Advertising -- Picture Of Creativity -- New Director Brings Creative Energy To Agency

Deserted. Depressed. Down in the Dumps.

That kind of sums up the mood at Livingston + Co. last spring after the advertising agency's popular general manager and creative director, Jim Copacino, quit to join the competition.

Livingston had been flying high with Copacino. The agency was winning awards and acclaim for its innovative Alaska Airlines commercials, which sympathized with harried business travelers and offered an antidote - Alaska's solicitous service and superior legroom. One memorable TV ad showed an increasingly desperate passenger trying to get change to use a pay toilet on Brand X.

After Copacino quit, most of Livingston's copywriters and artists also drifted away. Rumors were rampant that Livingston's major account, Alaska Airlines, might follow him out the door. Some speculated that agency owner Roger Livingston was too preoccupied with his new agency in Los Angeles, Livingston + Keye, to take care of business in Seattle.

Months passed. Free-lancers filled in.

Then, just when competitors were figuring out which accounts they would pluck, Roger Livingston hired Tracy Wong.

"Once in awhile," says Livingston of his new creative director, "you need a revolution rather than an evolution. And that's exactly what Tracy represents."

Wong is something of a star in the galaxy of advertising greats. Even though he's only 32, he's already picked up a pile of major national and international awards for art direction. Clios. One Show. Addys. Andys. Athenas. Effies.

A few weeks ago, he was off to France to pick up a top award at the prestigious International Advertising Film Festival at Cannes for his part in a series of TV ads made for a previous employer. The Gold Lion was one of only three such awards given anyone from the United States this year.

Wong, the San Francisco Ad Club's Art Director of the Year for the past two years, is celebrated enough to inspire imitators. While Wong was at Goodby, Berlin & Silverstein in San Francisco, a hotbed of creativity and Wong's last stop before coming to Seattle in November, he designed the series of ads that picked up top honors at Cannes. The ads featured bouncing, blinking, wriggling, handwritten graphics superimposed on ads for a chain of Mexican restaurants.

Since the ads first appeared a little over a year ago, ads with bouncing, blinking, wriggling or handwritten graphics have been appearing all over the place.

"Tracy is nothing short of brilliant," says advertising guru Andy Berlin, president of DDB Needham Worldwide in New York. Berlin, a man not given to understatement, was Wong's boss at Goodby, Berlin & Silverstein.

"Every 10 or 15 years," Berlin continues, warming to his subject, "the strange, compost-like weird process of broken dreams that is advertising produces some really extraordinary person and, infrequently, that person comes up from the art-director side of the creative business, someone who thinks with his or her eyes . . . I think Tracy is that brilliant practitioner of his generation."

Refreshingly, Wong hardly fits the stereotype of the hotshot advertising star who's just flown in from California or New York to show the yokels how advertising is done.

Rather, Wong is modest, even a bit shy. Slightly built, he stoops a bit when he walks. And when he bounces into his office in rubber-soled shoes that announce his presence with a persistent squeak, he gives the impression of being some guy from the mail room who just wandered in to drop off a package.

Pressed for a list of professional awards, Wong, grimacing apologetically, hands over a single-spaced list almost as long as your forearm.

Then, sounding uncomfortable, he mumbles, "Most of them are pretty bogus."

Growing up in Portland, Wong was the slightly nerdy kid who was always immersed in Batman and Spiderman comic books. The comic adventures fueled Wong's interest in art, however, and as a boy he created stories and art for comics featuring his own superheroes. That period, he says now, was a great training ground for a calling that tries to appeal to audiences with short attention spans and a thirst for action.

"If you don't keep (audiences) entertained or present them with a thought-provoking idea, they're not going to remember, they're not going to care," he insists.

Wong's work shows that he can slide gracefully from one style to its polar opposite, a talent rare in advertising, Berlin says.

"To use a baseball metaphor, he's fully armed. He has a fast ball, a sinker, a curve ball, a knuckle ball."

For the Mexican restaurant ads, Wong used a Super VHS camera and jerky, grainy, often out-of-focus shots. His purposely unpolished style meshed with the ads' lively graphics and jumpy, south-of-the-border music; they also fit the campaign's strategy, which was to make ads daily and air them that evening to emphasize the client's made-fresh-daily food.

Wong's polish and originality found a platform in his work, too. An example: the full-color, glossy ads for Royal Viking cruise lines. One featured the headline, "Quite magically, the most alluring island in the Caribbean comes and goes as it pleases" - beneath a picture showing only endless sky and sea.

More than a mere showcase for his creativity, however, Wong's ads are works of art that actually work.

The ads for Chevy's Mexican restaurants, for example, generated double-digit sales increases - as much as 50 percent at some restaurants. Credit goes to the ads, says Laura Brezner, the restaurant chain's marketing manager.

"We factored out everything (else) it could possibly be," she recalls. "If it was a nice day, we factored that out. But when the ads would go on, the sales would fly."

The ads also generated a windfall of free publicity when newspaper and TV reporters, including a crew from Entertainment Tonight, tagged along on shoots to do stories on the making of the commercials.

These days, Wong is digging in at Livingston + Co. His main task is handling the Alaska Airlines advertising, but the airline's strategy has been so successful that it doesn't plan any major changes. Despite the change in creative directors, the "we-sympathize-with-the-poor-traveler" theme remains, albeit in a reworked layout.

But in spite of the changes, the customer reaction remains unchanged.

"We're just continuing to get the same kind of feedback that we've always had, which is customers calling us and telling us they love our advertising," says Lisena Quintiliani, the airline's advertising director.

Since he's been at Livingston, Wong's filled in the gaps in the creative staff. Perhaps his most notable hire was Rob Bagot, a copywriter who joined the agency in February as associate creative director. He worked with Wong at Goodby, Berlin & Silverstein, where the fast-rising Bagot was chief copywriter on the agency's largest account, Royal Viking cruise lines.

Although Bagot's reputation as yet does not equal Wong's, the quirky, 28-year-old Bagot also brings with him a reputation as a talent to be watched - and a fistful of awards.

His ads for the cruise company's wealthy, graying clientele constitute something of a virtuoso performance for a young guy who wears sweat shirts embroidered with nonsense words to work and looks like he just escaped from a fraternity pledge party.

"At your disposal," gravely intones one ad, "are the services of 33 European chefs, six sommeliers and a concierge. Fresh lobster? A `58 Bordeaux? Golf reservations? Of course, of course, of course."

Writing such copy - with references to a wine bottled before he was born - was a mind-bending experience for Bagot.

"It's kind of like being at a tea party with your grandmother . . ." he confides.

Wong credits Bagot with a "quirky vision combined with a real ingrained and mature sense of advertising and business" uncommon in copywriters. And he says Bagot's imaginative and sensitive work for an Oakland basketball team, the Golden State Warriors, helped his former employer nab the lucrative National Basketball Association account.

Maybe he'll help Livingston nab some new accounts, too. First Interstate Bank of Washington was formerly with Livingston but decided to do its work in-house. And although Livingston remains the agency of record for The Mariners, it's not clear if things will stay that way now that the team has changed hands.

For now, the Alaska Airlines account, with estimated billings of about $23 million a year, is the lion's share of Livingston's work. Other accounts include Asymetrix, Four Seasons Hotel, Alaska Air Cargo and some public-service accounts including the Henry Art Gallery and the Museum of Flight. That gives it about $35 million in billings, about flat compared with previous years, and makes it among the top six or so advertising agencies in the area.

Since Wong arrived late last year, Livingston has pitched other accounts, including Avia, with billings in the $5 million range, Cellular One and Traveling Software, both with billings in the $1 million range. It picked up only the software account.

Roger Livingston doesn't seem worried, though. He lauds his new creative staff's "genuinely original way" of looking at things and sounds excited and energized by the potential this offers the agency.

"I don't have the vaguest idea what they're going to do next," says Livingston, formerly known for his tight grip on the reins of management, adding, "I haven't had people before that have had an unpredictable creative streak about them."

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LIVINGSTON + CO.

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Employees: 37

Headquarters: Seattle

Business: Advertising

President: Roger Livingston

Annual billings: $35 million

Major clients: Alaska Airlines, Asymetrix, Four Seasons Hotel