John Matejczyk: The Ad Man in Perpetual Motion

Despite an award-magnet career and an answering machine that seems constantly full of wooing calls from ad icons galore, MUH-TAY-ZIK | HOF-FER ECD John Matejczyk doesn’t seem able to quite believe in his success. Still, now he’s in charge of making something that makes things, he can finally acknowledge his future is more likely to be spent in a private jet than on the streets.

“For those readers who might not remember,” says John Matejczyk with a wry smile, “letters were things that we used to hand write onto paper, using a pen and ink, which we would then put in an envelope and hand over to the post office, which would deliver said letter to its destination.” The co-founder and ECD of San Francisco-based agency MUH-TAY-ZIK | HOF-FER, is explaining the age-old art of letter writing because, indirectly, it’s what got him into advertising.

Matejczyk was a marketing major in business school but was thoroughly uninspired by the classic textbook teaching ethos of the establishment and the bland future it seemed to offer him. “The best thing you could possibly hope for coming out of a marketing programme was becoming a brand manager at Proctor & Gamble. That was the Holy Grail, and that just didn’t appeal to me.” Which is where the letters – to his sister – came to the rescue. Said sibling had recently married someone who’d graduated from the Syracuse advertising design programme alongside the likes of Bryan Buckley and Mike Shine. He thought Matejczyk’s correspondence was really funny and asked “Have you thought about becoming a copywriter?” Matejczyk didn’t even know such a job existed (“That’s how bad marketing programmes in business schools were”) but thought it sounded perfect.

If you’re going to San Francisco…

The new brother-in-law helped him hone his craft and bolster his portfolio and eventually, in 1990, he got a job in his hometown of Chicago at Ogilvy & Mather, and worked his way up the ladder. He moved briefly to Doner in Detroit before returning to Chicago in 1996 as senior vice president and group creative director at Y&R. All this time, though, Matejczyk was hankering after a move to one of the more progressive, creative hotshops in the US, but he thought his chance had passed. “My perception was that those sorts of agencies would hire hot young talent who didn’t make any money, and I was in a place where I had children and I was making some money and why on earth would they hire a senior guy like me?”

“When I got to San Francisco I thought it would be the same fight… But there was no tension, everyone was running in the same direction.”

But in 1999 Matejczyk and then-fledgling director Craig Gillespie were behind a multi-award-winning campaign, Worried About Bill, for tax company H&R Block and suddenly, things changed. “After that campaign,” grins Matejczyk, “I called a buddy into my office and said, ‘You’re never going to believe my voicemail!’ I had messages from Rich Silverstein, David Lubars, Cliff Freeman… I couldn’t believe it.” Matejczyk left Y&R Chicago and landed a job at Goodby Silverstein San Francisco, “But I went from SVP and group CD to copywriter.”

Turns out it was a good move, despite Matejczyk being overwhelmed at first. “I was scared to death,” he laughs. “I thought I was a Chicago hack and these guys were going to find me out. I thought they just bled great ideas all the time.” It turns out Matejczyk did too. Over his three and half years at Goodby he helped put the agency on the digital map, excelling in that part of the business, helping Goodby win their first ever digital award for work for HP. Next, Matejczyk spent 18 months at Fallon Minneapolis with David Lubars, winning more awards, including the Emmy for Outstanding Commercial for a Citibank Identity Theft Protection campaign (below). Then it was back to Goodby for another two-and-a-half years, this time as a creative director. “Being a copywriter got to me,” explains Matejczyk. “I wanted to be a CD again because I realised that bigger breakthroughs happen when you can hone that client relationship and really steer them towards a greater future."

Unpronounceable partners

After the second Goodby spell, a stint of freelancing at shops including BBH New York, ChiatDay New York and 180LA, plus an interesting year spent working with PGI, a conference call firm, helping them to launch their new digital platform, colleagues suggested Matejczyk should meet with Matt Hofherr, former president of Kirshenbaum West, saying the two would get along. They were right. On 1 July 2010 the pair started their own agency. Matejczyk already had a company called MUH-TAY-ZIK, based on his email signature (“No one could ever pronounce my name, so it seemed like a good idea,”) so they just added Hofherr’s almost as tricky to pronounce name to create MUH-TAY-ZIK | HOF-FER.

“I’d always wanted to start an agency,” says Matejczyk. “I love making wonderful things. I want to make TV commercials, films, experiences… whatever. To me, making a company is the ultimate; making a thing that makes things. It’s like a perpetual motion machine.” He says that his approach to running the agency is to channel the great people he’s worked with over the years: Jeff Goodby, David Lubars, Rich Silverstein and Ron Hawkins, with creativity always at the fore.

“I was scared to death. I thought I was a Chicago hack and these guys were going to find me out. I thought they just bled great ideas all the time.”

When asked whether the West Coast creative mentality differs from other US regions, Matejczyk is quick to offer his thoughts. “I have very firm opinions about that,” he admits. “Now, I love Chicago, it’s one of my favourite cities, but I’ll explain it to you this way. In Chicago it’s creative versus account people fighting for control. When I left Chicago for San Francisco, my account people friends, whom I still get on with fine, said ‘There may be great creative out there, but you’re not going to find smart account people.’ I was like, ‘Hang on, you’re telling me the smart account people make work that’s boring and which needs twice as much media to be effective and the dumb account people do the insightful, creative work that everyone talks about?’ So when I got to San Francisco I thought it would be the same fight, but with the creatives on the winning side. But there was no tension, everyone was running in the same direction, with a clearly set vision. That’s when it occurred to me that advertising in San Francisco was a different industry than advertising in Chicago and until Chicago figures that out…”

Matejczyk believes that, on the West Coast, particularly in San Francisco, the business community is built on entrepreneurialism, disruption and youthfulness and those tenets were possibly front of mind when MUH-TAY-ZIK | HOF-FER was recently acquired by VCCP. The agency had received attention from holding companies over the years but rebuffed any approaches. “Typically, what I have seen from the holding company model is that their main contribution is cost controlling,” states Matejczyk. But the VCCP approach was different. Wanting a footprint in the US, but being unsatisfied with the results of previous UK agencies’ attempts to cross the Atlantic, they wanted to buy into an existing structure. Matejczyk says they’re being left to run the business as they always have, but they now have the capital to play on a new front, one which includes the opening of a New York office this September.

The fear of being found out

Despite collecting a raft of awards over an already impressive career, Matejczyk still sometimes feels like he did when he moved from Chicago to San Francisco that first time, worrying about being ‘found out’. The fear has improved slightly, though, he admits, with the idea of an equally unlikely positive outcome now balancing the negativity in his head.

“A psychologist might call it bifurcation,” he says. So how does he see the future for himself and his agency in the coming years? “I’m either going to be homeless,” he says, with that wry smile, “or flying around in a private jet.”

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