious now.

And so I think the biggest thing was just the heft of the work. We literally had two shifts, but it was the same people pulling both shifts. One of my partners and I lived downtown near each other, and we would just walk home at midnight, literally six days a week. So that was really different. I think that’s still the big difference between now being with C-K and Mitchiner, Ross & Kahn: one, the scale, and, two, the pitchability of C-K. You know, that was the biggest problem at Mitchiner, Ross & Kahn. We did quite well, and we grew pretty quickly and lasted past the danger zone. We lasted for more than seven years. But you still ran into walls where a client of a certain scale would say, “You know what? You guys just can’t handle what we need.” I think today it’s a very different environment.

Organizations of all sizes are able to have their at-bat with clients of all sizes, but at that time, which was the mid-nineties, it was different. And so I really welcomed the scale of C-K, the pitchability of C-K. The one thing I miss about our tiny place was that it was really flexible. C-K’s pretty flexible, but Mitchiner, Ross & Kahn was really flexible. C-K is one hundred and ten years old. There’s sort of a big historical obligation that’s on the current watch. You don’t want to be the management team that screws this up. We didn’t have that at Mitchiner, Ross & Kahn. We were like, “whatever.”

Tuten: So that agency was bought out. Is that right?

Ross: Yes, by Campbell Mithun Esty, which now I think is called Campbell Mithun.

Tuten: Did you stay put or did you leave when the merger occurred?

Ross: We were bought and absorbed into Campbell Mithun. Several of us moved right over to Campbell Mithun and took leadership jobs there. I stayed for a number of years until that agency was sold. I didn’t really like the idea of what was going to become of that. Peter Krivkovitch [Cramer-Krasselt’s CEO and president] and I had spoken over the years many times about me joining Cramer-Krasselt. I gave him a call, and I said, “Well, I think finally I can say, ‘This makes a lot of sense.’” And that was that.

Tuten: And you’ve been there ever since?

Ross: Yeah, like sixteen years, which is a long time in advertising.

Tuten: It is a long time. Do you think that that’s it for now? You’re going to stay put?

Ross: I think I have a really important goal still left, you know, a big aspiration still left ahead of me here. My singular goal is to get C-K to what I call a “sustaining benchmark status.” I think, for me and a lot of people here, it’s important we sort of hit a place where we are a constant benchmark. There are a few agencies that I think have achieved that, and I admire them a lot. That’s the goal—to get us to that point.

Tuten: Can you share which agencies you believe have hit that level of having a sustainable industry benchmark status?

Ross: For me, the agency that most models “the dream” is Goodby, Silverstein & Partners.⁵ Probably Wieden+Kennedy, too. Those two, for the last twenty-five years, really have always been a place to look to and learn from. It’s really the consistency of the reference point that I think is so amazing. It’s one thing to do it for a couple of years. It’s one thing to knock it out of the park in a way that makes everyone’s head turn once or twice, but to just consistently do it, to build a culture and value system that makes that happen over and over and over again. To me, that’s the goal: how do you build a self-repeating culture?

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Tuten: What kinds of things are you doing to achieve that at C-K?

Ross: We’re doing all kinds of things to try and do that. We’re trying to hire people who are believers, who are willing to stay. I think that’s a big part of it. We’re trying to stretch the definition of talent. We’re trying to leverage our independence in ways that make the culture feel unique and make the culture feel precious and something that people want to defend, something that people want to go to bat for. We’re looking for ways to give people freedoms and challenges that they haven’t had. We bring outside influences in a lot more than we used to.

We now have a huge program called “Right Brain,” which brings speakers, musicians, artists, programmers, mad scientists into the company culture on a monthly basis. We ask people within the company to research things and bring them to the rest of us and have their own forum to do it without somebody approving what they do. So, those kinds of things.

Tuten: Do you think those types of actions are part of what’s led Ad Age to name C-K one of the “agencies to watch for” the last three years in a row?

Ross: Well, I hope so. It’s hard to say. I think that like all sort of culture-based businesses, it is so much about who’s winning and who’s not winning. So I think a large part of the Ad Age measurement is about business success. I think a second, big part is, how good is the work? I think that our work has managed to be pretty good. To me, it’s really not at that place yet that I think gets us to benchmark. So, I love that Ad Age has done that and I’m grateful for it, but it’s not really satisfying for me until the product is really able to be a reference point over and over again.

Tuten: Is your goal one that is shared by the rest of the leadership team?

Ross: Yes. I think it is. I think we probably have different ways of expressing it, but I think the idea of success—success with continuity, success on a large public level—is very much shared. And I know we all believe that they key to that is how interesting the work product is, whether that work product be media innovation, planning innovation, or creative innovation—that’s what drives this business and is the first step to helping brands create friends.

Tuten: What’s a typical day like for you?

Ross: Breathless. And it’s kind of nutty. It’s booked solid, and it has a lot of travel—a lot of travel.

Tuten: What kinds of travel? To meet with clients? Prospecting? Presentations like at ad:tech?⁶ Everything?

Ross: All three of those things. Last week I started in Chicago, I went to Nashville, I went to Atlanta, I went to Frankfurt, I went to Stuttgart, and back again by Saturday. And then I leave again tomorrow for Los Angeles. And that’s kind of typical.

Tuten: Now, if you’re traveling that much and you’re doing the important work as part of the leadership team, how much time do you get to spend really with the creative, with the work?

Ross: Not enough. And that’s kind of—I guess that’s what’s expected. This goes back to that goal that I spoke about earlier. I would personally like to spend more time with the creative work, but I’m not sure that helps [us reach] the goal. I think the challenge for me, and for everybody on the leadership team, is to figure out how can the values that I might represent be present in rooms where I am not.

Tuten: Right.

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Ross: My challenge is to figure out who the people are who can lead those moments and lead them well enough that I can do these other things. As much as I miss those moments, there are other things that have to be done. From my point of view, the job of chief creative officer has to be about goal setting and values driving, not ad tweaking. If I’m ad tweaking on a big scale or across the network, that’s kind of a worrisome thing. And it’s also impossible, really, to do that well. It’s impossible because it’s impractical.

We have offices across the country and clients across the country, and there’s a lot of work. To bottleneck the work through me would be kind of egomaniacal, and I don’t think it could work very well. And I think it’d be demoralizing. So I believe that if you have creative leaders in New York, in our other offices, even within groups in the Chicago office, they have to be able to take the ball to a certain point. The executive creative directors of the individual offices have to be able to take the ball all the way. They shouldn’t need me. Ideally, they’d want me for certain things, but they shouldn’t be requiring it.

Tuten: Do you ever have a brief come in where you say, “I just have to work on this project.”

Ross: Sometimes. And, again, because of how I delegate it, I don’t see all the briefs, but there are a couple of businesses I do stay tied with. A lot of new business is when I get a chance to do work either by, again, sort of setting the approach we might take and then creating an example of what that might look, sound, or feel like. New business is where I get to do that the most. And sometimes with Porsche, which is a personal passion.

Tuten: Can you give me an example of something you’ve worked on recently?

Ross: Well, I’m really happy to say that for Porsche’s model year 2013, I wrote a lot of that work. Actually, I’m a little unhappy because I say that and yet I can’t tell you what the work is because you’re not even supposed to know what our cars are for the model year ’13. But that’s very recent. That’s why I was in Germany last week, sharing that with our counterparts there.

Tuten: You enjoyed it?

Ross: Yeah, it was great. I mean, it was challenging to be in the role of copywriter again, from a logistics viewpoint. I had to go in on the weekends, but it was really fun to just write and think about ideas.

Tuten: And is that one where other people came to you and said, “We need you on this one?” Or is that one that you said, “I have to work on this.”

Ross: No, I think logistics created a hole. There were some people that were out on production and some deadlines that sort of overlapped. It was the luck—in this case the good luck, the confluence—where, really the only thing I could say without ruining other people’s lives was, “Okay, I’ll do it.”

Tuten: And what did it feel like?

Ross: It was great. It was scary for the first couple of hours, but then it was great. It was a lot of fun. More fun than my usual days.

Tuten: Scary in the “I don’t know if I can do this anymore” kind of way?

Ross: It’s like anything else. If you don’t play tennis for a while, the first time you find yourself on the court, you kind of suck, right?

Tuten: Right.

Ross: So it was that. I wrote a bunch of stuff, and I was like, “God! I’m going to fire this person.” And then, then finally, I remembered that that’s normal. And then it got fun. And then when it gets fun, it gets good.

Tuten: And then who served as your creative director?

Ross: It’s funny because I asked a larger team to review the work. And I think they were pretty honest, and so I kind of reverse creative-directed. I said, “Okay, guys, now you’re the creative directors. What sucks and what’s really great?” And it worked. I think it did. We’re really happy with the work.

Tuten: That’s fantastic. What a great story. Say you have a magic wand and you can change with this magic wand one thing about advertising. What do you change?

Ross: Ooh, that’s a good question. What’s the one thing I’d change about advertising? I think I’d wish that the really horrible work wouldn’t be successful. There’s a lot of really bad stuff that you’re exposed to that I consider to be visual and noise pollution. And a lot of it arcs [i.e., causes sales to increase in response to the advertising]. It makes me crazy. A lot of it sells a lot of stuff, and I just wish it wouldn’t. And that would be how I would use that magic wand. I would say, “Okay, from now on, if it’s really offensive and crass, it doesn’t get to be successful. You can’t even buy your way to success if that’s the way you’re going to market.” That’s what I would change.

Tuten: It’s funny to me that you mention that, because that’s one of the things that we always end up discussing in my advertising classes when it comes to creative. Is the objective to meet the marketing goals of the client, or is the objective to create really good work? Sometimes the answer is not the same for those two things.

Ross: Well, right. I think the challenge with how open-minded the marketplace is in terms of accepting, responding to work that’s just horrific and work that’s really great, is that it allows marketing directors to be rightfully conflicted about what’s the right path for them. From their perspective, their jobs are on the line with the success or failure of their products and services. Unless they work for companies like Apple that are driven by the aesthetic and driven by a design point of view, they’re up against it. If somebody brings them a formula with a box full of rocks and that formula works, it’s going to be hard to get them off it with work that’s more insightful, with work that’s more human, with work that’s more endearing, with work that’s more memorable. Because the junk actually succeeds. It’s very challenging.

Tuten: Are you in that situation with clients?

Ross: I think everybody in my job is in that situation with clients. I think it’s a fair situation to be in. Our clients have, appropriately, a different lens with which they view the world. And like I said, the first topic we spoke about, if you can’t link what you’re trying to do with what they must do, you’re not going to get to yes.

Tuten: When you look around the industry now, what’s most surprising to you?

Ross: I think the biggest surprise—well, maybe it wasn’t a surprise. We saw it coming, but everybody just sort of said, “Holy cow. That looks like what’s going to happen,” and then it happened. It’s happened in all kinds of different industries. The surprise is how people who had nothing to do with advertising came to control the world of advertising. Did you know that Google is the world’s largest ad agency? But Google doesn’t care about advertising. These guys were out to invent a way to share information. Their mission is to bring information to people in a really usable way. It just so happens that their way of sustaining that mission is through ad sales. They’ve become probably the most powerful force in advertising. I think that’s mind-boggling. On the one hand, it’s kind of amazing and cool. On the other hand, it’s like, “How did we let that happen?”

A lot of the issues that we seem to have with the industry come from the outsiders—complete outsiders. Look at the music industry. Steve Jobs came in and completely transformed the music industry [with the introduction of the iPod and iTunes]. All these music industry people, many of whom got into the business because they love music and they worship the artists that create it, suddenly found themselves not in command of the industry they created. That’s what has happened to the advertising industry.

Tuten: So what do you think will be happening next in the advertising industry?

Ross: I think that change, among others, will probably spark a whole domino effect of new models for what the ad business is. I think that in five years from now, there will be a few pillars of constancy, but a lot of the landscape is going to look incredibly different. It’s going to be way more entrepreneurial. It’s going to be absolutely more technologically fueled. It will be analytics-fueled, and somehow creativity will still end up being a huge differentiator. But the definition of creative is going to be real different.

Tuten: In what way?

Ross: Well, I think the palettes—the canvas and paints—are just going to be different. It wasn’t that long ago when agencies were measured by the brilliance of their film. And now, already, it’s become—in, I think, a positive way—the brilliance of their engagement props, or how well they’re able to elicit participation and activate that participation into real results for clients. That’s changing the kinds of ideas that people create. And people that started in this business, interested in design and interested in words or interested in marketing are still interested in and motivated by these things. But they’re deploying them in ways there’s no way they would have imagined three or four years ago. That’s really cool.

Tuten: When we teach advertising, we’re still teaching people who want to go into the creative side to be art directors and copywriters.

Ross: As long as it’s writing and art directing through the lens of how things work today, that still makes sense. I think there’s a place—there has to be a place for the artist. I mean, you look at gaming, and you say, “Gaming? That’s a technology field, a software field.” It is, but it’s movies. It’s just movies that wait for you to determine their outcomes. There is still great writing, and there is still amazing art direction. So I think that those mindsets and those skill sets are still going to be in huge demand.

What’s going to be different is, again, how they’re deployed. We’re going to have to understand that the paint comes out of the tube in a different way now. That’s a huge challenge for people who are currently in the business, who’ve been in the business for a while, and even for the next generation, because they’re still inspired by the past. That’s what got them interested. The truth is, the past is not all that relevant anymore.

Tuten: What should we be doing in the classroom differently, do you think?

Ross: Well, I think that we still talk about the business and teach about the business in a two-dimensional way. We talk about ideas as marriages between images and language. There’s a whole new dimension that I like to call “activation.” The big idea is the cliché in the business—the goal is to develop a big, breakthrough advertising idea. I think that’s over. We need to be looking for big, breakthrough activation ideas. It’s about mobilization. I don’t mean literally a mobile phone, although that’s certainly part of it. It’s mobilization of people behind actions. And that’s very different than thinking about the world of perceptions and imaging. Now you have to do all of that at the same time. You have to create aesthetics in a world that galvanizes, mobilizes, and motivate people to actually do things earlier, more often, and in more ways than ever before. And so the role of art and the role of language have totally new jobs before them. And creative people, whether they wear a suit or wear jeans or whether they use a calculator or Adobe Creative Suite, have to look at what they’re creating in a very different way.

Tuten: You’ve talked to me a lot in the last several minutes about changes in the ad industry and changes that have happened and what’s coming. Mad Men is an incredibly popular drama now, and that reinforces a lot of stereotypes about the ad industry. Are any of those still true?

Ross: Well, obviously, Mad Men is fiction on a lot of fronts. I think that’s what makes advertising a constant stage throughout the generations of television—you know, it started with the movies, right, with North by Northwest. And then TV picked up on it with Bewitched. Darren Stevens [of Bewitched] was in the ad business. And when I was in college, there was Thirtysomething. There’s always been that stage for the industry because the one constant, the one truth, is the way ego shapes this business. That’s still true. I think that, like Hollywood, advertising is a magnet for people with grand visions, egos bigger than they should be, who sometimes through amazing skill and brilliance, and sometimes [through] sheer luck, get the chance to exercise their egotistical point of view. And so that part’s true.