The bigger the ship, the harder it is to turn. That's a truism that Ty Montague, chief creative officer and co-president of JWT North America, can certainly attest to. After all, four and half years ago, he was hired to turn one of Madison Avenue's biggest -- and oldest -- ships.
Ty Montague is chief creative officer and co-president of JWT North America.Since joining JWT (which, prior to the firm's 2005 "relaunch," went by its more-traditional moniker, J. Walter Thompson), Montague -- in conjunction with co-president Rosemarie Ryan -- has led the agency through a creative transformation. The goal: to rebuild an advertising powerhouse with the singular objective of creating and telling brand stories that audiences seek out rather than shut out. That's no small task, no matter how you slice it. And Montague won't lie -- it hasn't been easy.
The transformation of JWT hasn't just been a creative revolution -- it's been a digital one as well.
"Our goal has been to bring people in who bring a different perspective to what is a great and storied agency," Montague says. "Our observation four and a half years ago -- and this is not news to anybody today -- was that digital is not a department. And yet in most big agencies, it's treated as a department. But our philosophy was that everything is digital -- everything is just a string of ones and zeros. And because of that, everybody at JWT has to be digital."
Together, Montague and Ryan set about introducing a new generation of digital talent to an agency steeped in traditional marketing mindsets. They wove these new hires into the fabric of the agency. They plopped digitally minded creatives right alongside those versed solely in traditional media. They did the same in the planning department. And the same in account management.
"That was really, really hard -- and bumpy at first," Montague recalls. "A lot of them got here, looked around, and said, 'Wow, this is like an alien landscape.' Some of them left. But we kept at it because we believed that it was the right idea. And it's now become really quite successful -- it's become part of the culture. We have people with really strong digital interactive backgrounds partnered day-to-day with people with more-traditional storytelling backgrounds."
One of the major challenges in executing JWT's digital infusion was convincing the new digital marketing talent that they would have as much authority as their traditional counterparts, Montague says. "One of the old problems was that the people with the 'traditional' backgrounds would crack 'the big idea' and then throw it over the fence to people with digital backgrounds and say, 'Now figure out how it works on the web,'" he says. "That's a process that is wrong for today, and it kept a lot of people with digital backgrounds feeling like they had to be in a completely separate and specialized environment to get the respect they were due."
Montague notes that part of giving due respect to digital talent meant ensuring that no glass ceiling was imposed on new interactive hires. In that regard, he notes that people with both digital and traditional backgrounds hold executive creative director titles at JWT. And no work goes out the door without approvals from both sides.
Gradually, Montague says, what started as a somewhat forced alliance has evolved into something more akin to an exchange program -- with digital marketers infusing their traditional counterparts with a higher level of interactive skills, in exchange for greater insights into the traditional art of storytelling.
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