Interview with Rick Boyko - Adcenter Managing Director

It's been a while since we've posted an interview on rm116. Brian Thibodeau, a student at the VCU Adcenter, has volunteered to interview Rick Boyko, Managing Director at the VCU Adcenter. Thanks Brian!

Before becoming Managing Director at the VCU Adcenter, you were Co-President & Chief Creative Officer of Ogilvy and Mather. What was your primary motivation in joining the VCU Adcenter?

During my three years on the Adcenter board of directors, I had been visiting the school often and was becoming more and more involved. When I would visit, being around the students energized me. I started to realize that there was an interesting vibe happening at the school that wasn’t necessarily happening at the agency. The idea of being able to work with the students and create change from the outside of the agency rather than from the inside was intriguing to me. I have always tried to create change wherever I was. When I was at Chiat, there was a lot of change happening. At Ogilvy, I spent a lot of time changing the ethos of the company and moving it back to the vision of David Ogilvy and a creative leadership, which it had been lacking. So, naturally this opportunity was very appealing to me.

One thing I really value about the Adcenter is how the entire faculty is very seasoned. Often in academia you find a lot of inbreeding. Grad students finish up and then immediately begin working in academia without any world experience. The opposite rings true at the Adcenter. What is it about the Adcenter that attracts these “advertising giants” to join the team?

The Adcenter is unlike most other academia. We set up a feeling and energy here that is more like a company of marketers or advertisers. The other day, Coz (professor of copy and creative) said that in the ten years he’s been here, he’s never felt the energy that is happening right now with the new faculty. He feels like it is an agency. At the same time Don Just (professor of business and strategy), likens us more to a business of branding and marketing. Whatever it is, I do think the faculty brings an inherent energy and feeling to the school. Between all twelve of our faculty members, we have 277 cumulative years of experience in the business.

As I said before, there is an opportunity here to create change from the outside rather than from the inside of an agency. In this industry, ideas and thinking become congested and compromised. Here, at the Adcenter, we seek to breakdown those barriers. This is a place where we challenge the students to knock down the barriers. And when the students do it, they challenge the faculty and their thinking. Personally, that is one of the biggest reasons I’m here. It’s refreshing to be part of something that is continually changing and breaking down the barriers of thinking.

The VCU Adcenter has been ranked the #1 ad school in Creativity Magazine and is no doubt one of the premier ad schools in the world. To what do you attribute this success?

It has to do with a lot of things. Most important is the fact that the faculty is not teaching from a book, or an academic philosophy, but more from having actively participated in the business. Our faculty is invested in the students. Some portfolio schools say they are employing faculty who are “in the business”, doing it at the time. When I was “in the business” and trying to teach classes, my time constraints on that class were very narrow. My opportunity to spend one-on-one time with students became almost zero. And I think that is probably true in most portfolio schools as well. What the Adcenter has are twelve people who are here pretty much everyday and able to sit down and have a discussion with you or take you for a beer and shoot the shit. The faculty here is the bedrock. I think that’s invaluable.

One other thing that separates us from the rest is the fact that the Adcenter is setup to be a business environment. The school has always been about working collaboratively. We have all four tracks, which integrate the creative and the business side. Other schools don’t do that. As a creative, you walk away understanding a little bit more about what it is to collaborate and listen to a problem from a client’s perspective, and vice versa. If a potential client can judge work with an understanding of what it takes to create that work, they are going to be much better off than someone coming out of an MBA program that has been taught by faculty who never have worked in the business and who don’t understand creative at all. The way the curriculum is made up here is unique, and it’s the strategic underpinning that separates this school.

This past semester the VCU Adcenter competed in the prestigious international Innovation Challenge competition where the Adcenter placed above nearly 400 MBA teams from over 80 leading MBA programs around the world, with two of the Adcenter’s teams going to the finals. What was your reaction to this? Did you expect the Adcenter to do so well? What does this achievement say about the VCU Adcenter?

I used to have two dogs, a retriever and a pointer. When I’d throw a ball, the retriever would go fetch it and the pointer would just sit there and look up at me. I hadn’t taught them to behave this way. They were just wired that way. Potential clients are wired different than creatives. One is focused on finding the answer by analytical study; the other does so by pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. Neither is wrong, but they’re both totally different. They are also taught differently. There is no school in the world teaching both together or teaching the potential client how to judge creative, understand creative, or more importantly, how to work collaboratively.

After speaking at many MBA schools and creative schools, I saw a lack of this collaboration and, sensing a need for it, I made it clear that if I were to come to the Adcenter, I wanted to create this curriculum. It took me almost two years to get this done. In the interim, many companies like Proctor & Gamble and GE have begun to desire creative solutions and are now demanding more creative thinking inside their management ranks. So, it has now become a big movement and we are at the forefront of it. This program is already in place. Kellogg is talking about putting a creative class in their curriculum, Stanford has just added a design class, and Harvard is talking about doing the same. The difference is that they are still going to have MBA students rubbing elbows with MBA students. In our program, what makes it unique, is we have potential clients (Creative Brand Managers) rubbing elbows with strategists and creatives. You can’t find that anywhere else.

So, when you enter a contest like this, which our students did under the guidance of Professor Don Just, it has more potential for a more innovative solution. We didn’t expect the Adcenter to rank as high as we did, but I think it demonstrates and validates what we are trying to do differently.

The VCU Adcenter is currently renovating a new facility that’s expected to be completed later this year. It is my understanding that you personally donated one million dollars to help get the place built. What prompted you to make this generous donation?

To clarify, the donation wasn’t just to help with the new facility. It’s a donation to the Adcenter, in general. Some of it will go towards a scholarship, some for the new building, and some for the school to use as it moves forward. This donation by my wife and I coincides with our capital campaign to raise money. I wanted potential donors to know I’m invested also. I feel that if I’m going around asking people to donate money, I need to have skin in the game, real skin in the game. Then they won’t see me as just someone with my hand open, but they’ll see that I am obviously trying to build something and that I’m participating personally.

The new Adcenter building is designed by Clive Wilkinson Architects who designed Google’s state of the art “Google Plex”, TBWA/Chiat/Day, FCB Worldwide, Mother/London, and JWT/NY, to name a few. (Local architects, Baskerville, will also be contributing). The new building design is “intended to anticipate diversified advertising in the future.” What kind of innovations can we expect in this newly designed facility? Will there be a ping-pong room?

Creative environments generate new and more interesting creative thinking. One thing I took away from working at Chiat Day was the understanding that architecture plays a huge part in culture. Jay was of the belief that closed offices breed secrecy and a closed society. Open architecture breeds people who share and support one another. Doors are secretive; doors indicate barriers. This will, for the most part, be an open structure. Openness invites communication. Everyone should feel part of a family here with the conviction to help their peers succeed. This environment will push you to be creative.

This space has plenty of room for the entire student body. There will be a community table that can seat 140 students. If you look down on the table, it looks like neighborhoods with cul-de-sacs. It’s a neighborhood design; a community design.

We will have a computer lab with 45 computers and another 15 video-editing computers, plus a professional editing room. There will be a lounge with all the amenities. We will even have showers downstairs for those students who work through the night and don’t have time to go home before classes start. There will a flat screen T.V. for video games and a foosball table, and, yes, there will be a ping-pong table.

Advertising, in general, has been ranked one of the most dishonest professions out there. A poll by Gallop found that 70% of people find advertisements to be dishonest and deceptive. The only other two professions that rank lower than advertising are used-car salesmen and telemarketers. What is the Adcenter doing to change that?

It’s hard to change a perception that is so deeply embedded in society. All we can hope to do is our part. We are doing our best to teach students ethics within every class held at the Adcenter. With that said, I believe this negative perception ranges more from local advertising. Most agencies and brands do smart and entertaining work. Unfortunately, most consumers see a lot of local advertising that is not of the same standard. You cannot create a good communication if it does not come from the truthfulness of what that brand is. When you try to create something outside of that, and portray the brand as something that it isn’t, it usually fails.

While advertising has been called, “the most fun one can have with their clothes on” it is also a very demanding “chew-em up and spit-em out” industry. What advice can you lend to those who not only want to be a successful advertising person, but also a successful family man or woman?

At the beginning of your career you have to be willing to work 24/7. You must invest yourself in it because as you get older and you have a family, you want to be in a position that will allow you to spend time with them. I’ve been married for thirty-one years and the thing that helped me most was, as much as possible, not to work on weekends. When I was art/creative director at Chiat/Day, I didn’t work many weekends. Now, that didn’t mean I stopped thinking about it, I just chose to spend my time with my family. You have to make the right decision for yourself. During my time at Chiat, hardly anyone was married, so they were all there on weekends. I was a little out of the “club”, but I felt it was important to spend time at home. I had three daughters at the time, so you just have to make the life choices that are right for you. Once I became head of Ogilvy, weekends were more interrupted because I would have to go out of town for shoots and client meetings. It’s a young people’s business though.

Lastly, is Rick Boyko your real name?

Do you think it’s not? (ha ha) Boyko is Ukrainian. My dad was Ukrainian and my mom is Italian. Her name was Sciortino. Richard is my given name, so there you have it.

Rick Boyko currently serves as the Managing Director of the VCU Adcenter, a graduate program in advertising at Virginia Commonwealth University. Prior to that Rick Boyko served as Co-President and Chief Creative Officer of Ogilvy & Mather, New York.

While Rick has won almost every advertising award there is, he is most proud of an accomplishment outside of advertising: In October 2001, following the September 11 tragedy, Rick conceived of and was the driving force behind “Brotherhood”, a tabletop book honouring the 343 firemen who perished. It sold more than 200,000 copies and the proceeds of $1.5 million went to the families of the firemen.