David Oakley

Creative Director
BooneOakley

David Oakley is president, and creative director at BooneOakley (booneoakley.com), the agency he co-founded with partner John Boone. The agency, based in Charlotte, NC, has done well since its inception in 2000. In a relatively short period of time, the agency has brought home a Webby, a Cannes Gold Lion, and multiple Clio and Addy awards. Under David’s leadership, BooneOakley has been named an Advertising Age “Southeast Small Agency of the Year,” and David and John were named a “Hot Creative Team” by Creativity magazine. The agency web site was honored in the Google Creative Canvas for 2010.

David started his advertising career as a copywriter at Young & Rubicam in New York, where he crafted campaigns for major brands including Certs, Dr. Pepper, and AT&T. From there, he went to TBWA/Chiat/Day to help develop the Absolut Vodka campaign—voted one of Ad Age’s “Top Twenty Ad Campaigns of the Twentieth Century.” After seven years in the Big Apple, David followed his Carolina roots to super-regional agency, Price McNabb, where he worked on several award-winning campaigns. In 1997, David and John Boone opened a satellite office of The Martin Agency in Charlotte. There, David served as associate creative director for Wrangler, Alltel, Kellogg’s, Saan, and the Charlotte Hornets.

David Oakley: I’m telling you, blunders happen to us. That happens a lot to BooneOakley. It seems anytime we go in for a presentation, either something about the AV equipment doesn’t work or—I don’t know. It’s just been our history. It happens, so I just kind of laugh because it happened to somebody else.¹

Tracy Tuten: BooneOakley has the Bojangles account. How is everything at Bojangles?

Oakley: It’s really interesting. Bojangles is doing a lot of interesting consumer research right now. We are in the process of learning more about the customer base, which is always a good thing. A lot of the work that we’re going to be doing in the coming months is going to be based on the findings.

Tuten: Who’s doing the research?

Oakley: It’s a company called Bain and Company. I think the research firm is based out of Massachusetts. Bojangles actually was purchased last summer by a holding company called Advent and the holding company, fortunately, is willing to do some spending for good consumer data, which is a good thing. It’s something that we really wanted to do before, but Bojangles never had the budgets to do it.

Tuten: Interesting. I had Bojangles this morning for breakfast.

Oakley: Really? You did not.

Tuten: I did. Seriously!

Oakley: What did you have?

Tuten: I had a chicken biscuit.

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Oakley: A Cajun fillet biscuit? Very good, very good. I’m very impressed.

Tuten: I thought about you while I was going through the drive-through. I said, “David would be so pleased to know that we have this interview today and I’m here frequenting his client.”

Oakley: It’s Bo time! [The tag line for Bojangles’ campaign.] You were probably going through the drive-through while I was sitting at corporate headquarters. Actually, it’s not known as a corporate headquarters. It’s known as the support center, right? That’s what it’s called. It’s not called corporate headquarters. It’s called support center because they’re there to support all of the individual franchises and owners.

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

Oakley: Both of my parents were potters, which was great. It was a really creative background to have. I actually didn’t realize until I got in college that I’d had a very unusual upbringing, being the son of two craftspeople. It was really a great childhood. We traveled to craft shows up and down the Eastern seaboard when I was a kid. We would go to Florida or we’d go to Virginia Beach and we’d show our wares. But it was also a lot of work and growing up that way taught me that while I wanted to do something creative in my career, I did not want to be a craftsperson. I really didn’t want to be a potter. I saw my dad and my mom, and they always had mud all over them. They had clay all over them, you know, just from making pots. It’s a really hard business being a potter, and they worked really hard. I wanted to find a way to be creative and not be dirty all the time. That sounds like a really weird thing because I’m not exactly the cleanest person around, you know? I take a shower once every couple of months [laughter].

Tuten: Are your parents still living?

Oakley: My mom is still living. My dad passed away seven years ago, but the business that they started out in Creedmoor, North Carolina, which is north of Raleigh, is still going strong. My sister runs the business now. My sister is a glass blower. She has a great, glass-blowing business there, and there are still four potters who make pottery at the Cedar Creek facilities. It’s awesome. The business my parents started is forty-four years old now, and just this year it was recognized by the Department of Transportation, or the Highway System, or whoever does the tourism signage. Now, there are signs on the highway that say “Attraction: Cedar Creek Gallery and Pottery.” So it’s kind of like a state treasure now.

Tuten: That’s fantastic.

Oakley: Yeah, it’s really cool, I’m really proud to be a part of it. And that was a great place to be from.

Tuten: Does BooneOakley do the advertising for the gallery?

Oakley: We have done ads for them, yes, in the past. But, you know, they’re just a little too small for us. You know, they don’t have the budgets that we want [laughter]. No, I’m just kidding. We do everything—we do a lot of stuff for them for free actually. It’s my sister. We talk about ads and marketing all the time.

Tuten: Is your mom surprised how you turned out? At how you ended up using your creativity?

Oakley: Yes, she actually thought I’d be successful instead [laughter]. Instead, this happened. This ad thing happened. No, she’s really psyched. She’s really proud of me. Like any mom. I’m kind of embarrassed by that question, but the answer is yes, she’s very proud, of course.

Tuten: It just occurred to me when you were talking about growing up, for her to be a potter and to see how you channeled creativity in a different way. It must be a source of pride for her.

Oakley: At the beginning though, things were different. I have to be honest. When I was finishing school at Chapel Hill, I really thought that I would go back to Cedar Creek and run the Cedar Creek Gallery. I thought that would be my work. And even though I wanted a different creative route, I thought that I would probably become a potter, too. Even though that’s not really what I wanted to do. The hardest thing I ever did was really decide to leave that opportunity, that sure thing, and go out on my own and figure out a different way for myself. I just needed to do something. My parents were very supportive of me moving to New York and going and getting my first job in advertising. They thought that was really cool. But, still, it was a big decision.

Tuten: Did you go to college to study advertising? How did you discover advertising as your creative field?

Oakley: No, I didn’t plan to study advertising. I really went to college pretty much to meet girls [laughter]. I went to North Carolina because I heard that it was like sixty-three percent women. No, I went to North Carolina and I really went there because they had a good basketball team. That’s really why I went there. And because I was able to get in. I loved my time at Carolina. I took a lot of business courses. I was a business major.

See, it’s like this. When sons and daughters of bankers go to school and they rebel, they go into the arts. When the son of an artist goes to school, they rebel by going into business. I was kind of like that at college. I really wasn’t a great student. I was an okay student. I was really more into the whole college experience than I was into learning. When I was about to graduate, I was over at a girlfriend’s house on a Sunday afternoon, and I was doing my economics homework, and she was doodling or drawing these little drawings of—they looked like stick figures. She couldn’t draw for anything. But I asked, “What are you doing?”

She says, “I’m drawing the Pillsbury Doughboy.”

I’m like, “Why?”

She said, “I’m writing headlines for Advertising 170.”

I’m like, “Wait a minute. You get college credit for doing that? That’s so easy. Anyone could do that.”

She said, “It’s not so easy.” Blah, blah, blah.

I said, “Well, wait a minute.” It never occurred to me that people could make a living, you know, doing print ads or writing commercials. It never, ever occurred to me that people actually did that for a living. So she told me about a professor, and his name was John Sweeney. She said, “He’s awesome. He worked at an agency for seven years and he’s been a professor here for four, and you really should go talk with him if you’re really interested in this.”

I was the kind of student [for whom] it was really unusual to go to class, let alone to go talk to a professor. That was beyond my capabilities. I mean, seriously, it was like a big deal to go see a professor at random and say, “I want to take your class.”

I went to his class. I went to see him the next morning. I introduced myself. He said, “Well, great. What year are you, freshman, sophomore?”

I’m like, “No, I’m a senior.”

He goes, “Oh, so you’re graduating in two months?”

I said, “Yeah.”

He said, “Well, I suggest you probably go and get a job, you know? That’s probably what you should do.”

I’m like, “Well, yeah, I want to do that, but I want to get a job in advertising. That’s what I want to do. It just hit me yesterday. This is it.”

John Sweeney said, “Well, there are a lot of people graduating every year, and it’s a really hard field to get into, and you probably should just get a job in whatever—what’s your major, David?”

And I said, “Industrial relations.”

And he says, “I think you should get a job in whatever kind of job, whatever kind of career you go into with an industrial relations business major.”

And I’m like, “Okay, well, I’m not sure, but I know that I want a job in advertising.”

Anyway, basically, he said that his class was full and I was really bummed. I graduated and then that summer I saw that he had another class. He was teaching a summer school class, so I went back to him. And I said, “Hi, Professor Sweeney. Do you remember me?”

And he says, “Yeah.” He kind of remembered me.

I said, “I’m David Oakley.”

He said, “You graduated, didn’t you? Didn’t you graduate?”

I said, “Yeah, I did, but I’m still here in Chapel Hill.”

And he asks, “Why?”

I said, “Continuing education. I just hadn’t left Chapel Hill. So I really want to take your class.”

He said, “No, you can’t take my class. It’s full, and there’s a fifteen-person waiting list to get in it.”

And I don’t know what made me say this to Sweeney, but I said, “I know you’re like the most popular professor in the advertising track. I know you’ve won Professor of the Year for the last three years, but I also know college students, and I guarantee you that every single one of your classes, at least one other person will skip, and when that person skips your class, I’m going to be in that seat.” And he just looked at me like I was crazy. I said, “I will be in that seat.” And I walked away.

So I went to his class the first day, and it was literally packed with people. Then somebody got up and left, and I sat down in the seat. I went every single day. Every day there were open seats, so I just kept going even though I wasn’t enrolled in his class. Eventually it came time for the mid-term exam and I came ready to take the exam as though I was actually enrolled in the class. Professor Sweeney must have been thinking, “This guy’s a psycho.” [Laughter].

Up until that point, four weeks into the class, he had barely acknowledged me. But that day he came up to me, looked at me and he just threw a copy of the test on my desk, and he said, “Okay, you’re in.” That was that. He officially added me into the class. I ended up staying at Chapel Hill another year and a half and working as a waiter and oyster shucker. During that time, I took three more classes with Sweeney. He helped me put my portfolio together, and to make a really long story short, I took my beginning advertising portfolio, and I moved to New York.

Sweeney introduced me to some people in New York, and I kind of networked my way around and ended up getting my first job at Young & Rubicam. Twenty-five years later, Sweeney is still a really good friend of mine, and he’s been my mentor since the beginning. He is a great professor. But you know what? He really wanted me to prove to him that I wanted a career in advertising. Once I showed him that I really wanted it and I was committed, he was like, “Okay, we’ll go. You’ll get it.” So that’s how I started.

Tuten: You are exactly the kind of success story from students that keeps professors going, keeps us teaching every day. There are plenty of those other ones who—well, like you were before you met him.

Oakley: Just going through the motions, going through the bars, hanging out, coming into class hung over. Something clicked when I realized that I really wanted to do advertising. It was a crazy decision, and, it’s been a crazy career, and it’s still young. I still feel really young, and I can’t believe that was like twenty-five years ago. It feels like it’s gone by in twenty-five minutes, and I guess that’s because I was having a good time.

Tuten: What was your first job at Young & Rubicam?

Oakley: My first job was as a copy cub. Basically, it was a junior copywriter position. They called copy trainees copy cubs. I was hired with four other junior writers from around the country. They hired a guy from Winthrop University whose portfolio basically consisted of poetry that he had written. They hired a guy from University of Illinois. They hired a woman from University of Missouri. We all started together. It was like this melting pot of different people. We all became friends because we started together and we went through this six-week copy-training program. Through this training program we were introduced into what a big ad agency was all about. After training, we were split up. We were all put into different groups.

Of course, we were the low person on the totem pole in our respective creative departments. When I was there at Young & Rubicam—this is around 1987—there were fourteen hundred people in the office. It was crazy. It was almost like going to a small college inside this giant ad agency. It was just ridiculous how many people were there.

Tuten: What kinds of campaigns did you work on there?

Oakley: Let’s see. I did a really fun print campaign for Certs breath mints. It was the first time they’d ever done a sugar-free version of Certs, and it was interesting because it was such a big agency, and everybody wanted to do TV. So people really didn’t care about the campaign. The more seasoned creative types didn’t really care about doing print advertising at the time. Y&R was known then as a TV shop, so I couldn’t believe that one of my first assignments was to do a full-color magazine advertisement for Certs. I ended up getting lucky. I was assigned to work with an older art director.

I was like twenty-four and my art director was sixty-two. This art director actually drew his comps with a paintbrush, and watercolor, and paintbrushes. He didn’t use markers. He didn’t use a computer. He drew all of his comps with a paintbrush, which was like crazy. I couldn’t believe it, and I really kick myself because I don’t have any of his comps. I wish I had saved them. At the time, he would do them and throw them away. But, anyway, we did a campaign for Certs that ended up winning all these awards. It won at the One Show and it won Clios. The funny thing was that this Certs campaign was the only thing that won awards out of the entire New York office. I was still pretty new at Y&R and it was just kind of ironic that this little print campaign that no one wanted to do ended up winning the only awards of the year.

Tony Carillo was the art director. While we worked, he would sit there and tell me stories about his daughter. He would talk about his tennis-playing daughter, who was this great tennis player. He’d say, “Yeah, she’s from Flushing, she’s from Queens. You know, she was junior partners with this kid. You probably know him, John McEnroe.” So he’s telling me about going and hanging out with McEnroe and I’m like, “What’s your daughter’s name?” And he says, “Oh, Mary, Mary Carillo.” So the tennis announcer that you see now, Mary Carillo, is his daughter.

So Mary Carillo was John McEnroe’s mixed doubles partner, and they won the US Open together. It was like, holy shit! Y&R was a very, very amazing place to work actually. It was like a school. It exposed you to so much.

Tuten: What’s the most important thing that you learned while you were working there?

Oakley: The most important thing that happened to me is that I met my wife, Claire while I was at Y&R. She was an accounts person. I fell in love with her, we got married, and we celebrated twenty-one years last week.

Tuten: Congratulations.

Oakley: Well, thank you very much. Thank you. What was the most important thing I learned? I kind of knew this from my parents, but it was reiterated at Y&R. The lesson is to always to believe in yourself and keep your eye on the prize. Y&R was my first step into advertising. It was really cool and I learned a lot, but there were also times that I didn’t like what I was producing. The Certs campaign was really one of the few things that I produced there that I really liked.

Y&R was a bureaucracy, and I really learned to keep my eye on the prize because I wanted to do the type of work that some of the other agencies in town were doing at the time, like Chiat/Day or Scali, McCabe, Sloves. They were doing unbelievable work. I was also keeping my eye on a couple of the agencies in North Carolina, one was McKinney, and LKM—Loeffler Ketchum Mountjoy—in Charlotte at the time, and also The Martin Agency, which was doing great work. I just really watched other agencies, and I knew that I wanted to work at a smaller agency. But Y&R was the best place you could ever start a career. I’ll put it to you this way. It got me in, got my foot in the door. It was my first job, and a lot of great things came from it. I can sit here for hours and tell you Y&R stories, but if you really want to know all of the good ones, you have to buy the book.

Tuten: Your book?

Oakley: Exactly. Whenever it’s ready in 2028.

Tuten: I’ll be your first sale. Tell me about this bureaucracy issue at Y&R.

Oakley: When you’re a junior writer, there are just so many levels to work through to get your ideas approved. You have to be very guarded with an idea. When you come up with a good idea, it’s almost like it’s your baby, and you have to shepherd it through. You don’t want these different cooks to come in and put different things into it. Sometimes you’ll have a creative director or a supervisor that can add things and make it better. There are some who are gifted at that. But there are also a lot of people who aren’t so gifted at that, and sometimes what they add to an idea, well, it’s like they just want to put their fingerprint on your idea to put their fingerprint on it.

So when you’re a junior writer, you have to go through the senior writer, and then you go through the associate creative director, and then you go through the group creative director, and then you finally get it to the executive creative director before it goes out to the client. An idea has to go through like five levels before it actually gets to see the light of day. It’s very, very hard to get it through all these levels. It’s much easier to do great work by having an idea, working through a creative director, and then going to the client. The bureaucracy of it all was frustrating. It was frustrating to have such a long, difficult road to work with ideas.

Tuten: So you said that Chiat and The Martin Agency were doing the kind of great work you wanted to do while you were at Y&R. What kinds of things were they doing? What was different at those agencies than Y&R?

Oakley: Chiat/Day had done a campaign for NYNEX, which was the telephone system in town at the time, and it was a print campaign, and it was all over the subways. I’m completely blanking on exactly what the executions were right now, but I was in love with this campaign! I was like, “This is the best thing that I’ve ever seen.” And then there was a great campaign for Smith and Wollensky Steakhouse that I thought was written brilliantly. The work appealed to me in a different way. Y&R was more akin to formulated packaged goods stuff. Y&R did ads for Efferdent and Rolaids. I worked on the Rolaids account. I met Tommy Lasorda, the Dodgers’ manager, and I did radio spots with him, and I met Rollie Massimino, the Villanova head coach, and did radio spots with him. The work was fantastic and fun, but the creative was just kind of formulaic. It just wasn’t really anything breakthrough. It wasn’t what I wanted to do.

Tuten: Was this the “Rolaids: How do you spell relief?” campaign?

Oakley: Yes [laughter]. Yes, I worked on that campaign.

Tuten: I still use that campaign as an example in class. To point out the value in repetition.

Oakley: When I was there, they started giving out the Rolaids Reliever of the Year award for the best relief pitcher in baseball. I did a print campaign for that. It was good. When I look back on it, Y&R was pretty awesome, and I met friends, not only Claire, but friends that I’ve had for life. People who are still in my life today. Y&R was kind of like this mini-graduate school that I was in, and I was there for three and a half years.

Tuten: And then what happened?

Oakley: There were a lot of changes going on during that time at Y&R. A new group of creative directors came in. I saw people get laid off at Y&R, old people who had been there forever. People who had been there during the “mad men” days, you know, and I’m there in the late eighties and people who had been there for like thirty years get laid off. A new guy would come in and just lay everyone off. They didn’t lay me off because I wasn’t making enough money to save them any money, I guess. But what was your question? Why did I leave?

Well, I had been working to make my portfolio better and I got an opportunity to go to TBWA. This was right before they merged with Chiat/Day. TBWA was right across the street from Y&R. I literally just walked across Madison Avenue and started a new job. I got to work with some incredible people there. I worked on the Absolut Vodka campaign. It was about two years or three years after the campaign had just started. I got to come in. I was lucky. I was still really junior. I had only been in the business for three years. It was just incredible. I was at TBWA/Chiat/Day for four years.

Tuten: Is the Absolut Vodka campaign the only one that you worked on there?

Oakley: No. Absolut was an interesting thing because it was a print campaign that really became iconic, if you really think about it. Imagine if you said to a creative team, “Hey, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to put the product really big in the middle of the page. I want the product to take up the whole page. I want the name of the product to be in like 2-inch type at the bottom, and I want there to be one other word on the page. That’s your assignment.” The creative team would vomit! Seriously, we would vomit. That would have been like the worst assignment you could ever have. I mean, it’s terrible. But that’s exactly what that campaign is based on.

Geoff Hayes was the originator of the campaign. He actually saw the genius in the package design of Absolut Vodka. The taste of Absolut vodka is no better than any other vodka. It’s the same stuff, basically. I mean, if you put out five glasses, I could never tell you which one was Absolut—even then, even when I was working on it! What Absolut had was an amazing package. I think Absolut was the first to actually spray the type and label on the bottle instead of using a paper label. Spraying the label made the brand seem so much more classy, chic, cool. It really made the brand seem more high-end. I thought that was pretty amazing.

What Geoff Hayes was able to recognize is that they should really make the package the king. The bottle should be king. He had this idea to feature the bottle and make the package the hero. Geoff looked at it and said, “This bottle is perfect. This is perfect.” And then he just wrote, “Absolut Perfection” and put a little halo over the bottle, and that’s how the campaign was born. It was just one execution, and the legs on this campaign were unbelievable. It went on for fifteen or twenty years. I think they’ve changed it now, but it did go on for a long time.

Tuten: So what’s your favorite one?

Oakley: My favorite one is an evolution that happened right as I was getting to TBWA. A team named David Warren and Tom McManus worked on a campaign. They had the insight to branch the campaign out and do a city campaign. Michael Roux was the head of Absolut and he wanted to do something that recognized certain cities. Roux said something like, “I’d love to do something that we could run in Chicago magazine or New York magazine that would be specific to that town.” David and Tom took Michael’s request and came back with this idea that a city icon could be reflected as the bottle. What if you took an overhead shot of a swimming pool and made a swimming pool look like a vodka bottle, an Absolut bottle? They named it “Absolut LA.”

In that same meeting, they brought in an overhead shot of Central Park that they had altered to look like the bottle, and it said, “Absolut New York.” And it was just like, “Holy shit. That is like unbelievable, but it doesn’t have the bottle, so we’re not going to be able to do that.” I mean, they clawed and clawed, and I have to give them major credit for being persistent, but they were able to get that to Michael Roux. I think that he was skeptical at first, but he decided to go for it. Roux bought those two ads. They would run specifically only in New York and Los Angeles, and they got Steve Bronstein to shoot them. They had models made for the shoots.

There must have been rocket fuel added to that campaign because when those two ads hit the market, that’s when people started tearing them out of magazines and collecting them. From that point on, it just opened up this whole thing. I was lucky to work with those guys because they kind of took me under their wing and invited me to really help them come up with more ideas for the campaign. They’d say, “Okay, Oakley. Help us think some more.” That’s how, as a young writer, I got to work on an iconic campaign. I did the Absolut Boston ad, which was the parquet floor of the Boston Garden. I’m such a big basketball fan. I really wanted to do Absolut Chapel Hill, but, you know, we decided to do it for Boston [laughter]. We did Absolut Louisville and Absolut Seattle and Absolut St. Louis. We did these city ads all over the place. There were some ads that never made it.

Tuten: Do you have a favorite ad that was never produced?

Oakley: There was one that didn’t make it, which I think would have been one of the best of all time. It had a political leaning to it, and this was in 1992. It was the political season of 1992. It was a spread and the ad had the Absolut bottle way on the left side of the page and it said, “Absolut Liberal,” and the other side of the spread had the bottle on the right side, and it said, “Absolut Conservative.” It was left-right. It was one quick visual pun. Everybody at the agency loved it. We were like, “This is going to be the best one we’ve ever done, blah, blah, blah, blah.” We presented it to Michael Roux, and he was just like, “No, no, no, no. I do not get involved in politics. No politics, no politics.” And we were like, “But you’re appealing to everyone now. You’re saying it doesn’t matter your political affiliations. This is the vodka for you.” He wouldn’t do it. Four years later, in 1996, they took that ad back out to those guys because Absolut under new leadership, and they tried to sell it, and the same thing happened. They could not sell that ad. So anyway, that one didn’t happen.

Tuten: That’s a great idea. I love it.

Oakley: Well, thanks. That was a good one. There are a lot of ads that never made it, never saw the light of day. Oh well.

Tuten: Is it heartbreaking?

Oakley: It is, especially when you’re starting off in your career because you put so much heart and soul into coming up with an idea and the ideas can get killed for so many odd reasons. The stereotypical reason is like, the client’s wife didn’t like it. That sounds so lame, but it’s happened. It’s happened.

Tuten: So how do you deal with it?

Oakley: With one that doesn’t make it? For every ad that’s made it through the pipe, there are ten that don’t make it through, you know? It’s kind of like sperm, I guess. God, I don’t know why I said that! [Laughter.]

Have you ever heard the saying, “The one that makes it through is a good one”? It makes me think of Luke Sullivan, and I think you said you were interviewing Luke Sullivan, right?

Tuten: Yes, I did.

Oakley: Okay. His book, Hey Whipple, Squeeze This,² was a huge, huge influence on me. There is a principle in that book that I will never forget and I tell people all the time. It is just a simple thing: “outlast the idiots.” Meaning if someone kills your ad, go back to the drawing board and come back with a better one—and if they kill that one, go back again, suck it up, and come back with a better one because eventually there’s going to be a deadline, and they’re going to have to buy it. So if you give in and just say, “Oh, screw it. Here, take this. Is that what you want?” then you’re going to have to produce that ad. It takes just as long to produce a bad ad as it does to produce a good ad. So you should really outlast the idiots, and eventually, the deadline will happen, and you’ll have to produce something really good. Anyway, thank you, Luke.

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Tuten: I bet he’ll be happy to see that you learned such valuable lessons from his book.

Oakley: He’s a great guy. He’s been a huge influence on not only me, but a whole generation of writers, really. You know what, I wrote a blog post a few months ago, and it was entitled “Luke Sullivan’s Mistake.”³ It was really funny because I put it out there knowing he would end up seeing it somehow. Someone would forward it to him.

In the original printing of Hey Whipple, Squeeze This, there’s a picture of Absolut Magnetism, which was an ad I did. I had heard that ad was going to be in the book and that meant I would be mentioned in the book. I was so psyched. I was like, “Wow! Luke Sullivan’s writing a book,” you know, because he was winning every award you can imagine at this time in advertising. He was like a god, and here he’s writing a book about it, about how he does it.

Someone said to me, “Hey, your ad is in there. Oakley’s ‘Magnetism’ is in there.” So I run out to the bookstore to buy the book. I get it. I’m flipping through the book to find the ad. I find it on page twenty or whatever page it’s on, and there it is. I’m like, “Oh my God. It’s here.” I flip immediately back to the credits to see if my name is in it. It lists me as the art director. And I’m like, “Fuck! I’m a copywriter. This is the greatest copywriter ever, Luke Sullivan, and he thinks I’m an art director. He thinks I’m an art director!”

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He got it backwards—my art director was listed as the copywriter. So I wrote this whole thing about he made this big mistake in his first book. But anyway, you have to read it. He was really nice about it. He wrote me like three e-mails, saying, “Oh my God. I cannot believe I never knew that, you know?” He says, “I’m changing it in the new edition. I will make sure it’s right.” I’m like, “No, it’s really funny. I’d rather be known as the art director. The art directors did more on that campaign than any copywriter ever did.”

Tuten: The new edition is supposed to be a complete new edition to incorporate social media and digital.

Oakley: Oh good. Well, he doesn’t, he doesn’t know anything about that [laughter].

Tuten: Should I let him know so he can stop work on the book?

Oakley: Yeah, definitely stop him.

Tuten: So it sounds like you had a great experience at TBWA/Chiat/Day.

Oakley: Oh, I did. Claire and I got married during this time. And after three years of being married, we had our first kid, Sydney. We had a little tiny apartment and after about six months, we decided that we were either going to move to New Jersey or we were going to move really out of Manhattan. I got an offer to come down to Charlotte, and I really had only been to Charlotte a couple of times. We moved here. We just up and moved. I didn’t realize what a traumatic experience that was going to be—moving with a little baby to a place like Charlotte in the mid-1990s from New York City. Even though I’m from North Carolina, it was a huge culture shock to me. For Claire, who had spent her whole life in New York, it was like, “Holy moly, where have you brought me?” It was very different. Looking back on it, it was the best thing we could have ever done, but at first living here was an interesting experience. Anyway, I’m getting off track.

Tuten: Who did you work for when you first came to Charlotte?

Oakley: I worked for an agency called Price McNabb. It was founded by Charlie Price, who’s from North Carolina, and at the time I think he had an office in Raleigh, Columbia, Asheville, and Charlotte. And I met John Boone there, and we started working together. I spent about two and a half years at Price McNabb. I loved that it was small and the layers of bureaucracy weren’t there. It was just one creative director. We got a lot of great work done in the time that I was there, a lot of good stuff produced.

I got an opportunity after that to go to The Martin Agency. I got a call from Mike Hughes, who was the creative director at The Martin Agency. This was like getting a call from God. I mean, Martin was just, was it. Luke Sullivan worked at Martin for a long time. I mean, it was, “Wow. Mike Hughes has noticed my work and he’s interested in it,” you know? I got the job offer to move to Martin in Richmond, but I turned it down. Isn’t that crazy? Claire was expecting our second baby. We were expecting Lucas. So I talked to Mike Hughes and said, “You know what? I really don’t want to leave Charlotte, and I can’t believe I’m saying this to you, Mike, but I’m not going to take the job offer. I cannot believe I’m saying this, but it’s not—the timing is not right, you know? I can’t believe I just turned down that job.”

I went back to Price McNabb and I worked there for another six months. Lucas was born, and it was awesome. In the meantime, John Boone had been freelancing. He had left Price McNabb and was freelancing at The Martin Agency, and they offered him a job, and John, almost jokingly, said to Mike Hughes, “I know that you had offered David Oakley a job a few months back. He’s in Charlotte and I’m in Charlotte. I know he didn’t want to move to Richmond. Why don’t you just open an office in Charlotte and you can hire both of us, and I know he would take the job.” John came back to Charlotte and told me about it. And I’m like, “You did what? You said that to Mike? Wow! That’s pretty cool.” And then a week later, Mike Hughes called and says, “We’d love for you to work for us. God knows why you want to live in Charlotte, but, if you want to live in Charlotte, we’ll do it. We’ll get you guys a little place and we’ll hire you.” So that was that. We opened up an office for The Martin Agency here.

Tuten: So how did BooneOakley come about? Why isn’t it The Martin Agency Charlotte?

Oakley: That’s a good question. We worked with Martin for maybe three years. Three years seemed to be about my limit before I needed something new. We got to work on Wrangler jeans. We did a ton of fun stuff for Wrangler. I thought it was a great account. We pitched and won the Charlotte Hornets. We pitched Performance Bike. John and I were kind of autonomous, but we also worked on some of Martin’s bigger brands, like Kellogg’s and Saab and Wrangler out of Richmond. We were really just a creative output and we spent a lot of time in Richmond. I personally started to get bored. I just kept thinking, “You know, this is kind of boring.” I don’t know if sitting and looking at John all day was boring. I don’t know what it was. He was probably more bored than I was, but I really wanted to break off and start our own agency.

Honestly, Martin thought the Charlotte Hornets account was too small for them. And I was like, “You know what? It’s not too small for me.” Also, I didn’t want to travel as much at the time. I was doing a lot of traveling for production, and I had two small kids and I wanted to be in Charlotte with my family. I talked to John and we came to an agreement: “Okay, we’re going to start BooneOakley.” But then we had to talk with Mike. We went to Richmond. I sat down with Mike Hughes and told him, “I really have always wanted to open my own shop. There is only one place I’d rather work than The Martin Agency and that one place would be working for myself. The Martin Agency was like my dream job. Everything’s been great about it. I’m going to do it [open my own agency], but I’m really honestly scared out of mind because this is like jumping out of an airplane—or jumping off a trapeze without a safety net below.”

And the Mike Hughes said the coolest thing. He said, “This is your safety net right here. You can always come back to work for me.” That’s what he said. I was like, “Wow. That is so amazing. Mike, are you serious?” And he says, “No.” He just started laughing, but then he said, “Yeah, I am serious. If you guys get tired of it in a year or two years and you realize what a pain in the ass running your own agency is and how hard it is, you can call me and come back. He was serious when he said, “I will take you back,” which I thought was one of the greatest things ever. If I can ever offer that to someone who works for me, I will. I would always want to be like Mike Hughes. He’s the best boss ever.

Tuten: Do you ever think about going back?

Oakley: Every day. Every day I think about it. I do! Running your own business is really hard and it’s a lot more than just doing fun, creative work. It’s so much more than that. It’s much harder than I ever realized. At the time, we were this kind of cocky creative team. Creativity magazine had named us “hot creative team of the year,” and this was in 2000. We were full of ourselves a little bit. We were like, “We don’t need those account people. We don’t need those support people. We don’t need big Martin. What do they do? We can do all of this on our own.” And we struck out on our own, and it was like, “Holy shit. You know, they did a lot of stuff. They did so much stuff, and it’s not really all about the creative.” Running your own business is probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but yet it’s probably the most rewarding.

Tuten: Have you ever called Mike to ask him if you could come back?

Oakley: Yeah, it was a couple weeks ago. I did talk with him. I said, “Remember when I came to talk to you and you said if we ever wanted our jobs back we could? Can I have it back?”

And he just says, “No. I was lying. No, you can’t have it back.”

I’m like, “Oh, man, come on. You said that I could come back.”

He says, “I was kidding.” But he was just totally joking. He’s the type of guy that if I called him today and say I wanted a job, he would give me a job. It might be as a janitor. I don’t know what the job would be, but he would help me.

Tuten: How did you launch BooneOakley? What did you do?

Oakley: The first thing that we did for BooneOakley was to put a billboard out on Highway 485. It was in the year 2000. It was about two weeks before the presidential election. That was the year that Al Gore was running against George Bush. We put a billboard up that had a picture of Governor Bush and it said, “Gore 2000.” This was a big, fourteen by forty-eight [foot] billboard. When we had the outdoor company print it, they’re looking at it like, “What is this? This is a mistake.” I’m like, “Don’t worry. Just print it and put it up.”

So we put it up, and within an hour, we’re getting calls from CNN, Fox News, wondering, “How in the world could you have made such a horrible mistake and how did you do this?” I respond, “Well, you’ve got to understand, um, um, um, it’s our first day, our first week in business. You’re not really going to write a story on this, are you? You’re not really going to?”

This one guy from Fox kept saying, “This is the biggest political campaign blunder in history. Of course we’re going to write a story on it.” But then he says, “So tell me: who are you working for? Is it the Democrats or the Republicans?”

And I don’t know how to respond. I just say, “Um, we’ve been instructed not to say.” I just said it like that. He says, “Oh! You’ve been instructed not to say? They don’t want you to tell us who you’re working for? Oh, okay.” He was all over me. And I’m like, “That’s all I can say. I would really appreciate it if you would just let this drop.”

“We’re not letting this drop.”

That afternoon, it was the lead story on CNN.com: “Ad agency bungles campaign billboard.” It was kind of a worldwide story. This was on a Friday, but on Sunday, I’m online, Googling the story, and I’m seeing pictures of this billboard everywhere. I’m seeing it in, you know, in Chinese. They had written about this story in China. I’m like, “Oh my God.”

I remember telling Claire, “No, I can read this. Look. It says, ‘Those idiots don’t know the difference between Bush and Gore. What a bunch of idiots, losers, whatever.’” Anyway, that’s basically what it said. We had to pretend all weekend that we didn’t know anything, except that we had just really screwed up. On Friday afternoon, we had said, “Well, we’re going to get it changed as soon as possible. We’ll get it taken down, but the outdoor company has left for the weekend. They don’t work on Saturday and Sunday. You know how unions are.” [Laughter.] I’m saying that—like there are no unions in North Carolina. But, anyway, we had said, “They don’t work on the weekends. We’ll change it Monday morning.” Then on Monday morning, we sent out a little press release saying, “At eleven o’clock the Bush-Gore billboard will be fixed.” That’s basically what we said. And at eleven o’clock, there was an NBC News helicopter literally filming live while we put a sign across the billboard. The sign said, “Today’s job opening: proofreader for 123Hire.com,” which was a jobs listing site. Someone had needed a proofreader. Obviously, there was a proofreader who was needed because there was a giant mistake!

The news story was carried on CNN and everywhere. It ran all over the news outlets again. The story was, “Well, you thought it was a humungous blunder, but what it turned into was an amazing, amazing publicity stunt for 123Hire.com,” and we got nationwide coverage again. On Wednesday of that same week, there was an article in The Wall Street Journal about it, and we were interviewed for The Wall Street Journal, which is a pretty darned good way to start a business. That was a good thing.

The president of Continental Tire North America, which is based in Charlotte, drove by the billboard that weekend and came into the office on Monday morning and told his marketing team, “Find out who did this billboard. I want them to pitch our business.” Continental just happened to be in the middle of an agency review, and they asked us to come into the review. To make a long story short, we ended up winning that business two weeks later. That billboard really catapulted us and got us going.

Tuten: That’s a great idea. How did you come up with that?

Oakley: John and I were talking one afternoon about all the political signs that were in the neighborhood. It was primary season, probably in August of that year. You know, there were like tons of Pat McCrory signs in our neighborhood, and John was saying he couldn’t believe how many were in his neighborhood. One of us happened to say how weird it would be if there were a mistake or, you know, what if one was printed wrong? Then I remembered this story about Yonkers Raceway. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of this, but there’s a horseracing track up in New York, probably in the Bronx, I guess. Yonkers is in the Bronx. When they opened it, if I have my stories straight, it was in the 1940s. They were almost bankrupt by the time they finished it, but they put giant letters up and they spelled it “Yonkers Raceway,” but they spelled it “wya.” They misspelled it, and the next day, it was on the cover of The New York Herald. I think the Herald was the paper of the time, but the New York Post and The Daily News had it on the cover. The Raceway had free publicity from this giant screw-up, but then all of a sudden, everyone knew that Yonkers Raceway was opening that weekend. They were idiots because they spelled it wrong, but they had gotten the publicity that they had wanted. They had a sellout that weekend. Everyone came out to the race to laugh at the sign, and it got them started off successfully.

We thought, “Man, wouldn’t it be wild if a political billboard was done the wrong way like that?” We had a friend from 123Hire, and we were talking to him about using our new agency. We honestly had this idea for 123Hire before we even had them as a client. But we called Brian Parsley, who was the owner of 123Hire. We were like, “Look, we’ve got a great idea. We want to come present it to you.” We brought it to him, and said, “There’s no way anyone’s ever going to do this. It’s so risky. You’re talking about the president, the future president of the United States,” and we’re thinking copyright infringement, and this and that. Somehow though, Brian just says, “That is awesome. I love that.” He went on, “It won’t cost that much to print this. I already have billboards in Charlotte. I’ll just take one of my old ones down and put that one up.” So that’s how it happened.

Tuten: That’s perfect.

Oakley: It worked out really well. I will tell you. It was scary that weekend. I was not prepared for the media onslaught, but I was able to kind of get through it somehow.

Tuten: Are you usually the voice of BooneOakley? Are you the primary spokesperson?

Oakley: Yeah, pretty much. I just have that personality. When I was in the eighth grade, I won an award at the end of the year. The Kaopectate Award, for basically having diarrhea of the mouth. I’ll never forget my eighth-grade teacher giving me that award in front of the whole school. It was great, yeah.

Tuten: Teachers live for moments like that.

Oakley: [Laughter.]

Tuten: BooneOakley’s web site is very unusual. Can you tell us about that?

Oakley: It’s basically a series of YouTube videos. I wish I could take all the credit for it, but all the credit really goes to a junior team that was working here, Jim Robbins and Ryan Holland. We had given them the task of redoing our web site. Our web site prior to this one launching about a year and a half ago was basically built-in flash. It was really cool. It had astronauts on it. We were dressed as astronauts. It had gotten a lot of attention and won industry kudos for being a cool web site. We wanted something new, but also to do something else that was very attention-getting. Well, Jim and Ryan had come to us with an idea to include a talkbot on the site. Basically, the idea was that a visitor could type something into our site and the site would give an answer. Anything you typed in, we would have an answer for it. It seemed like a really cool idea. We were working on it for a while, and then another agency did something similar, so John and I killed the idea. We said, “We can’t do that. It’s too similar.”

Jim and Ryan did just what Luke Sullivan talked about: they outlasted the idiots. We killed the idea and they came back to us a week or two later and said, “You know what? We noticed this thing on YouTube where you can do annotations in the videos, and you can click on the videos to go to another video.” They were showing it to us, and we were like, “Wow. I didn’t know that. That’s crazy. I had no idea you could do that.” It was a brand-new technology.

We started talking about the agency, asking things like: What is BooneOakley’s story? What are we all about? We were about really doing daring work and doing things that are outside the, very unusual, creative stuff, so let’s tell our story and maybe tell our story in a series of videos. We talked with Jim and Ryan about what we wanted to say in the videos, and then they went back and illustrated the ideas with stick figures. It almost took me back to my friend, Laura Bowen, and the first time I considered advertising as a possible career. They were just really crude drawings.

They put them together on file cards and came in and showed the first video one afternoon, and I almost fell off my seat. I was like, “Holy God, this is good! This is so funny.” We spent like the next two months coming up with other videos and other things to link them all together. Really, the whole web site was just a vehicle to show our work and to show what we did, what we had done, and to make it very interactive and easy to get through.

Tuten: You got tons of publicity for doing the web site that way, but are there any cons?

Oakley: We got a lot of publicity. We’ve gotten a lot of new business inquiries through it. One of the cons, though, is using YouTube. A lot of corporations block certain sites, like porn, I guess, and YouTube! That means many people cannot access YouTube at the office. We didn’t realize this, so in some respects, we shut ourselves off from consideration by companies. At companies in which YouTube is restricted, when someone types in booneoakley.com, the site comes up as “restricted.” We have had a lot of new business leads, but the biggest con is that not everybody can look at YouTube at the office.

Tuten: What do you think you’ll do next with it?

Oakley: You know what we’re going to do now and we’re in the process of doing it? We’re going to keep the YouTube site. We’re going to keep it because I think it’s great, and we’re able to update it and add things. It is a little bit of a problem that people can’t view it from some companies, so we’ve done a very simple site. We direct people to that site if they have problems navigating the one on YouTube.

Tuten: I read recently on your blog about a pitch that you lost.

Oakley: Which one?

Tuten: I don’t know which one it was.

Oakley: I’m joking. But I’m also laughing because I feel like we’ve lost like our last three pitches.

Tuten: Oh.

Oakley: It’s very fresh in our mind—losing. The hardest thing is losing. I hate, hate, hate losing, absolutely hate it.

Tuten: It’s surprising then that you blogged about losing.

Oakley: Well, I just felt like it was almost cathartic. I wanted to send the message out to our people that maybe sometimes when you lose, that’s what was meant to happen, and you have to accept it and move on. Maybe we weren’t right for that client, even though we really wanted it. And, you know what? We weren’t right. We weren’t right for the client if we lost the pitch. In that blog post, I told a story about a pitch I was on when I was with The Martin Agency. We went down and pitched Alamo Rental Car. While we were waiting to give our presentation, I found the pitch that the agency that had previously pitched in the morning had left by mistake in the rehearsal room. I’m looking through the pitch thinking, “Oh my God. This stuff is terrible. This is awful. Oh my God. There’s no way we’re going to lose to this.” I brought the other pitch with us, and we did our presentation.

Our presentation basically was [laughter] received by crickets [dead silence]. When we presented, it was like crickets. We were in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and we all loaded into the van that would take us back to the airport. I was like, “I can’t believe the stuff that Foote, Cone, and Belding presented. It’s terrible. It’s got like Bobby McFerrin singing and changing his song to ‘Don’t Worry. Drive Happy.’ I can’t believe anyone would actually present that. If we lose to these guys, I’ll be vomiting all the way home.”

John Adams, Martin’s CEO, and really, really a brilliant guy, was with us on the pitch. He said, “If we lose to these guys, I’ll be okay with it.”

I’m like, “What? Are you like crazy?”

He goes, “No. If we lose to these guys, we weren’t right for them. They don’t want the type of work we do, and it wouldn’t have been a good fit. So it’s better for us to lose now and move on to something else.” He goes on to say, “If we were pitching against Chiat or Wieden+Kennedy or Goodby, I would really, really be upset if we lost to them, but I won’t be upset if we lose to FCB because it wasn’t meant to be. They don’t do the same type of work that we do, and if they win, they will have beaten us at a different ballgame than what we’re playing. Obviously, the client wants something different.” Well, we found out a week later that they went with FCB, and that actual campaign I had found in the rehearsal room got produced.

I really didn’t believe John Adams. I’m like, “You’re full of it. Don’t you want to win?”

He said, “I don’t want to win if it’s not the right fit for our agency. You have to take a step back and realize that you’re not meant to win everything. Sometimes it’s better to lose than to get into a bad relationship.”

Anyway, that’s what I needed to share with our people here. When we lose, it’s meant to be. We just weren’t the agency who produced the kind of work that that prospective client wanted. Sometimes it’s better to lose.

Tuten: How did the employees take it?

Oakley: They told me I was full of shit. No, I don’t mean that. I think they really appreciated it. I wrote it more for them than anything. I wrote it for the people who actually worked on the pitch. I wrote it for the agency. And I wrote it for me, too. Because even though I know what John Adams taught me is true, it’s still really hard to lose.

Tuten: How do you handle it as an agency when you lose? Do you have a meeting about it? Do you talk through what you did right and what you did wrong?

Oakley: We always bring everyone together. We’re very transparent about things. We’re a small agency, and I’m not a great poker player. People can read me. They know when I’m really psyched, and they can tell when I’m really bummed. When I get that phone call after the pitch and the first thing I hear on the phone is, “Unfortunately, we’ve decided to go with another agency,” you know, I’m not going to be able to walk around the rest of the day joking and everything. I’m going to go to the guys and say, “Here’s the deal. We didn’t win. We gave it our best. I’m really proud of everyone. We went all the way down the field.” It’s almost like being a coach. You’ve got to keep your team excited and up, and you can’t let them get too low. I think that’s one of the things about running a business that you end up becoming. You become a coach.

Tuten: You’ve had three losses recently?

Oakley: Yes.

Tuten: What’s that like? That’s got to be a whole new level of coaching, coaching past it.

Oakley: It is. It’s really hard because I’m right in the middle of it. I want to win, but we just have to be patient and find the right next piece of business that’s good for us. It’s really difficult and you have to keep your head up. It’s not that different from any sports team when you go on a three-game losing streak. You just have to get up the next day and go to work, and eventually, things will fall in place. I’ve been through periods of time where we won like crazy. The work’s coming in like crazy. Of course, winning creates another set of problems. It’s a funny business. It’s very much a roller coaster business: you’re up, you’re down, you’re up, you’re down. It’s a wild, wild, fun ride.

Tuten: Can’t take it too personally.

Oakley: You definitely can’t take it personally. It’s just like when you’re a junior writer and your creative director’s telling you, “No, that idea sucks,” or “That idea’s not good,” or “But maybe you should do this.” You really can’t take it personally. You just have to keep going and coming back with new stuff. You kind of have to go home and lick your wounds a little bit and then come back the next day and be ready to go after the next piece of business that might be available.

Tuten: Is that the best piece of advice that you’d give to someone who’s somewhat new in the business?

Oakley: Well, I think you really have to learn to have a thick skin, and figure out how to deal with obstacles put in your way so that you can get around them. Figure out a way to get around them and make things happen. That’s the best way. In this business there are always different obstacles and different ways to get to a solution, and you’ve got to find a way to make it happen.

Tuten: What’s next for you? What dreams and aspirations do you still have?

Oakley: Well, actually, it was just doing this interview, so I’ve pretty much peaked now [laughter]. But seriously, I’d like to grow into someone more like Mike Hughes. I look at Mike as like the best boss I’ve ever had in terms of being a real, genuine, nice, good person, who has great instincts and is great with people and is fair in his judgments and people respect him. Yet he was able to let the people who work for him grow and do the work and become better. That’s what I’m hoping that I’m able to do, that the people who work for me become better people and definitely better creative people, but more than anything, better, and maybe one day they’ll go off and start their own place.

Tuten: Do you want to grow BooneOakley? Is it as big as you want it to be?

Oakley: No, I’m not really that concerned about size for BooneOakley as long as we’re able to make a decent living and continue to do the type of work that really makes me happy and makes John happy, the type of work that gets noticed and gets talked about, and really creates a reaction for our clients. I mean, really—it’s not fun—advertising sucks if you’re doing boring work. It’s like beige wallpaper. No one even notices it. I just want to be able to continue doing the type of work we’ve been doing and doing it on different canvases. I’m really excited about things that are happening digitally. The developments in digital represent such a new, interesting way of talking with people. That’s what I’m excited about. Oh, and writing that book.

Tuten: Are you and John still creative partners or too busy managing the business to be a creative team anymore?

Oakley: We are occasionally creative partners, but over the last couple of years, basically, we’ve been creative directors on different accounts, and we’ve been—we haven’t done that much creative together recently. He’s an awesome, awesome art director, great creative mind, and a brilliant guy. Yeah, we haven’t really, honestly.

Tuten: Do you miss it?

Oakley: I definitely miss it. But, you know, I feel like there are different things that I am destined to do right now versus doing copywriting or, you know.

Tuten: What are you destined to do?

Oakley: I’m destined to do interviews [laughter]. No, I think I’m destined to be Mr. Client Relationship guy. Not really. I don’t know. I really want to be someone who is—I’m trying to think of how to say it—fostering a den of creativity. I want to be someone who creates a place where people come to do creative stuff and do it for our clients. I don’t know how to explain it, but someone who’s created this environment where really cool things happen.

Tuten: I’ll look forward to seeing what you do to make that happen.