If you’re a fabulously successful interactive entrepreneur whose last
six startups have made a killing in the market and you’re looking for a
new place to park some cash, Mike Hughes wants your money.
Admittedly, that sounds somewhat odd, for Mr. Hughes, the longtime President and Creative Director of
The Martin Agency
in Richmond, Virginia, is highly successful himself. His advertising
agency helped launch the ad industry’s Second Creative Revolution in
the 1980’s and has been on a tear ever since. Martin’s latest triumphs
include its stewardship of the renowned Geico insurance account, and
its win (after a controversial and protracted review process) of the
Wal-Mart retail account.
Nonetheless, Mr. Hughes wants to pick
your pocket -- for your own good: He wants to establish the world’s
first endowed professorship in interactive advertising at
Virginia Commonwealth University’s Adcenter,
the first accredited graduate program in advertising to combine
academic study of business-communications strategy and brand management
with a creative program for art directors and copywriters.
“We’re
really trying to teach the next generation of industry leaders, and
interactive is by far the fastest growing part of that,” Mr. Hughes,
the chairman of VCU Adcenter’s Board of Directors, told me during a
recent visit to Manhattan. “There aren’t enough people with experience
in digital advertising. It feels to us there should be a program at the
Adcenter built specifically to make that happen – to improve education
in this area, from media to creative to strategy to brand management.
And right now is the time, while the rules are still being written.”
The
enthusiasm of Mr. Hughes and his Adcenter colleagues for interactive
and its opportunities is of no small import to marketers, agencies, and
media. The
Second Creative Revolution
led by agencies like Martin, Chiat/Day, Wieden + Kennedy, Fallon,
Goodby Silverstein, and others transformed the ad industry by making
advertising culturally relevant to a rising generation of consumers.
Their rebellion regionalized -- and then globalized -- a business that
theretofore had been New York-centric. That combination of
decentralization and postmodern edginess, in turn, drew new creative
energy into agencies at a time when maturing consumer businesses in the
U.S. desperately needed to shake up the way they marketed products and
services to fragmenting, jaded audiences.
But during the first
decade of the interactive era, the agencies that defined this Second
Creative Revolution had their sights trained largely on traditional
media. That the shops that imagined their way into the signature
campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s are now innovating their way into
interactive promises a new creative surge in marketing – and even more
intimate levels of engagement with consumers.
“Creatives today
have a facility with technology -- they don’t need to think about the
technology to use it, while for my generation, it doesn’t come
naturally,” said Mr. Hughes. Fifty-nine years old, he is a
second-generation ad man; his father was a production manager, back in
the days when writers wrote copy, handed it over to art directors for a
layout and an illustration, and then trafficked it to production heads
who would supervise photography, typography and the other components of
realization.
“What the new generation of creatives hasn’t necessarily learned,” Mr. Hughes continued, “is how to engage as deeply as we did."
