Interview by Trey Alston / Working Not Working Member
Asking Danny Robinson what he does as The Martin Agency’s Chief Creative Officer brings the first of many surprises. He doesn’t respond by saying that he’s “in charge” of one of the most well-received agencies in the world and its award-winning creative. Instead, he says that he sets the tone for creativity and asks the right questions. Robinson’s infinitely curious about the world around him, the people that work at the agency, and how it can evolve in a changing world. And that’s what makes him suitable for the position — an insatiable wonder that defines his approach (and by extension, the agency’s) to creative work.
Robinson came into advertising after realizing that the spreadsheets and calculators in the world of traditional marketing were more trouble than they’re worth. He graduated from Atlanta University with a Master of Business Administration Marketing in 1984 and spent two years as an Assistant Product Manager at General Foods. Then, he moved on to The Guild Group where he served as an Associate Creative Director for 10 years before co-founding his own agency, Vigilante, that he’d helm for seven years. At that point, a phone call from The Martin Agency’s then Chief Creative Officer Mike Hughes persuaded Robinson to bring his curious brain to the agency in 2004.
Over the past 17 years, Robinson has worked as a SVP/Group Creative Director, Chief Client Officer, and Chief Creative Officer as of last August. He’s seen a lot during his time with the agency. Here’s an exhaustive look at the grand scope of working at the agency, evolving creatively, and intrinsic learning as it relates to his work.
Check out our conversation with Robinson below.
What was the realization that drove you to pursue a creative career?
It was kind of thrust upon me because my first career choice was in marketing. I was a product manager. Two years in, it was clear to me that I wasn't going to be successful in that job. I had a mind for marketing, but I didn't have a mind for the other side of the business: budgeting, finance, product tracking, spreadsheets, and Excel sheets. That was a part of the job that I didn’t really think about. I had those classes in grad school and I did okay in them. But I realized the thing I liked most about the job I had was when the ad agency came to present work. Then I felt at home, like I knew what I was doing and I enjoyed it. So it was a natural next step. It wasn't the marketing side; it was the advertising side of marketing that I really liked. I started down that path because I failed at the first choice.
When do you think that you got good at what you do?
It takes a while to get good at something. That shouldn't surprise anyone. There are prodigies in the world and then there's everyone else. Nobody becomes a great concert pianist three months in unless they were born with that thing. But you can count the number of people who are brilliant from the beginning. It takes time. It probably became most evident to me in the second year into Vigilante, which is an ad agency I co-founded in the early nineties. I was given responsibility as a chief creative officer, never having been one before, and only having been a creative for a while. It was an opportunity that I was afforded, and I was dumped into the deep end.
I learned a lot in a really compressed period of time and started to at least believe after a few successes that I could maybe do this for a living. I had already been doing it for 12 years at that point, but I wasn't necessarily sure up to that point that I was going to be able to make it a living. It was when I was forced to figure things out on my own and to quickly learn how to help the business succeed that I started to feel like maybe this is something I can do.
“It takes a while to get good at something. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. There are prodigies in the world and then there’s everyone else. Nobody becomes a great concert pianist three months in unless they were born with that thing.”
So what would you say drove you to The Martin Agency?
I was lured by a phone call from who was then the CCO, Mike Hughes. He put an opportunity in front of me to figure out what I wanted to do if I were to come here. I was at Vigilante at the time, trying to build an agency, and got a call that just turned into a conversation. And he asked the question, "What would it take to get you to come to The Martin Agency?" And that led to an open job. "What would you want to do if you were to come? How would you help us build the agency? How could you help us grow? How can you bring a different perspective?"
There weren't a lot of people of color in the creative department when I came in. I don't know that there were any when I got here. There were some before me, certainly plenty after. So it was the combination of what felt like a job where I could write my own path and create what it is, and at an agency that I had long admired in a state I was born in. I was working in New York at the time I got that call.
I always loved the work that The Martin Agency did, but knew that they were trying to get to another level, which was an interesting proposition to me.
What would you say that you do as a chief creative officer?
The way I think about it, I have three primary jobs. My biggest role is setting the tone for creativity. I have to be a champion for creativity. People who come to work, who work here primarily in the creative department, have to understand what it is The Martin Agency stands for. What kind of work do we want to put out into the world? What kind of work do we do? To help them figure out, "Well, do I want to work at Martin or somewhere else?" So I have to set the tone for creativity and be a champion for creativity.
“My biggest role is setting the tone for creativity. I have to be a champion for creativity...My job as a CCO was not to come with answers but to ask the right questions that can get people to the right answer.”
I think my other primary job is to find the talent and put together the right teams that can do great work. I've long stopped talking about the work we have to do and how great the work is as a drum beat, and more remind people that great work comes from finding great talent and putting the right teams together. So you can talk about wanting to do wonderful, award-winning, business-building work all you want, but if you don't have the talent and you don't build the right teams, that's not going to happen. So if you focus on the people and on the teams, if you focus on the talent you bring in with the assumption that you have the right client, then the work's going to follow. Great work's going to come out of great teams and great talent.
I think the third thing is to just ask the right questions. My job as a CCO was not to come with answers but to ask the right questions that can get people to the right answer. And because I'm not in the day-to-day work always, I had to find the right lieutenants to help make that happen too.
My fourth job is to make sure clients understand the power of creativity and understand what it is that we're trying to do as partners, and to stay close to that so that we make sure we have clients whose ambitions are aligned with ours. We also have to understand and remind people that we're in business and not doing this for art's sake. The work we do has to produce for clients. We're solving business problems with creativity.
Those are probably my four biggest roles here. I'm no longer doing the work. I'm not really giving input on the work day-to-day, because I have people who work on our teams who do that. But it is important that I'm flying at a high enough altitude where I can see the whole body of work and make sure that we're all moving in the same direction creatively. We have a motto of fighting invisibility, so our work has to be seen and shared and talked about; I have to make sure we're doing the kind of work that is and will be.
“It’s important that I’m flying at a high enough altitude where I can see the whole body of work and make sure that we’re all moving in the same direction creatively.”
What’s it been like to transition to being less hands-on with creative?
It's the right time for me to do it. I was Chief Client Officer here for three years before this role, because I felt like I wanted to have a different responsibility than I had as a Group Creative Director. I was looking to have a bigger impact on the company, spend less time on the three or four accounts I was running, and provide value for the agency to help it focus and move forward.
I don't miss it. I may be better at this job than I was as a pure creative anyway. Most of the people here who work for us are better than I am and was as a creative. I'm probably a better leader at this level. At least I'd like to think so.
The real transition was going from a Group Creative Director to Chief Client Officer, because I was leaving the creative department, where I had been my entire career, to run the Account Leadership department. The decision was made for me to take on that role because I have an MBA and business experience. Client interaction and interfacing are fairly easy for me because I understand the business side. Then I started my own business, so I also had some experience being an account-like person, although I had an account partner as my co-founder.
It was a harder transition blending my business and creative background to help account leaders understand creatives better and what great work looks like. I had to learn what account leadership really was. I had to learn about scopes and business writing close-up work and getting contracts done.
I came into my current role ready with an idea of what I thought the department should be, how I might want to change it, how I might want to have an impact.
What kind of stress does a role at this magnitude bring? What's that weight like?
I've been pretty good at compartmentalizing. The biggest weight is that there are people who are depending on me for their livelihood and their career. There are people depending on me, in part, to help them get better at what they do, to see a career path, to know what the value is that they bring. So it is more about the responsibility that I have for the people who work here. I don't think we ever spend enough time thinking about or talking about or helping our talent, because really, in the end, that's all we have. All we have are the people here that are responsible for making the things that we make.
“I don’t think we ever spend enough time thinking about or talking about or helping our talent, because really, in the end, that’s all we have. All we have are the people here that are responsible for making the things that we make.”
I worry less about how the work is and more about how the people are who are doing the work. I truly believe that if it's clear to them where their value is, why they're here, what we're trying to do as an agency, and that they're fulfilled in their careers, then the work will come. That can be more difficult than ever because some of them aren't here right now. We don't hang out in the office together. We haven't done that in a while. That scares me the most that I'm missing something, that there are people who are slipping through the cracks that I don't see.
The weight is on the people to whom we have said, "Come work for us and do the best work of your lives and we'll take care of you." I want to make sure we're doing that.
How does having a career with proven work impact your confidence in the creative process at Martin?
I mean, I've been here long enough to see and know how Martin operates at its best. It's no coincidence that we've had a lot of our clients for a long time. We've had Geico for decades, clients like Hanes have been here for years. We have clients that have stayed with us because we do work that works. No client hangs around an agency if the work isn’t helping their business. That's why they hire us. I've seen the success we've had for clients for long enough to know how it works. That helps us when we have new clients like Coinbase and Snap.
Certainly, they all have different business problems. We solve the problems based on what their problems are. The work will be different, but at the foundation, how we work, the kind of work we do, the way we collaborate, all of that is by and large the same. We continue to have success because we've been able to hold onto the stuff that works and change the things that need to change. So that makes my job easier. I have a CEO partner in Kristen Cavalo who I can trust and follow blindly because I believe she has amazing instincts, makes decisions quickly, and can say, "Let's agree or not agree. Let's just have a conversation in advance. Just go." Having an executive team that won't let you fail gives me confidence. We're humble here, but we're not lacking in confidence or competence.
Named to the Adweek Creative 100, The Impact Lab is the heartbeat of The Martin Agency.
Over the course of your years in the industry, what have you learned about creativity itself?
It proved itself this past year, particularly, that creativity really is the only true point of difference between clients. Prices can change, products can be made and then copied, but creativity is the one real device you have to separate yourself from a competitor. It is one of the only things we can use to solve business problems in a way that only we can.
It also proved that those companies that understand a crisis also understand that you don't stop. You keep going. You don't pull back on communication. You continue to communicate because at some point when you come out of the pandemic, consumers are going to remember those brands that were there then, those brands that gave them some value when they needed it, or were reassuring when they needed it. Eventually, we'll come out and we'll get back to some kind of normal, and they’ll go, "All right, that was a brand that was talking to me or providing something for me when I needed a brand. I think I'm going to continue to reward that brand by continuing to use it." Creativity was the only thing that kept a lot of companies going.
“Creativity really is the only true point of difference between clients. Prices can change, products can be made and then copied, but creativity is the one real device you have to separate yourself from a competitor. It is one of the only things we can use to solve business problems in a way that only we can.”
What have you learned about yourself over the course of the years in the industry?
It took me a long time to be able to let go, to not think and believe that I had to solve all problems alone. I blame a lot of things. I'm an only child. I was used to figuring stuff out without anybody to help. But I learned it is really critical that the higher up you go, the more you become a manager and less a doer—you have to learn how to delegate, to let the thing go, to let people make mistakes, and to not come in and try to save them with an answer.
You have to discover that you're actually better with help. Problem-solving is better when there's more than one person. Frankly, I don't think anybody can have great ideas by themselves. It’s very rare. And if they can, their ideas would still be even better with a partner.
I've learned to ask for help, raise my hand, not take on more than I can, let people do their jobs, and get out of their way. You read about snowplow parents that do things to make the path easy for their kids and get them into college with no adversity. I think that's terrible as a parent, but I think it's great as a manager. My job is to make sure that there's nothing in the way so that the creatives can do their job. They can just focus on the work. They don't have to think about things that get in the way of that, because those things aren't their responsibility.
Ultimately, you have to learn to let people do the thing you hired them to do, and learn that there's no shame in needing help to get something done.