Interview: Tracy Wong on Leadership, Diversity, and the Importance of 'Creative Democracy'
Tracy Wong (Jason Hall)
Growing up in Portland, Oregon, Tracy Wong developed a passion for drawing and design at an early age. In 1993, he cofounded the acclaimed Seattle and Los Angeles-based ad agency Wongdoody, where he currently serves as chairman and creative director. In 2015, Ad Age recognized Wongdoody, whose clients include Amazon, T-Mobile, Air New Zealand, Papa Murphy's Pizza, and the Seattle International Film Festival, as one of its small agencies of the year. Throughout his 30-year career in the business, Wong has won over 350 national and international awards for his work.
Every May for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, Asia Blog interviews noteworthy Asian Americans from a diverse set of backgrounds. View the complete Q&A archive
Asia Blog caught up with Wong to discuss his upbringing, the importance of diversity in an advertising agency, and why he lets accounts people take part in the creative process. The interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
Having grown up in a traditional Asian household, how much did your parents influence your creative career choices?
I grew up with my father in a traditional Chinese household with three generations under one roof. My grandfather came to the U.S. from Guangzhou, China by himself in the early part of the 20th century, after his family had been killed in the first Sino-Japanese war. For decades, he and my father worked in restaurants, and then my father eventually became an optometrist through the G.I. Bill. My mother is Japanese, and was interned in Idaho as a toddler. She worked in the financial business.
I mention all this because no one in my family ever made a career out of a “creative” profession. I was always good at art, but didn’t know what to do with that talent. I never enjoyed “fine art” because it wasn’t practical. (Sound familiar?) I stumbled my way through majors in college and landed on advertising with some help and direction from my mother, who was good at art, but couldn’t make a career of it. Advertising was the perfect blend of business and creativity.
You champion having a "creative democracy" at Wongdoody. How did you come up with this idea? Is it still a radical idea for many ad agencies out there?
The creative process in advertising — and any business that involves coming up with ideas — is flawed because it never yields the best ideas. Why is that? It’s because creative decisions are generally made by one person at the very top, no matter their level of experience or ability. It’s entirely ego-based. Like a tyranny. In ad agencies, a creative director — the person who runs the creative department — decides what ideas win and what gets presented to clients. It’s never by committee or consensus. Why would that person hand over all of the power to an unknowing peasant?
This process is the same for the client side. And it’s not even the chief marketing officer who decides what big campaign ends up on the Super Bowl. It’s the person at the very top, who often has no experience in judging creative ideas: the CEO.
This flawed process means that a company’s ideas are only as good as the tyrant/king/dictator in charge. If that tyrant/king/dictator happens to be Steve Jobs, your ideas are going to change the world. If not, your business could be at risk.
This “creative democracy” we have at our agency takes the ownership of the creative process out of the hands of one person and gives it to the team responsible for the idea. Yes, there are still people solely responsible for coming up with campaigns (writers, art directors, designers) but the circle is enlarged to include discipline experts from all sides of our business (people in technology, media, account management, strategy and production). Every decision is strategic and consensus-based.
Creative democracy was invented out of desperation in the first month of the agency’s existence. We had an ad campaign due for our very first client, K2 Skis, and I did not have the manpower to get enough ideas to the table to meet our deadline. So I enlisted the creative help of an account guy (our president, Pat Doody), an assistant account person/strategist (Rene Huey) and a moonlighting freelance writer (Craig Hoit). On Monday, I asked everyone to come up with ideas — whatever came to mind.
Forty-eight hours later, we sat on the floor and begin to toss scraps of paper onto the middle. (There wasn't enough room for a conference table.) On those scraps of paper were scrawled headlines, garbled unformed thoughts, chicken scratchings of layouts, and ripped-out photos from ski magazines. I asked everyone to comment on the scraps and discuss what was working and what wasn’t.
We formed three piles. One was “yes, this is working.” Two: “nope, not working.” And finally three: “maybe, but it’s not working yet.” It was my job as “creative director” to facilitate the discussion, keep us focused on strategy and to push ideas from the “maybe” pile into the “yes” pile. From that internal came a pretty terrific campaign where each of us contributed — even the account people, which is considered completey absurd in our industry.
I had never seen a creative internal where everyone was asked to contribute ideas and then comment on them collectively. A “democracy” was born.
What compelled you to start Wongdoody’s Advertising Scholarship, specifically for women?
There was a lot of momentum within the agency to promote what we’ve practiced internally for years, which is strong support for gender diversity. Women make up almost half of our executive team, including Executive Creative Director Pam Fujimoto, Managing Director Skyler Mattson, who run our Los Angeles operation, and Senior Director of Human Resources Megan Blacksher. They were the ones who conceived and drove the scholarship. I have always believed that women are generally smarter than men, but are burdened with what society believes and what roles they are then given. I was raised by my paternal grandmother, the matriarch of the Wong family, who was wise, smart, compassionate and, most of all, strong. She showed me what women were capable of.
How representative do you think the ad industry is when it comes to Asian Americans and women in leadership roles?
Unless you’re an ad agency in Asia, there is little representation by Asians in leadership roles in American agencies. That is the case for people of color in general in U.S. agencies. Our industry seems to be doing a little better with gender diversity, in my estimation, but it’s still dominated by white males. For decades, it’s felt like a club that you can’t get into unless you fit the profile. I feel the advertising industry is trying hard to correct that, harder than most industries, because it’s a business that should reflect the diversity of the consumers they’re addressing.
Given all the awards that you have won, what do you feel is your greatest career success?
I once sat in a teaching circle led by a Native American elder. She asked me what I did for a living. When I told her “advertising,” she pondered for a moment and said, “Your medicine is very powerful. You must be very careful with it.” What she meant was that our “medicine” is the words and ideas that we convey through ad campaigns. They are meant to trigger feelings. And they are very powerful because they are sent out to millions of people. It’s like having a super power, and you must use that super power for good.
So my greatest successes are public service works, because they serve the general good, and in some instances, saves lives. The highlight has been our anti-tobacco efforts for the Washington State Department of Health. One initiative in particular targeted hardcore smokers, those who have been smoking for years, if not decades. The campaign was so effective that every time it ran, calls to help lines tripled, which is the key metric for success. Statistically speaking, calling a help line increases a person’s chances of quitting a hundredfold. The campaign, called “Dear Me,” where real people wrote letters convincing themselves to quit, has been picked up by 19 other U.S. states and is now distributed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.