FCB's Liz Taylor on Famous Namesakes & Female Quotas

 A famous namesake comes in very handy for certain things. Just ask FCB Chicago’s chief creative officer, whose moniker, shared until 2011 with a certain violet-eyed actress, has secured her many a room upgrade/table at the hottest restaurant in town. (In a star-studded double whammy, her creative director husband shares his name with the All Stars legend Chuck Taylor.) But when it comes to carving a stellar career path, Liz Taylor has done it under her own steam.

Which makes the assumption that she landed the CCO gig at FCB purely thanks to a female quota rather annoying. “A lot of people were saying ‘Oh, there’s another one who got the job just because she’s a woman.’ I was like, ‘I’ve won some awards! I’m not a hack!’” she says indignantly. “But part of me didn’t really care about people’s preconceptions, because [I thought] I’ll just rise to the challenge with great work that speaks for itself.”

And rise she has: leading FCB Chicago to a 12-Lion win at Cannes this year with a slew of creative campaigns, ranging from the charming to the chilling. For kids’ bike and trailer brand Radio Flyer, the agency launched a kids-only travel agency featuring destinations such as Stinky Broccoli Forest and Mount Puppy, reachable only by imagination, while in their campaign for Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence, a teddy-bear-shaped gun was a grim reminder that it’s easier to bring a lethal weapon than a soft toy to market under current US manufacturing regulations.

Other recent highlights include a quartet of films for probiotic brand Renew Life, voiced by William H. Macy and Felicity Huffman, built around the concept ‘Being Human Takes Guts’. For Taylor, the campaign exemplifies FCB’s global creative vision, “Never finish work”, which she was tasked with bringing to Chicago. “[The Chicago office] was traditionally about beautiful, perfected executions. But now, we’re working a new muscle in the department, getting people to think about equity-building, legacy-making, culture-changing platforms that can have a provocative, behaviour-changing idea within them, and evolve with new chapters every year. A Nike ‘Just Do It’. Or a Dove ‘Real Beauty’,” she explains excitedly. “That’s our mission, and we’re just getting started with it.”

The opportunism of an oil painter

A Chicago native, Liz Taylor was raised in the suburb where movie classics The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles were shot, and she displayed a strong creative streak from a young age, starring in amateur theatricals and scribbling stories. After majoring in English, she was bound for law school; luckily, her brother convinced her it would “suck her creative juices dry”.

Advertising had always interested Taylor – instead of band posters, her college dorm-room walls were plastered with Nike and Absolute ads ripped from magazines – but lacking any industry contacts, she wasn’t sure where to start. Unfazed, Taylor simply rang up the most famous agency in town. “I called Leo Burnett Chicago and asked the operator: ‘How do you get a job making the ads?’” laughs Taylor. “I didn’t even know what it was called!” After attending a portfolio clinic at the agency, she was inspired to apply to Atlanta Portfolio Center, sending oil paintings and a novel (penned at the age of 13) in lieu of a portfolio. It was an early example of the lateral thinking, enthusiasm and resilience that’s served Taylor so well in her career.

Graduating alongside Ted Royer and Jay Benjamin (it was clearly a vintage year), Taylor got her first copywriting job at J. Walter Thompson New York, where she was soon handling big budgets, global accounts and shooting million-dollar Kodak commercials in India. After eight years in the Big Apple, she returned home, transferring to JWT’s Chicago office, where she worked alongside CCO Dennis Ryan “and fell in love with consumer packaged goods”. Not the sexiest of products, to work on, admittedly, but, explains Taylor, “If you don’t do good work on Nike, you’re in trouble. But if you do amazing work on clients that are more traditional and conservative, then that’s way more rewarding.”

“A lot of people were saying ‘Oh, there’s another one who got the job just because she’s a woman.’ I was like, ‘I’ve won some awards! I’m not a hack!’”

In 2001, she followed Ryan to local indie agency Element 79 (now absorbed by DDB Chicago), where she worked on Gatorade’s Can Jimmy Play? campaign, among others. As a big sports fan, it was a personal and professional highlight. “I had to fight my way onto that account – it was a very male-centric group,” remembers Taylor. “Jimmy… was an assignment that no one wanted – everyone else was doing the big Super Bowl spot – but it actually became one of their biggest campaigns.”

Then came a four-year stint juggling motherhood with freelancing as a creative gun-for-hire, during which Taylor worked on “every new business pitch in the city”. Although working with lots of different agencies was fascinating, the craft-obsessed Taylor found handing over projects halfway through “quite frustrating… when what comes out is not at all what you thought you were creating”.

As digital creative evolved from websites and banners into bigger cyber-centric, crafted ideas, new opportunities opened up. Having helped TribalDDB to victory in a Wrigley’s pitch as a self-confessed digital novice – “I’d write down all these technical terms in my Moleskine and go back and Google them” – she was shocked to be offered a permanent GCD position. “It was one of the hardest jobs I’ve ever had,” she says. “Socially, because there were a lot of creatives who did not like the fact I was coming in above them; mentally, because I didn’t even know how to build a banner ad.” But displaying the same fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants attitude that got her into ad school, she stayed “two steps ahead of the clients”. When the agency closed in 2010, she continued building her digital expertise by freelancing at R/GA and Ogilvy, eventually going full-time at the latter as ECD, digital and social, in Chicago, then North America, and finally global.

There, she oversaw such creative highlights as The One Moment, Morton Salt’s mesmerising slow-mo music video for OK Go, a bold move for an ultra-traditional brand that had never done any advertising; Glade’s data-fuelled immersive scent experience, Museum of Feelings; and the Brady Campaign’s Zero Minutes of Fame, a Google Chrome plug-in that replaced mass shooters’ names with those of their victims, denying killers their craved notoriety.

Collaborative competitiveness

Add to this an almost brotherly bond with Ogilvy’s CCO, Joe Sciarrotta (“I’ve never met a bigger champion of women, of talent. I am where I am because of him.”) and it’s no surprise Taylor thought she’d found her forever agency. Fate – and FCB’s global CCO Susan Credle – had other ideas. The two had known each other for years, but one night, at an industry dinner, “We just started talking, and the opportunity was too good to be true.” Now, just over a year into the job, Taylor is focussed on the creative mission set by Credle of “doing famous work on famous brands” and bolstering the creative department through diversity recruitment initiatives. “We’re being cautious – I don’t want anyone to feel there is a quota, or cause any insecurities,” she adds, mindful of her own experience.    

“We Chicagoans are competitive, we’re always fighting our way to the top, but we’re still supportive of others. We’re all in it together. Unless it’s the Cubs versus the Sox!”

Understandably keen to see FCB Chicago rise to the top of the network, Taylor is equally set on challenging hoary old perceptions of the Windy City itself and boosting her home town’s creative credentials as a whole.

“We Chicagoans are competitive, we’re always fighting our way to the top, but we’re still supportive of others. We’re all in it together,” she concludes. “Unless it’s the Cubs versus the Sox!”