I think Chris Rock is the funniest dude on the planet, period.  There’s a lot of things that I don’t find funny like #77 on Stuff White People Like – Musical Comedies.  Every now and then, I’ll pop in Bigger and Blacker, and I’ll be ROFL.  Seriously.  Laughing so hard I almost pull a muscle in my stomach.

“There are only three things women need in life: food, water, and compliments.”

Harvard Business Review just published an article titled “Innovate Like Chris Rock” which goes over the process and tactics of Chris Rock in becoming the most popular comedian in the world.

There is no doubt he’s got enormous talent, but his brilliance also comes from the fact that he’s an experimental innovator. The jokes he rolls out on his global tours are actually the output of thousands of small experiments – some of which worked, but many of which did not.

First, he picks small venues where he can do rapid, low-risk experiments with new material. In gearing up for his latest global tour, he made between 40 and 50 appearances at a small venue called the Stress Factory in New Brunswick, New Jersey, not far from where he lives. Rock told the Orange Country Register, “It’s like boxing training camp. I always pick a comedy club to work out in.”

In front of audiences of say 30 to 40 people, Rock will bring a yellow legal note pad with lots of joke ideas scribbled on it, according to fellow comedian Matt Ruby. In sets that run say 45 minutes, many of the jokes will fall flat, but according to Ruby, “There were 5-10 lines during the night that were just ridiculously good. Like lightning bolts. My sense is that he starts with these bolts and then writes around them.”

It’s all part of a process. When the material falls flat, Rock will even pause to say things like, “This needs to be fleshed out more if it’s gonna make it.”

Experimental innovators don’t overanalyze or put all of their hopes into one big bet – they quickly, creatively, and inexpensively use experiments to learn, gather insights, and identify unique opportunities – they then rapidly iterate, relearn, and refine to achieve success.

What’s your boxing training camp?  How do you test your ideas?  How do you know what will work?  When entrepreneurs generate ideas, I think it’s extremely important to test your ideas and get feedback on them as well.  Here’s some ideas on how to screen through your ideas.

1. Create a list. Capture all of your ideas and write a one-sentence blurb about them.
2. Share your ideas. Show the list to your friends, advisors, mentors, etc.  Publish the list on your blog.
3. Resonate. Ask your friends to pick their favorite ones and flush out the ideas that resonate.
4. Repeat. Take the short list back to your friends and ask them to poke holes in your idea.
5. Execute. Take action on the ones that make it through the ringer.  Throw the rest out or add them to your backburner.

Before becoming Managing Director at the VCU Adcenter, you were Co-President & Chief Creative Officer of Ogilvy and Mather. What was your primary motivation in joining the VCU Adcenter?

During my three years on the Adcenter board of directors, I had been visiting the school often and was becoming more and more involved. When I would visit, being around the students energized me. I started to realize that there was an interesting vibe happening at the school that wasn’t necessarily happening at the agency. The idea of being able to work with the students and create change from the outside of the agency rather than from the inside was intriguing to me. I have always tried to create change wherever I was. When I was at Chiat, there was a lot of change happening. At Ogilvy, I spent a lot of time changing the ethos of the company and moving it back to the vision of David Ogilvy and a creative leadership, which it had been lacking. So, naturally this opportunity was very appealing to me.

One thing I really value about the Adcenter is how the entire faculty is very seasoned. Often in academia you find a lot of inbreeding. Grad students finish up and then immediately begin working in academia without any world experience. The opposite rings true at the Adcenter. What is it about the Adcenter that attracts these “advertising giants” to join the team?

The Adcenter is unlike most other academia. We set up a feeling and energy here that is more like a company of marketers or advertisers. The other day, Coz (professor of copy and creative) said that in the ten years he’s been here, he’s never felt the energy that is happening right now with the new faculty. He feels like it is an agency. At the same time Don Just (professor of business and strategy), likens us more to a business of branding and marketing. Whatever it is, I do think the faculty brings an inherent energy and feeling to the school. Between all twelve of our faculty members, we have 277 cumulative years of experience in the business.

As I said before, there is an opportunity here to create change from the outside rather than from the inside of an agency. In this industry, ideas and thinking become congested and compromised. Here, at the Adcenter, we seek to breakdown those barriers. This is a place where we challenge the students to knock down the barriers. And when the students do it, they challenge the faculty and their thinking. Personally, that is one of the biggest reasons I’m here. It’s refreshing to be part of something that is continually changing and breaking down the barriers of thinking.

The VCU Adcenter has been ranked the #1 ad school in Creativity Magazine and is no doubt one of the premier ad schools in the world. To what do you attribute this success?

It has to do with a lot of things. Most important is the fact that the faculty is not teaching from a book, or an academic philosophy, but more from having actively participated in the business. Our faculty is invested in the students. Some portfolio schools say they are employing faculty who are “in the business”, doing it at the time. When I was “in the business” and trying to teach classes, my time constraints on that class were very narrow. My opportunity to spend one-on-one time with students became almost zero. And I think that is probably true in most portfolio schools as well. What the Adcenter has are twelve people who are here pretty much everyday and able to sit down and have a discussion with you or take you for a beer and shoot the shit. The faculty here is the bedrock. I think that’s invaluable.

One other thing that separates us from the rest is the fact that the Adcenter is setup to be a business environment. The school has always been about working collaboratively. We have all four tracks, which integrate the creative and the business side. Other schools don’t do that. As a creative, you walk away understanding a little bit more about what it is to collaborate and listen to a problem from a client’s perspective, and vice versa. If a potential client can judge work with an understanding of what it takes to create that work, they are going to be much better off than someone coming out of an MBA program that has been taught by faculty who never have worked in the business and who don’t understand creative at all. The way the curriculum is made up here is unique, and it’s the strategic underpinning that separates this school.

This past semester the VCU Adcenter competed in the prestigious international Innovation Challenge competition where the Adcenter placed above nearly 400 MBA teams from over 80 leading MBA programs around the world, with two of the Adcenter’s teams going to the finals. What was your reaction to this? Did you expect the Adcenter to do so well? What does this achievement say about the VCU Adcenter?

I used to have two dogs, a retriever and a pointer. When I’d throw a ball, the retriever would go fetch it and the pointer would just sit there and look up at me. I hadn’t taught them to behave this way. They were just wired that way. Potential clients are wired different than creatives. One is focused on finding the answer by analytical study; the other does so by pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. Neither is wrong, but they’re both totally different. They are also taught differently. There is no school in the world teaching both together or teaching the potential client how to judge creative, understand creative, or more importantly, how to work collaboratively.

After speaking at many MBA schools and creative schools, I saw a lack of this collaboration and, sensing a need for it, I made it clear that if I were to come to the Adcenter, I wanted to create this curriculum. It took me almost two years to get this done. In the interim, many companies like Proctor & Gamble and GE have begun to desire creative solutions and are now demanding more creative thinking inside their management ranks. So, it has now become a big movement and we are at the forefront of it. This program is already in place. Kellogg is talking about putting a creative class in their curriculum, Stanford has just added a design class, and Harvard is talking about doing the same. The difference is that they are still going to have MBA students rubbing elbows with MBA students. In our program, what makes it unique, is we have potential clients (Creative Brand Managers) rubbing elbows with strategists and creatives. You can’t find that anywhere else.

So, when you enter a contest like this, which our students did under the guidance of Professor Don Just, it has more potential for a more innovative solution. We didn’t expect the Adcenter to rank as high as we did, but I think it demonstrates and validates what we are trying to do differently.

The VCU Adcenter is currently renovating a new facility that’s expected to be completed later this year. It is my understanding that you personally donated one million dollars to help get the place built. What prompted you to make this generous donation?

To clarify, the donation wasn’t just to help with the new facility. It’s a donation to the Adcenter, in general. Some of it will go towards a scholarship, some for the new building, and some for the school to use as it moves forward. This donation by my wife and I coincides with our capital campaign to raise money. I wanted potential donors to know I’m invested also. I feel that if I’m going around asking people to donate money, I need to have skin in the game, real skin in the game. Then they won’t see me as just someone with my hand open, but they’ll see that I am obviously trying to build something and that I’m participating personally.

The new Adcenter building is designed by Clive Wilkinson Architects who designed Google’s state of the art “Google Plex”, TBWA/Chiat/Day, FCB Worldwide, Mother/London, and JWT/NY, to name a few. (Local architects, Baskerville, will also be contributing). The new building design is “intended to anticipate diversified advertising in the future.” What kind of innovations can we expect in this newly designed facility? Will there be a ping-pong room?

Creative environments generate new and more interesting creative thinking. One thing I took away from working at Chiat Day was the understanding that architecture plays a huge part in culture. Jay was of the belief that closed offices breed secrecy and a closed society. Open architecture breeds people who share and support one another. Doors are secretive; doors indicate barriers. This will, for the most part, be an open structure. Openness invites communication. Everyone should feel part of a family here with the conviction to help their peers succeed. This environment will push you to be creative.

This space has plenty of room for the entire student body. There will be a community table that can seat 140 students. If you look down on the table, it looks like neighborhoods with cul-de-sacs. It’s a neighborhood design; a community design.

We will have a computer lab with 45 computers and another 15 video-editing computers, plus a professional editing room. There will be a lounge with all the amenities. We will even have showers downstairs for those students who work through the night and don’t have time to go home before classes start. There will a flat screen T.V. for video games and a foosball table, and, yes, there will be a ping-pong table.

Advertising, in general, has been ranked one of the most dishonest professions out there. A poll by Gallop found that 70% of people find advertisements to be dishonest and deceptive. The only other two professions that rank lower than advertising are used-car salesmen and telemarketers. What is the Adcenter doing to change that?

It’s hard to change a perception that is so deeply embedded in society. All we can hope to do is our part. We are doing our best to teach students ethics within every class held at the Adcenter. With that said, I believe this negative perception ranges more from local advertising. Most agencies and brands do smart and entertaining work. Unfortunately, most consumers see a lot of local advertising that is not of the same standard. You cannot create a good communication if it does not come from the truthfulness of what that brand is. When you try to create something outside of that, and portray the brand as something that it isn’t, it usually fails.

While advertising has been called, “the most fun one can have with their clothes on” it is also a very demanding “chew-em up and spit-em out” industry. What advice can you lend to those who not only want to be a successful advertising person, but also a successful family man or woman?

At the beginning of your career you have to be willing to work 24/7. You must invest yourself in it because as you get older and you have a family, you want to be in a position that will allow you to spend time with them. I’ve been married for thirty-one years and the thing that helped me most was, as much as possible, not to work on weekends. When I was art/creative director at Chiat/Day, I didn’t work many weekends. Now, that didn’t mean I stopped thinking about it, I just chose to spend my time with my family. You have to make the right decision for yourself. During my time at Chiat, hardly anyone was married, so they were all there on weekends. I was a little out of the “club”, but I felt it was important to spend time at home. I had three daughters at the time, so you just have to make the life choices that are right for you. Once I became head of Ogilvy, weekends were more interrupted because I would have to go out of town for shoots and client meetings. It’s a young people’s business though.

Lastly, is Rick Boyko your real name?

Do you think it’s not? (ha ha) Boyko is Ukrainian. My dad was Ukrainian and my mom is Italian. Her name was Sciortino. Richard is my given name, so there you have it.

Rick Boyko currently serves as the Managing Director of the VCU Adcenter, a graduate program in advertising at Virginia Commonwealth University. Prior to that Rick Boyko served as Co-President and Chief Creative Officer of Ogilvy & Mather, New York.

While Rick has won almost every advertising award there is, he is most proud of an accomplishment outside of advertising: In October 2001, following the September 11 tragedy, Rick conceived of and was the driving force behind “Brotherhood”, a tabletop book honouring the 343 firemen who perished. It sold more than 200,000 copies and the proceeds of $1.5 million went to the families of the firemen.

Brian posted a review on the book, Advertising is Dead, Love Live Advertising a couple of posts back and I got a chance to read through the book myself. He was dead-on when he said that this book was like a yearbook for non-traditional creative. I would recommend it to a lot of people that want to see what other agencies are doing outside of print and tv. Tom writes a lot on his personal theories on the advertising industry which is worth a read itself.

I caught up with Tom Himpe, the author of Advertising is Dead, Long Live Advertising and chatted with him about his book, advertising and Brussels…

The title of your book is very interesting. Is advertising, as we know it,
really dead? If so, aren’t we all out of jobs?

The title is an allusion to a quote which has been made quite often in the last few years, announcing the death of traditional advertising. I think this long announced death is happening slowly but certainly. It’s like this quote from Bill Gates: “We are overestimating what will change the next 2 years, and underestimating what will change the next 10.” That’s how it is with the traditional advertising formats. In two years, they will not have disappeared from the surface of the earth. But in 10 years, the landscape will be truly different. They might not be completely dead yet, but they will have lost most of their dominant position. As is most often the case in the advertising sector, revolutions happen slowly yet steadily, not overnight. There will be just as many jobs, quite probably even more, but the content and nature of the jobs will be completely different.

Speaking of the future, how do you think the advertising landscape will be different from today?

As boundaries will be fading increasingly between different communication disciplines and every company calls himself a “brand builder”, more and more agencies will end up very close to each other. This will create new opportunities for partnerships on the one hand, but increasing competition on the other. But there will be plenty of room for new, refreshing niche players, coming from entirely new directions, whether it’s game development, tv production or urban gaming. Finally, players that cannot offer true added value, will be replaced. Google is said to be working on a system to buy and sell advertising space online. That might hurt many online media agencies. And Business 2.0 recently called Nextmedium one of the 11 “disruption companies”. Nextmedium is a web-based service that handles automated product placement in films and television series. So to sum it up: the future will be one big pool with lots of ducks in it, all more or less quacking the same tune; there will be some very special blue and orange ducks walking on the side; and finally some dead ducks on the bottom of the pool.

Personally, I really enjoyed the book but was wondering what took so long for
something like this to come out. What was your motivation for writing it?

My motivation was exactly as you say: the fact that no book of this kind had come out yet. There were plenty of regular illustrated advertising books on the one hand, giving an overview of print, tv and other work, and plenty of theory books on the evolution in the advertising landscape on the other hand. But there were no illustrated books that gave an overview of all the off-beat, surprising, innovative communication campaigns of the last years. So I decided to do it myself.

You compare fusion cuisine + fast food to advertising, how are the two related?

I compare fast food with the traditional advertising formats, and fusion cuisine with the new-school methods of communication. Old-school advertising is about using and repeating well-known, familiar, standard recipes, tested and approved by previous generations. The metaphor of fusion cuisine refers mainly to this: stop going for the same old ingredients that everybody is using, and start experimenting with new and diverse ingredients. Communication today needs to be more experimental, diverse and complex, much like fusion cuisine is much about experimenting with new cultures and flavours.

Your book goes into some examples of “fusion cuisine” but how can agencies start thinking differently? It’s actually a lot harder than it sounds and most companies will resort to what they know and what has worked in the past.

I think it’s a matter of applying a few simple rules. First of all, agencies need to recruit people with a broad and open mindset. That might seem logical, but it really isn’t. There are many old crocodiles out there. If a senior creative isn’t opening up his mind to the new rules, I would personally be inclined to replace him or her by a 20-year-old. Secondly, include the thinking of people from different backgrounds, from music to tv industry, from product developers to event organizers. Different brains and mindsets create new fusions. Thirdly, get rid -as much of possible- of unnecessary, artificial boundaries and structures between communication disciplines. Fourthly, encourage experiments. As an agency, you have to walk the talk. Try things out and see how it turns out. Finally, do the basics: read, inform yourself, see how a 12-year-old is using media. It’s all out there. You just need to let yourself be sucked in.

Everyone is talking about two-way communications with consumers but you take it a step further and say that brands should engage in guerilla warfare. Can you explain what you meant?

Literally speaking, “guerrilla” means little war in Spanish. What I mean is that communication campaigns shouldn’t be this one big bomb, this one huge campaign. I think it’s wiser to invest in a wide array of smaller and quite often more creative and innovative ideas. Russell Davies talked about the dominance of the one big idea. I totally agree. There are plenty of little, smaller “wars” to fight with very diverse target audiences. So it’s not just about a dialogue with all consumers, but a series of dialogues with different groups of consumers. It will also ensure that the brand is present during a longer period of time, because not all budgets are swallowed by this one big campaign.

The big debate with non-traditional is measurability. In your book, you
talk about the amplification effect. Can you explain further and do you
think clients will buy this?

The amplification effect refers to the amplification of niche or less conventional ideas through various channels and media, both paid and unpaid. The most commonly used include free publicity, traditional advertising formats, co-creation, branded content and online seeding.

I think off-beat and truly original actions or initiatives should be the heart of a campaign. Rather than being the cherry on the cake, they should be the cake. But on many occasions, these ideas are rejected because of insufficient reach. Many advertisers still consider quantity and reach to be more important than the intrinsic quality of the content. I believe very strongly in the force of great content. I’d rather spend 80% of my budget on something truly amazing and amplify it as much as possible, than to spend 20% in the production of mediocre content, which I then distribute in traditional, interruptive channels.

After spending months writing the book, are there any campaigns that still
stick out that you thought that were pure genius? Something along the lines of “I wish I came up with that idea.”

I still think the HYPE Gallery campaign is quite terrific. When it came out, it was one of the first and valid examples of consumer-generated content. It is also a very integrated campaign, involving many channels used in a very consistent way. It offers true value for the consumers. And has been expanding globally ever since. Finally, the fact that the client gave a traditional brief for a traditional campaign, makes it all the more brave.

You used to be the strategic media director for mortierbrigade / Brussels.
Anything I should definitely check out in Brussels? Favorite restaurants,
sights, etc?

Well, the whole neighbourhoud near the Stock Exchange is very vibrant, a lot of nice shops and pubs. Go and have a drink in the Archiduc, a very cool bar with an old, authentic architecture, in the Dansaert street. Go to the Beursschouwburg, a terrific complex that celebrates theatre, film and… partying.

Last question, best Belgian beer?

I’m a sweet mouth, so my favorite beer would be Kriek Lindemans, which is the best cherry beer in the world.

Tom Himpe is a strategist at Naked Communications in London. You can reach him at tomh@nakedcomms.com
If you would like to be interviewed for future posts, please email me at mikekarnj@gmail.com