New York Special: Matt Ian

He decided to study advertising because his high school friend suggested it, and then semi-dropped out mid-career to have a go at being a rock star. But Matt Ian, executive creative director at TBWAChiatDay, is now firmly in control as he conducts a new band of creatives to greatness in a complex media landscape

As a guitarist – first bass then lead – in a number of bands, music has long had a strong pull on TBWAChiatDay New York’s executive creative director Matt Ian, and it’s a musical analogy that he uses to good effect to describe his view of how a creative department should work.

His feeling that advertising, and more specifically New York advertising, has become too reliant on freelance creatives is illustrated by comparing the creative director role to that of an orchestra’s conductor. “In a media landscape that has become so complicated, where there are so many more moving parts, the idea that CD stands for ‘curator director’ is bullshit,” he states.

Actually doing the work

Ian explains that a lot of creatives in the industry, and certainly a lot of creatives who were at TBWAChiatDay New York when he arrived in September 2013, were freelance because they craved some creative freedom. They didn’t want the ‘political bullshit’ of an agency but simply to make good work. These freelancers, thinks Ian, are the people who should be the industry’s CDs, GCDs and ECDs.

“But a lot of these guys still see the CD role [as a political one], and the problem now is that nobody’s really leading, nobody’s conducting the orchestra anymore. It did used to be that [a CD thought] ‘OK, I’m going to be the rock’n’roll guy, the band leader and I’m just going to sit here and listen to what people have to play [and pass judgement].’ But now, you have to be the leader of the orchestra. You have to have a very, very clear idea as a CD of what the overarching idea for a campaign is, which means you have to actually be doing the work, not just commenting on it.”

Ian, a near-native of New York (he’s from Greenwich, Connecticut, about 30 miles north of Manhattan) has been doing the work since his first role in 1996 at a West Coast agency called Lambesis. He fell into advertising after a friend from high school, (now director) Tom Kuntz, moved west to study advertising and convinced Ian to join him. “I didn’t really know what advertising was,” says Ian. “I mean, I liked the Little Caesar’s ads but I didn’t realise it was something I could actually do.”

Art director to copywriting

Ian had studied art and joined Lambesis as an art director, but the agency was short of writers, so one day his boss came to him with an offer.

“Hey, Matt, do you want to switch over to be a copywriter?”

“No way, man, I’m an art director.”

“I’ll give you another $20k. That’s double your current salary.”

“Hand me a pen.”

Or words to that effect.

Ian recalls that after about a year he was fired for being consistently late. At this point he also wanted to try and make a go of his potential music career and wasn’t sure if he wanted to commit to advertising, so he moved back to New York and freelanced at various places between playing gigs with his band. Soon, though, he was offered a job at TBWAChiatDay New York, followed by stints at Crispin Porter + Bogusky and a very successful tenure in LA at Deutsch, running the Volkswagen account, and hasn’t looked back since. He returned to New York – and TBWA – 20 months ago because, he says, they sold the job to him in the right way.

He loved his time at Deutsch and realises he was working with a client that was completely committed to creativity, but the pull of New York and the offer to make TBWA’s New York office a creative powerhouse was too much to turn down. “I loved Deutsch but [TBWA] said the right things. They recognise that New York needs…” he trails off, before starting up again, more passionately. “I look at Droga5 and what they do is amazing, but New York needs another one of them, and TBWA were posing the question of, essentially, can we be that competition? And I’m from New York and this is where I want to do it.”

Ian says it’s been a rollercoaster since his arrival, with the agency in transition, some key creative departures and a reliance on the aforementioned freelance brigade. But now the teams seem to be hearing the music for themselves and the agency is getting more in tune, though Ian doesn’t take anything for granted, least of all his agency’s location.

“There’s no manifest, God-given right for New York to be the best,” he says. “New York has to be the best, by being the best.”

The city itself has changed, according to Ian. When he was younger the city was something of a mean, dirty place “where only the scrappiest survived” but it’s now cleaned up its act. For the better? “I think for the better,” he replies. “I have kids so I think it’s a good thing that you can walk down the street with them and not get knifed. The lack of knifing potential is a definite positive. But I do miss some of the old New York. There is that safety now, and that’s not necessarily conducive to some of the stuff that used to just spring up and grow naturally in the city.”

New York state of creativity

But there’s still more than enough of that ‘stuff’ to inspire Ian, his creatives and a whole raft of other companies and people. Manhattan is a concrete metropolis seething with ideas and unexplored potential and New York’s artistic pulse, thinks Ian, is what drives the city and its creative industries.

“[This city] has a lot of hidden treasures because there’s just so much stacked onto so much,” he explains. “It’s that stimulus that draws people here.”