Johannes Leonardo Are Doing It Their Way

Suggesting that the digital age isn’t actually all that – see the vision of a dystopian future outlined in adidas Originals’ Your Future Is Not Mine – is the kind of bold, fresh concept that catches the collective eye of millennials, cleans up at Cannes and lures the big brands, such as Google and Coca-Cola, to see what other big ideas buzzy New York shop Johannes Leonardo can come up with...

Feng shui theory holds that each space has its own energy, but arriving at Johannes Leonardo, it feels as though the exposed brick walls and floor-to-ceiling windows are struggling to contain a force of nature. Housed in a former photography studio in New York’s hip Soho district, the office hums with zip, zest and a sense of getting shit done. It’s like the city in microcosm. Even the resident French bulldog, who sports a pink harness, is scuttling around with purpose.

“There’s a real buzz of energy throughout the agency, in the spirit of making great things,” agrees new head of integrated production, Dana May. This is a shop that’s been doing great things for a decade now – big, transformative brand ideas executed with a freshness and flair that gets them mentioned in the same breath as Droga5, Mother and Anomaly – but the past year, it’s fair to say they’ve been on a creative roll.

The astronomers of Soho

May’s arrival in September 2016 marked the start of a new commitment to expanding and diversifying production, while the agency’s already enviable client list (adidas Originals, Google, Coke) has been bolstered by a raft of new business wins. Even more impressively, in an age of project-based relationships, 90 per cent of that roster is now agency of record. And although not in the business of “chasing awards”, their prospects for Cannes look pretty rosy.

Johannes Leonardo started life in 2007 (the name combines those of the founders, Johannes ‘Jan’ Jacobs and Leo Premutico, but also pays tribute to Renaissance-era astronomers Johannes Kepler and Leonardo da Vinci – who, according to their website, “also looked into the unknown and explained it to the rest of us.”) Jacobs began his creative career in his native South Africa, working for a succession of top networks including Y&R, Ogilvy & Mather and TBWAHuntLascaris. Australian native Premutico, meanwhile, got into advertising after appendicitis put paid to his dream of becoming a professional soccer player and honed his trade at Colenso BBDO in New Zealand.

The pair met at Saatchi & Saatchi in London in 2003, and in 2005 were offered co-ECD roles at the New York office, tasked with transforming a “huge cash-cow agency, [without] a single good piece of creativity”. Within two years, they had taken the shop to dizzy new heights, including Cannes Lions’ Agency of the Year; a satisfying outcome for two ambitious (and bloody-minded) creatives who’d been told by everyone: “Whatever you do, don’t take this job.” 

The decision to launch their own agency was, continues Jacobs, “a pretty organic process”. At Saatchi, they’d learned a lot about “the way networks judge creativity – the emphasis on awards and things like that – and that wasn’t necessarily the way we wanted to judge. We set out to [answer the question]: What can creativity do for the business problems you hear as a creative director?”

These feet were made for talking

Their first job, for football boot brand Nomis, was a case in point. Tasked with launching the product in an over-hyped market dominated by adidas and Nike, a key insight from the client was that 80 per cent of customers who trialled the boots bought them. So JL created an entire campaign, Ask Your Feet, to shift the conversation from image to performance and get people looking beyond flashy logos. It picked up two gold Lions in 2008 and is still cited as a favourite campaign by new joiners to the agency, says Jacobs.

It was a similar story on Re:Brief, their Mobile Grand Prix-winner for Google, where JL convinced the advertising legends behind iconic campaigns like Coca-Cola Hilltop and Volvo’s Drive It Like You Hate It to reimagine them for the digital age. The idea came from a client’s comment that the industry was using display [banner] advertising in a prehistoric way – yet anything that could be done on the wider internet, could be done equally well in a banner. “We thought that was amazing,” remembers Premutico, “so we tested that insight by asking, can the world’s biggest ideas live in the smallest spaces?”  

That was 2012, and as Jacobs points out, “We’re still doing the same thing today. We try to come up with these big, transformative brand ideas.” It’s this approach, he believes, that explains why, in an increasingly project-based world, 90 per cent of JL’s business is AOR. “[These days] the model is very complicated; there are lots of partners that clients have to work with – so if they have a big idea that’s moving the business forward, it’s much easier to rally round it.”

Of course, you can’t talk about Johannes Leonardo without mentioning adidas Originals. Like Fallon and Sony, or CP+B and Mini in the Noughties, agency and brand are enjoying something of a golden chapter with their ‘to create is to challenge the status quo’ concept, which kicked off with #OriginalSuperstar in 2015. That was followed by double gold-Lion-winner Your Future Is Not Mine, urging the next generation to reject a dystopian future of virtual reality sex, smartphones and selfies. The current campaign, Original Is Never Finished, tackles “the idea of originality and the sense it’s all been done before” via a visually dazzling mash-up of classical and pop-culture references, featuring Snoop Dogg and set to Frank Sinatra’s My Way - a truly pioneering use of a much-loved track which earned it the Entertainment for Music Grand Prix at Cannes this year.

The consumer is the medium

With director Terence Neill bringing a fresh, edgy aesthetic, and through the clever use of ‘legitimate’ influencers, the films have enjoyed huge viral success; to the point the Originals ‘style’ is now being copied by other sports and streetwear brands keen to secure a slice of the millennial market. But sexy visuals alone won’t get your brand lasting traction, points out Jacobs. “What people don’t understand is that [adidas] were doing cool-looking work before we won the business, but their sales were going down. The key difference is, you can’t just make the work look great: you’ve got to have some insight, argument or point of view that the brand can stand for and that people can believe in.”

That commitment to a bigger idea is why JL is no one-trick pony. “We’re not ‘the streetwear agency’,” states Jacobs. “We’re able to flex across [different types of brands].” He points to recent client wins including a Fortune 500 company, MassMutual; a new digital insurance brand, Sonnet; and a millennial-focused sports news platform, Bleacher Report.

Another key tenet of the Johannes Leonardo philosophy is ‘the consumer is the medium’. “When we started, there was so much conversation around media and technology,” explains Premutico. “Digital media was going to be the next big thing… and bye-bye traditional media. Now it’s VR. We realised that’s always going to evolve, and all that technology is going to do is to empower people.” Consumers now have the power to enhance ideas and build brands up – or bring them down.

This channel-agnostic approach presents an exciting challenge for the agency’s production department, and May has been tasked with creating fresh capabilities for clients, such as global event activations and virtual reality experiences. A former head of production at CHI & Partners, who has also freelanced for pretty much every top New York agency you’d care to name (Droga5, Mother, Anomaly and Ogilvy, to name a few) May is passionate about the role of producers in fulfilling the agency’s vision.

“Everyone should have the opportunity to play in the creative sandbox and influence our output,” she says. “In a time when ‘decoupling’ production is such a buzzword in the industry, it’s incredibly important to me that production is valued. I tell my team we are more than just executors: we’re creative partners, pathfinders, mediators, business strategists and brand stewards.”

To that end, she’s building a team of producers with both classic agency production experience and less traditional backgrounds, like art and industrial design – some of whom had not worked in the advertising industry prior to joining JL: “It excites me as they bring something special and a new approach to how we produce things.”

The high ground on the High Line

In many ways, New York is a natural habitat for this go-getter of an agency, reflecting both its diversity (it employs staff from 17 different countries) and attitude. “People come to New York to test themselves. It’s a hard place to be successful. That joint energy of trying to see what you can do is powerful. It’s a nice thing to be part of,” says Jacobs. And those who take risks get rewarded. “It does feel [like a place] where a lot of decisions are made, and a lot of things start. You get handed that blank canvas [from clients] a lot.” Sometimes quite literally, as when they were offered a stretch of wall by a developer at the iconic High Line, a railway line-turned-park arching above the streets.

“Something like 200,000 people walk by every month, so the question was, what do we do with it?” says Premutico. The idea they came up with was, a riposte to Trump’s infamous pledge to build a 1,900-mile wall on the Mexican border, whereby artists will create messages of solidarity on vacant walls across the city – starting with the High Line site. By aggregating the total length of those walls, they hope to outstrip the 1,900 miles planned by Trump. Now that’s a big idea.