John x Hannes - You Can Always Get What You Want

Creative partners John McKelvey and Hannes Ciatti have had a star-studded 15-year career, wrangling Gisele Bundchen for iconic campaign I Will What I Want, then following their own tagline to break free from agency constraints and set up their own shop, John x Hannes, working with another icon – and another John – John Malkovich, on their very first job

How’s this for a surreal, self-referential experience worthy of a John Malkovich movie? Acting the part of John Malkovich… to John Malkovich himself. “It was amazingly meta!” laughs John McKelvey, one half of Brooklyn-based creative collective John x Hannes, recalling how he and partner Hannes Ciatti presented their Super Bowl script for website platform Squarespace to the Hollywood legend.

And they managed to convince him: the resulting two-part ad sees Malkovich, who recently launched an eponymous fashion label, try to reclaim the domain name johnmalkovich.com from an amateur fisherman. Delivered with his trademark deadpan humour, the spot brilliantly highlights Squarespace’s site registration services and was one of the Super Bowl standouts this year.      

While Malkovich is a big name to have on the CV, McKelvey and Ciatti aren’t strangers to celebrity: during their 15 years in the business they’ve worked with top talents from Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen and prima ballerina Misty Copeland to the NBA’s Golden State Warriors basketball team. Unlike some agencies and brands who are content to slap the influencer-du-jour on a product without regard to fit or values, they’ve successfully leveraged star power to create authentic, hard-hitting campaigns that cut through the morass of content and actually start real-world conversations.

Brothers doing it for the sisters

Couple that creative ability with a modern, flexible, cost-effective business model, and it’s no surprise that John x Hannes is already causing a bit of ferment in the Big Apple – despite launching only last year. Perhaps because the duo’s working relationship goes back further: Australian-born McKelvey and Ciatti, an Italian native, first met in Sydney when the former was running his own creative collective and the latter was working as a designer at local indie shop The Monkeys. Later, they started working together at WhybinTBWA Sydney, helping the agency to gather in the gongs.

The awards momentum carried the pair to New York, a city both had dreamed of working in. After a six-month stint at R/GA New York, creating campaigns for Google and Nike, David Droga called “out of the blue”, to offer them roles at his 100-strong shop. 

“It turned out really well,” says McKelvey of the move to Droga5. In 2014, they creative-directed the now-iconic I Will What I Want campaign, featuring Misty Copeland and Gisele Bündchen, to launch Under Armour’s global womenswear business. It was, says McKelvey, “a huge learning curve” in “how to propel a story through culture. The influencers give you the chance, because they’ve got the audience, but you have to work really hard to get something that’s genuinely insightful and that’s got a truth in it.”

That can be difficult, he continues, when you’re only granted a two-hour slot with the star in question. “You have to get everyone on board and let them embrace it,” adds Ciatti. “[We had] lots of phone calls to Misty and Gisele, and training sessions with them, so that when it came to shoot date, they knew what [the concept] was and could go out and really tell the story.”

Scoring a slew of Lions and Pencils, including the Cyber Grand Prix at Cannes, the work also garnered column inches in TIME and Vogue and even a nod from the United Nations. “What was so amazing was getting recognised for what [we] did for a certain group in society – empowering women, telling amazing stories, finding new symbols of inspiration for young girls. That was way bigger than the industry awards and getting recognised by our peers,” says Ciatti.

Making their next move

But being part of Droga5’s extraordinary success story – which had grown in a few years to 600 people, yet remained fiercely independent – made the duo hungry for their own adventure, and the evolving advertising landscape offered ample opportunities. “In an agency, you live in a bit of a bubble. But the industry is changing so much [in terms of] where creative work is coming from,” explains Ciatti. “We thought it was time to learn from what is going on in the tech and production industries.

You can plug in in a smarter way, a more flexible way. We’d got a bit tired of all the meetings and all the talking, and we wanted to get closer to production. Those were the two things that were really driving us. Less talking, less meetings, more doing and making.”

Funnily enough, their first job as John x Hannes echoed their career segue: Make Your Next Move, an integrated campaign for Squarespace charting John Malkovich’s real-life journey from actor to menswear designer (Squarespace created his label’s online store). The authenticity of the connection between the brand and its star was key, and they spent hours interviewing Malkovich (“such a gentle creative soul”) before the shoot at his Paris atelier. “In a world of celebs just putting their name on fashion lines, you could distrust that dynamic… but nothing about it was staged,” explains McKelvey. “That was the coolest part – everyone was invested. John wanted it to work; Squarespace had a way to prove their product had scale without it being an ad; and we got a production company [Smuggler] that believed in us.” 

Then came the Super Bowl spot which, incredibly, was shot and wrapped in a matter of days. “Agencies talk for ages about a Super Bowl ad,” says Ciatti, “but Squarespace were brave enough and everyone trusted each other to just do it.” The most nerve-wracking part was presenting the script to Malkovich. But luckily, says McKelvey, “he understood the value in amplifying it [the campaign].” There are high hopes for both projects at Cannes this year.

Direct-to-brand is one strand of the business. Clients are coming to them because although they are increasingly bringing creative in-house and might not need an agency for 12 months of the year, “they are still looking for that external objectivity, those insightful moments, big brand-building stuff and storytelling,” reports McKelvey. The collective also works with agencies – although not as traditional freelance creatives. “It’s about having ownership of a project, not just bringing in ideas that never go anywhere,” says Ciatti. “If you can’t have the relationship with the client it’s hard to make something great.”

Recent successes include two films for Beats’ agency of record, R/GA Hustle, as part of the brand’s b [ready] campaign. They re-shot iconic music promos for The Prodigy’s Firestarter and E40’s Tell Me When To Go frame-by-frame and spliced in footage of athletes preparing for their first major sporting event. “[Hustle and Beats] already had a great platform, so we helped make that work strong in terms of connecting it to real-world moments,” says Ciatti.

We don’t want to be tied down

Working with production companies in a more collaborative way from the very beginning, rather than via the traditional agency pitch process, is also a key aim and, inspired by their success with Smuggler on the Squarespace campaign, the duo are currently building relationships with the likes of Anonymous Content, Superprime and Reset.

So what does the future look like for John x Hannes? “I’ll probably regret saying this when we’re broke,” laughs McKelvey, “but right now being tied to a single client, requiring lots of staff and management, even if it was with a large retainer, that’s not what we’re looking for. It’s to do lots of interesting creative projects with different brands, different alliances, and to scale up later. This is way more fun and this is where the opportunities are.”