At HUMANAUT the LOVE for Liquid Death goes deep. Two of my all-time favorite creative humans and collaborators: Andy Pearson, LD VP of Creative, and Mike Cessario, LD CEO / Founder, both worked with me at Humanaut back in the earlier days. And I couldn't be more proud and inspired to watch them go on to build the best marketing / branding case study in modern business history. Period. Hands down. It's not even close. The idea that Humanaut got to play even a tiny role in this legendary story makes me blush and beam with pride.
From day one Humanaut has been a wild experiment. What would happen if we only did advertising for brands we believed in, that deserved to be famous? My co-founder Andrew Clark and I used to ask: would we recommend this product to our Mom or can we give it to our kids? If the answer was no, we wouldn't work on it. It was that simple. And for 10-years that rule of thumb hasn't changed.
It turns out that Idiotic stubbornness is one of my superpowers. But being a small shop in the middle of nowhere (a.k.a Chattanooga, TN) meant we had the freedom to say "NO" and to grow slow and say "YES" to our hunches and listen to our feelings without the distraction and pressure of the noisy ad scene. And my feelings told me that I didn't want to waste my precious time and talents selling bullshit that didn't matter or that may actually be making things worse for people and the planet.
But it was Organic Valley that forever wrecked me as an ad man. One of our first viral campaigns that put Humanaut on the map was Save the Bros (for a new organic protein shake). This was the hat-trick of my career. I got to do world-class hilarious creative, for a ridiculously-good cooperative of family farmers, and the campaign sold a shit ton of product and went on to win an Effie for effectiveness. Hot damn! That was the best drug an ad guy could get. And once I got a taste of that high, there was no going back. If doing that kind of creative work was possible, why would I spend my time doing anything else?
Chasing that high for ten years has led to Humanaut becoming the world's best agency at making better-for-you brands famous. I don't mean to sound braggy it's just the truth. It's all we do. And we've gotten really freaking good at it. Because it's so fun, it feels good, and it's what we truly LOVE to do.
Creativity is problem solving. If there a deep unspoken problem in the advertising industry it's that no one working in advertising cares anymore about the problems they're being asked to solve. I'm sorry, but in 2024 getting more people to buy candy bars, fast food, insurance, wireless plan upgrades, or another sugary whatever is not a problem that needs to be solved, which means creativity is not needed. Deception is likely what is now being asked of you. And that's not your job. And that's why your job probably sucks. But it doesn't have to. There's hope.
I've got a lot more to say, coming in a part 2. Stay tuned.
