McKinney & Silver: Raleigh Redux

Graphis, Nov/Dec 2001 by Berger, Warren

McKinney & Silver: Raleigh Redux McKinney & Silver was known for its lush print ads promoting the beauty of North Carolina. Now the agency is drawing attention with its ads for carmakers, dot-coms, and food chains. By Kyle Hood

The agency's longstanding emphasis on picturesque print advertising was beginning to seem a bit quaint in an era of new media.

Baldwin said he quickly became "sick of hearing about the heritage of this agency." So the new creative director decided to implement changes.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed that "there are no second acts in Hollywood," and the same could be said of creative advertising agencies. When a high-flying, award-winning shop loses its spark and begins the steady downward slide to mediocrity, rarely does it reverse course. It may persevere, and it may even grow from a business standpoint-by way of mergers, diversification, and added layers of corporate bureaucracy. But rarely does it recapture the creative magic that made the agency special in the first place. Which is precisely why the sudden creative resurgence of McKinney & Silver has surprised, and delighted, many in the ad business.

McKinney first arrived on the national ad scene two decades ago, a breath of fresh air from the lush hills of North Carolina. Based in Raleigh, the agency became known nationally for clever and elegant print ads, primarily on behalf of its flagship client, the state tourism board. McKinney's ads, evoking the rich history and breathtaking landscapes of North Carolina, had the effect of making tourists think they'd been missing out on a national treasure right under their noses; as the campaign ran, throughout the 1980s, the state's tourism rates shot up. And McKinney & Silver reaped its own rewards passel of creative honors and trophies, notably the prestigious $100,000 Kelly Award for best magazine advertising campaign. When people in advertising spoke of the great regional agencies of the 1980s and early '90s, McKinney & Silver's name usually came up, as a lone but stellar representative of Carolina creativity.

But by the mid-to-late '90s, things had changed. McKinney & Silver was no longer winning as many top creative awards as it once had. The agency's longstanding emphasis on pretty print advertising was beginning to seem a bit too familiar and quaint in an era of new media. There wasn't much national attention anymore, and in fact, the agency was even being eclipsed at award shows by a fellow North Carolina shop, Charlotte's Loeffler Ketchum Mountjoy, which had taken over much of the state tourism advertising and was producing the kind of stirring print campaigns that had put McKinney on the map years ago.

Moreover, the agency seemed adrift from a management standpoint. The founders were gone, and the agency's new owner-the high-flying Internet company US Web/CKS-seemed to shift the agency's focus away from creative concerns and more toward achieving dot-com-style growth. Given all of this, it wouldn't have shocked many people if McKinney & Silver had flamed out with the dot-com crash of the past year. But instead, the agency rebounded. By the end of last year, McKinney was winning awards for several exciting campaigns, reeling in major new accounts, and gaining recognition as Adweek magazine's Southeast agency of the year.

How did it happen? The turnaround actually began a couple of years earlier when a relatively new CEO named Don Maurer, a veteran of the Boston creative agency Mullen, came aboard and began to plant the seeds of rejuvenation. "What had attracted me to the agency was its great creative heritage," says Maurer, "but I could see that it needed to be re-energized." The first thing Maurer needed to find was a new creative leader, and he looked to Providence for the answer. There, at the Rhode Island agency Leonard Monahan, he found David Baldwin (portrait on opening page). Baldwin, an easygoing copywriter whose hair flows down his back, was lured to North Carolina by the scenic environment, the enthusiasm of Maurer and the agency's rich creative history.

But it wasn't an easy decision: Baldwin knew that McKinney & Silver's creative reputation had slipped, and that the agency was trying to make a creative comeback. "To tell you the truth, I've never seen an agency make that kind of a comeback, so that did concern me," he says. And after he came aboard, he realized that the agency's glorious history was a mixed blessing. "I began to get sick of hearing about the heritage of this agency," he says. "The fact is, we'd never really changed from the '80s-and that was hurting us."

As the new creative director, Baldwin set about changing that. One of the first things he had to do was repair the relationship between the creative side of the agency and the business side. "A wall had been built up between them," he says, probably stemming from traditional thinking that the agency's creative integrity had to be protected from the people in suits. But Baldwin knew that the best modern creative agencies avoided those divisions and tended to work more seamlessly these days, involving account managers, planners and media directors in the creative process. Baldwin and Maurer did likewise, creating "brand teams" on each account, with heavy direct involvement by the agency's new media director, John Klein, and its new head of account planning, Andrew Delbridge.