McKinney & Silver: Raleigh Redux

Graphis, Nov/Dec 2001 by Berger, Warren

The goal was to get McKinney & Silver thinking less like a regional traditionalist, and more like a diversified cutting-edge national agency. That also meant the agency had to move beyond a certain style of print advertising, to embrace television, new media and integrated marketing. "There was a tendency in the past to think that if you came up with three great print ads for a campaign, that was enough," Baldwin says. "We had to start thinking about the process of advertising in a bigger way."

Baldwin also urged the agency creatives to open themselves up to more influences, and he even hired a "director of cultural curiosity" whose job is to keep tabs on emerging trends, music and styles around the country. "Let's face it, we're a little cut off in Raleigh," Baldwin says, "and I think it's important that we keep our ear to the ground." Most of all, Baldwin says, the agency had to re-focus its priorities. "We had become too focused on who owned us, and how much revenue those owners expected us to produce," he says. That the agency ownership issue became a distraction was certainly understandable-- after all, the situation seemed to be in constant flux.

The confusion began after CKS, a hot Internet ad agency, acquired McKinney & Silver; CKS then merged with US Web; next, US Web/CKS merged with a company called Whittman-Hart; and then it changed its name to marchFirst (by now it was an Internet consulting company). The mergers finally stopped, but along came another kind of turmoil, as marchFirst saw its stock price plummet in the dotcom crash of 2000.

By this time, however, Baldwin and Maurer had, in effect, forced the agency to wear blinders-to focus only on the work, not on the chaos involving the owners. The result: McKinney has produced some of its best advertising in years. For Audi, the agency's emotional "street signs" campaign turned ordinary road signs into rallying cries, urging drivers to enjoy the freedom of the road. In one ad, a "detour" sign appears, and the words "Take every" flash over it; similarly, beneath a "Yield" sign we see the flashing words, "to the adventure." The elegantly-designed campaign was lauded for its distinctiveness-and it also helped Audi achieve record sales.

Even more impressive was a campaign created by the agency for its parent company, marchFirst. The ads were a celebration of "being first" at anything, but their power derived from the unusual use of perspective. Instead of simply showing historical "firsts"-the first airplane, the first man on the moon, etc.-the ads displayed how ordinary people might have reacted upon witnessing those "firsts."

Perhaps the most striking ad in the series shows the faces of people reacting to the first exhibition of Cubist paintings-as the actors in the commercial stare into the camera in shock, tilt their heads and try to make sense of what they're seeing. The campaign couldn't protect marchFirst from the vagaries of the stock market, but it did put McKinney & Silver back on the radar, creatively.