Ron Ceballos on Merging Art and Strategy to Craft Meaningful Creative Work
The EVP, Executive Creative Director of Quigley-Simpson, reflects on his extensive experience across the industry and shares how brands can fuse creativity with business strategy to produce culturally impactful campaigns
Ron Ceballos recently joined Quigley-Simpson as EVP, Executive Creative Director. In his role, Ceballos co-leads the creative department and helps the agency win significant new business.
Ron has over 24 years of experience in creative, design, conceptual storytelling, and emerging technologies. He has held leadership positions at top-tier agencies, including Quantasy + Associates, RAPP, 360i, Havas, Barkley (now BarkleyOKRP), and Grey Worldwide. His resume includes work for Viking Cruises, Spirit Airlines, Honda, The NFL, DirecTV, Canon, Pantene, Target, Lincoln Mercury, The California Lottery, Don Julio Tequila, Ketel One Vodka, Red Bull, and NPR. His groundbreaking work has earned numerous accolades, including Effies, Clios, Webbys, and the prestigious Cannes Lions Grand Prix.
The Continuum sat down with Ron to discuss his impressive career, which spans post-production, art direction, writing, and creative directing, and why he’s excited to combine these skills in his new role at Quigley-Simpson.
You attended the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan and started in post-production. How did you pivot to marketing and advertising?
Right. Once upon a time, I had a dream of going into 3D animation and working at Pixar, so I went to SVA. Afterward, I had a long career in post-production in New York City. I was a special effects artist, illustrator, animator, motion designer, and programmer. I learned as much as I could to be confident building anything. One day, maybe 5 or 6 years in, I found myself sitting at my Flame station at three in the morning, surrounded by creatives telling me how to push pixels. I was listening to their ideas, and it occurred to me that I could come up with better ones. At that point, I realized I was tired of being someone else’s hands because they didn’t know how to build anything. I decided to go over to the dark side… advertising.
It was a tricky transition. The closest thing to what I did was being an advertising art director. In other fields, an art director is someone who had been a designer and worked their way up to managing clients, projects, and business. I learned quickly that in advertising, an art director is a kid who just comes out of school, has ideas but doesn’t know how to make any of them real, and barely knows Photoshop.
I didn’t fit that model. I was this weird person who could build websites, make films, animate, code, add special effects, and had wacky ideas. I came into advertising when the internet still had a feel of the Wild West. I spent the early part of my advertising career moving around to a bunch of places and learning the craft. I did a freelance tour and jumped from special effects to small agencies to client side with the NFL and DirecTV. I was working as a freelance art director, and then I landed at Grey. That’s when advertising really took off for me.
Tell us about your work at Grey Worldwide. Did you have some favorite campaigns from those days?
I got hired at Grey about a month after Tor Myhren was brought in as the Chief Creative Officer. If you know anything about the history of Grey Advertising, you know that back in 2007, it was almost 100 years old and that it was a stodgy, boring shop. It was where creative went to die. Tor fundamentally shifted the trajectory of that agency.
I was so lucky that I got hired right after that and was able to see the shop at 777 Madison Avenue go from a 300-person ragtag bunch to a 1,200-person global powerhouse creator. I cut my teeth under Tor's and Don McKinney’s (Chief Digital Officer) tutelage. During my tenure, we had 48 pitches and won 45 of them. It was a fast-paced skyrocket of momentum, and I got good at advertising in that environment.
One of my favorite campaigns was something I did for Canon, which was called Project Imagin8ion. I had a similar idea when we were working on a campaign for Don Julio several years prior. YouTube was just becoming a thing, and people were discovering how many things they could do on the internet. The Don Julio brief was about passion. I had this idea to bring in Robert Rodriguez because he’s a polyglot—he’s a director and writer and soundtrack scorer and special effects guy—and I’ve always strived to be a polyglot. I thought we could have him invite people to create something together. The client loved it, but it never went anywhere.
Flash forward, and we got another brief from Canon. This time, it was around imagination. They had already poured millions of dollars into a microsite experience called the Explorers of Light Program. It was a website, but no one was going to it. We started looking at the landscape and found that hundreds of thousands of people on Flickr were talking about Canon cameras and sharing their own photography. I saw an opportunity to marry the two and invite people to bring their passion and imagination together. It was similar to the original idea, but this time, we turned to Ron Howard, who was an Academy Award-winning director who knew how to bring stories to life.
We received over 100,000 submissions in less than three weeks. We also got billions of impressions and were invited to Film Festivals and red-carpet events. I met Ron Howard’s lovely parents and talked Thanksgiving at the premiere. That was my first Cannes Lions Award.
“After that, I knew what I was capable of creatively and wanted to see if I could inspire other people and run business.”
You kept pushing yourself. After that, you set your sights on being a writer and a creative director. Can you tell us a little about that trajectory?
I’d learned what art directors did and decided I wanted to learn what copywriters did. I really wanted to write a Super Bowl ad, so I took on every single writing assignment I could get to learn the craft of writing. At one point, I was working on the digital for E*trade. Tor had done the original E*Trade baby ad, and lo and behold, they offered me a chance to write the Super Bowl spot. I'm sitting there with Brendan Kilcoyne, Jim Heekin Jr., and Tor banging away every day, just writing new scripts. After three months of working until three in the morning, we settled on the ad with the two babies talking about the economy and one singing “Take These Broken Wings.”
That was the Super Bowl spot, and we started releasing user-generated content on top of that. Somewhere on the internet, there’s a ridiculous music video for that song that my writing partner and I made featuring the two of us, and we definitely live up to the ridiculous description.
After that, I knew what I was capable of creatively and wanted to see if I could inspire other people and run business. That’s when I jumped to 360i, where I was a Creative Director responsible for leading client business.
And that’s where you worked on the Oreo account. Everyone loves Oreos. Can you tell us about the Daily Twist project?
That was a really fun project. This was back in 2012 when Oreo was turning 100, and they came to us with this print campaign they were using in France about how Oreo had always been there throughout history. It was beautifully art-directed, but we thought it would be better to look forward than back for the campaign. Facebook was really big at the time, and we suggested a 100-day campaign where we responded to things that were happening while they were happening. We called it the Daily Twist.
We assembled an interagency team, knowing that every 24 hours, we would respond to something happening in the world and put an Oreo spin on it. A lot of it could be pre-planned. For example, we knew when the Mars Rover was going to land, so we released a cookie with a red center and rover tracks on it that day. We had a plan for Elvis’s birthday. But we also implemented a system that allowed us to quickly respond and get legal approval. In many ways, that was the birth of real-time marketing. We won every major award globally for that campaign, too.
“Brand is the experience at every touch point. It’s understanding human behavior, psychology, cultural trends, business implications, and what's happening in and out of the category right now.”
After that, you moved to California and had several roles at agencies like Rapp and Quantasy, as a freelancer and later, as the owner and Chief Creative Officer of your consultancy. Many of the moves you made during this time had to do with work-life balance. Why was that important?
I was pretty burnt out in New York City. I spent 15 years working until three in the morning and bleeding out of my eyes. We were pretty settled at that point in a house upstate just a few miles from my in-laws; it was meant to be our forever home. But then I got an offer to come to California and run an agency. Our first kid was four months old, and it felt like if we were going to do anything, that was the time to make a move. We fully expected to go back to New York. Then we got to California, and I realized I could work across from a beach, skateboard, surf, and see my children for dinner every night. I knew I was never going back to New York.
The job that brought me to California didn’t last that long because its pace was ridiculous. I was burning out myself and my staff. I went to Rapp and got to run their LA office for a while, and then they asked me to open their office in San Francisco. We started as four people and grew that team to 32, but I didn’t like the Bay area. I hated the fog and the Silicon Valley vibe where someone was always pitching you something.
I came back to LA and, as you said, worked for another agency before starting my own consultancy. During those years, I worked with great brands, including Target, Google, Facebook, Acura, Honda, and Wells Fargo.
Before we talk about your new role at Quigley-Simpson, we want to mention a project you did on your own for the 2008 election. There’s a lot of talk about corporate values and social responsibility now, but back then, it wasn’t being looked at as much. What was your project, and what inspired you to take it on?
There are just some moments in my career when I see beyond what we, as marketers, do every day as opportunities to make a difference. Back in 2008, John McCain and Barack Obama were going head-to-head, and obviously, race was a major underlying issue in the campaign, but no one was really talking about it. A couple of us at Grey made artwork where Obama was white and McCain was black, and I put a line in between them that said, “Let the issues be the issues.” We released it into the world on a Thursday without any media dollars behind it. By Monday, 60 million people had seen it, and I was on CNN talking about race in politics. By the following Thursday, it was being used in social studies classes.
That's not advertising; it's taking what we do and moving the needle, standing for something, and pushing culture in the right direction.
“I think you get into this game creatively to make the fancy, cute, or funny creative, but as you get older, you begin to understand business implications and business strategy and how you can make creative that is not only memorable but also impactful.”
You’ve been at Quigley-Simpson for a few months now. Can you tell us about your role and why you wanted to join the agency?
I’m EVP, Executive Creative Director. I am co-leading the creative department for the agency. We have long-term clients like Chase and P&G, and we’re doing a lot of new business pitching and growing. I'm here to bring what I bring creatively to the agency and help inspire this pretty rad, humble group of people to the next level.
Here's part of the reason why I joined Quigley-Simpson. I've worked in above-the-line communications at some of the greatest global agencies and for some of the biggest bosses on creatively led campaigns. On the other side of the spectrum, I've worked at RAPP, which means I got a PhD-level education in below-the-line communication and the data-driven side of the industry. I can flex both ways. As we’ve been talking about, I went from art school to being a programmer to being a creative and a lot more in-between. Quigley-Simpson feels like a smack dab in the middle of where all my experiences can combine and excel in a place with a truly unique understanding of the business.
It's brand and demand. It's what it should be, which is a coalescence of both of those ideas. There are lots of agencies that do one or the other, but I haven't come across a shop that truly understands how to bring those things together in a meaningful way like Quigley-Simpson does. It's not about the fancy award-winning Super Bowl spot, the intricate email/social campaign, or the perfect logo. Brand is the experience at every touch point. It’s understanding human behavior, psychology, cultural trends, business implications, and what's happening in and out of the category right now. And then it’s about how you use those decision points and creative ideas to help move someone's behavior.
With E*Trade and Oreo, I've gotten into pop culture vernacular several times, but that’s just half of the cookie. I think you get into this game creatively to make the fancy, cute, or funny creative, but as you get older, you begin to understand business implications and business strategy and how you can make creative that is not only memorable but also impactful. Not only on the business we work on but culture at large as well.
I think Quigley-Simpson does a good job at both. We have media and creative right here in the same building. Many agencies talk about full service, but that’s often hogwash because you can’t truly be integrated in full service unless you have both sides of the house in one place.
That’s why I came here, and I think my experience on the agency side, client side, and post-production side—both above the line and below the line—means that I’m well-positioned to help drive Quigley-Simpson’s work.
October 8, 2024
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