I sat down for a little Q and A with our creative director, Wayne Best, to get his take on what’s happening with the agency business and how Cog NYC is doing things a little differently. Enjoy. 1. Why did you start Cog NYC? I love advertising. It’s the perfect mix of business skills and creative skills. But, with each promotion from ACD to CD to ECD… you get further and further away from the actual creative work, and spend increasingly more time dealing with things like budg

It was 9:42am, the team of all agency partners- PR, Media, Advertising, etc. - had been waiting for the VP of Marketing for almost an hour when she stormed in, unapologetically, and positioned herself at the head of the table. She looked around the conference room and asks, “why are all of these people here?” A brand team member leaned over and whispered, not quietly enough, “they are here to present the marketing plan to you…” But all we heard was, she doesn’t care about thi

My husband is a lawyer and hated Law and Order. My mom, a nurse, disliked “ER.” I hated Mad Men, and worked in, you guessed it, advertising. My mom and my husband dislike dramas depicting their fields for the usual reasons: oversimplified, unduly glamorized, and outright misrepresentations of how things work. This is not why I hated Mad Men. I hated how accurately it depicted my life working in an ad agency. The only real differences: no more drinking or smoking in the offic

The most creative brief is actually the tightest. The more narrow the brief, the better the creative that comes out of it. I know the obvious logic is that if a creative has more freedom, they’ll come up with something more creative, but it’s the exact opposite. Nothing is more creatively freeing than knowing exactly what needs to be said. Then you can have a ton of fun finding the best way to express that single-minded thought. Too often today, we don’t have enough discipli