Inside Noel Cottrell’s dimly lit Buckhead office, a pile of brass buckles on a table are the first things you notice.
Cottrell, a burly South African who moved to Atlanta nine months ago from New York, assured a visitor that they were awards rather than intimidation devices.
As executive creative director at Grey Group in New York City, Cottrell was one of the creative forces behind the award-winning E-Trade talking baby ads.
Now working as chief creative officer at Fitzgerald + Co. in Atlanta, Cottrell says he wants to help bring a winning streak to the smaller agency, which works with Navy Federal Credit Union, Pergo flooring, Quikrete and other brands.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution caught up with Cottrell on a recent afternoon.
Q: You've been assembling your team over the past few months. How did you find these folks?
A: Interestingly, through the power of Facebook. Marc Lineveldt [recently hired as Fitzgerald's executive creative director] was a regional creative director for Saatchi & Saatchi. He's a good friend of mine from South Africa. He's a top-shelf creative guy. One of the bricks of an agency is a great art director. You need a great art director to make stuff look amazing. Somebody once said, "It's an art director's world and we're just living in it." Marc has that crazy art director gene.
Q: What is your first-blink assessment of Atlanta's creative community?
A: Internally here, I inherited a department of between 20 and 30 people. I think a lot of people here were desperate ... for the opportunity to do great work. It's just about giving people that opportunity, pointing them in the right direction, letting them know what to expect. Up at Grey in New York, we hired maybe eight to 10 people from Atlanta. It's not like there's a lack of talent here, between UGA, SCAD, the Creative Circus and other places.
These places have amazingly talented, creative people, but they all leave. They graduate from school and they say, “Now, I want to go to New York,” or “Now, I want to go to San Francisco.” There’s a lot of that. My dream is to trap some of those kids here and also to get some of the people who have left to come back. Like Wes Whitener [hired along with Mitch Bennett as creative directors]. Wes is from Athens.
What happens a lot of times is you move to New York and you come back here for holidays and you see the good life. Bigger homes and you can have a car. And you can be closer to the grandparents down here.
There’s some decent-sized agencies here. But I think there’s a gap in the market in Atlanta for a very creative agency that wins at the award shows, that does great, progressive, cut-through work.
There are also some big companies here in Atlanta. It’s weird to think that a lot of these big companies don’t do a lot of their advertising in Atlanta. They want a New York agency or someone outside the city, which is weird. That’s a self-perpetuating problem for Atlanta, because if you want the best creative people here to do the best, award-winning work, you’ve got to pay them. And if you’re not working on AT&T, UPS, Home Depot or Coca-Cola, you’re not going to have the money. You’ve got to become an agency that’s as attractive as a New York agency.
Q: I'm sure you've seen the spoof of the E-Trade commercials, where the baby loses everything when the stock market craters.
A: They keep taking it down, which is why it's only up to 110,000 hits. E-Trade or the agency keeps taking it down because it's not good for business. It's not what the baby was meant for.
Q: It's a rigorous process to find the right baby to represent the brand, isn't it?
A: That very first one had such great attitude. The voice hit that magic formula. I think they've done a great job. It's one of the few campaigns that's still current. There are very few campaigns — I could probably count them on one hand — that are still relevant five years later.
When it blows up like that, that’s when you know you’ve got something good. [The team at Grey] had that snarky way of seeing the world and they were able to bottle it in this baby.
Q: Are there any sectors that are especially interested in spending money on advertising these days?
A: It's interesting. Up until about 10 days ago, I would say everyone was. Everyone was more positive, saying, "OK, it's behind us now. Add to the budget, we've got more money."
Literally, over the past week, I can’t tell you how many emails I’ve gotten from clients saying, “Can we orange-light some of these projects?” Because the markets were so crazy. They’re saying, “Let’s just hold off for a second.” A lot of orange lights came on last week, telling us not go into production on something.
At the same way, we might have renovations that we want to do or new furniture. And then you look at the numbers and say, “Let’s just hold off for a while.”
Q: So you can sympathize with what the clients are going through?
A: Absolutely.
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