Jeremy Weisz 14:12
How really do you ever share those hunches with the client?
Morgan Tierney 14:17
I mean, it varies. There’s a lot of clients who come to us and everything is a screaming emergency and they need it tomorrow. But a healthy creative timeline isn’t days, it’s weeks. And it takes that long to do the one-on-100 exercise and to align on which shallow holes we want to bring forward because our process has a lot of peer review baked into it. When we say peer review we mean sharing our ideas internally, not just with the creative department but with people who represent the target and honestly like people who represent your mom out there in the world walking around the people who are going to encounter these ads in the wild. And it really keeps us honest because too often In the advertising industry, you end up with industry people talking to industry people, and losing track of the fact that these ads are meant to be experienced by people who have no context. So we’ll run around the office with corkboards, covered in ideas and share them with accounting and to share them with IT. And yeah, literally call up your mom and ask her for her opinion. And then we take all the feedback we get from peer review through the process. And we kind of, we don’t just automatically adopt it, we interrogate it. And we’d like to say that if someone says something once, you can ignore, it might be a one-off, if they say something twice, you should at least think about it. And if something comes up three times, then you should probably act on it. Because it’s going to be a recurring thing. And it could create a big problem. So after we’ve gone through the entire process of ideation, office hours check-ins with creative directors, peer review, refining shallow holes, based on peer review, it’s usually in the three to four, three to four week range to get to that gold.
Jeremy Weisz 16:10
Morgan, are there any other timeless chapters are tools that stick out to you?
Morgan Tierney 16:16
I mean, I’m biased, because the person who wrote the draft, I feel very, like,
Jeremy Weisz 16:21
Can you hold up the book for a second?
Morgan Tierney 16:23
Emotionally invested. Yeah, so here’s the book. And each section or tool in the book is accompanied by a Rethink designed, visual articulation of that idea, because we are very visual.
Jeremy Weisz 16:38
Some of these are chapters if you’re looking at the screen, so like the shared belief, Oh, yeah. What’s this picture? I don’t know if it’s like a monkey eating a popsicle.
Morgan Tierney 16:52
So that is a logo that we designed for our own internal ping pong tournament, called ping pong. And the reason that it’s in the book is kind of twofold. One, we entered our own internal logo for our internal ping pong tournament in award shows, and it performed surprisingly well actually picked up quite a few awards that piece, and then it’s in the chapter of the book that is called One Plus One Equals Three, which is really just one approach that we have for getting to ideas, you’ll see a couple other examples of One Plus One Equals Three where there’s the audio symbol is also a UFO, or the cannabis symbol is combined with the Red Cross plus symbol to create a new wellness brand. So particularly in design, a One Plus One Equals Three approach can be really effective at coming up with something new and fresh.
Jeremy Weisz 17:49
This is your logo, this ping pong paddle. Yeah, well, this is so the pickleball companies.
Morgan Tierney 17:55
Oh, yeah. And we’ve got, we’ve got a one plus one equals three pickleball idea that I can’t tell you about right now. TBD. So watch this space on rethinkideas.com. But, yeah, it’s flipping through the book right now just sends me down memory lane of everything we’ve been through to get to these 52 tools, which I will say they’re not all about developing creative, I look at them that way, because I am a creative director, writer by trade. But the book is divided into three sections. So the first section is sort of the people section, dealing with the people side of running a creative company. And there’s some tips and tricks in there. The second section is about that developing of the creative itself. It’s more about the product that we produce. And then the third section is I mean, we call it people product and profit. The third section is more about the founders perspective on how to maximize the ROI of your creative company without burning people out or creating unnecessary red tape. Like one of the things that we did to remove some of that red tape that stops creatives from producing their best work was eliminating timesheets. So a lot of creative companies think of what they’re billing for as time. They think they’re billing for creative hours spent on a project. But everyone lives on their timesheets. This is a known fact, creatives are not out there working eight square hours a day or seven hours plus a lunch break, and dividing it up all equally and saying, I spent 45 minutes on Molson here and then two hours on IKEA there. What’s really happening is they’re thinking about ideas when they’re in the shower or while they’re falling asleep or throughout the day, and it’s just destroyed.
Jeremy Weisz 19:50
I build. At 7:00 a.m. I was dreaming about the stuff.
Morgan Tierney 19:55
Yeah, exactly. That’s seven minutes. What I did though work last night. I’m going to call that an hour. No, because you know, time dilation when you’re dreaming happens, but so we just decided to not play that game anymore. So we got rid of timesheets, which is the thing that makes life nicer for creatives. They don’t have to worry about being nickeled and dimed on hours. And they don’t have to account for every minute that they’re thinking about a brand. But it’s just something that we trained our clients to accept was that we’re not billing for time, we’re billing for an output. And it just changed the way that we structure things.
Jeremy Weisz 20:31
Talk about Morgan experiments, right, because we were talking before we hit record. You mentioned those things. Now, timesheets, or some other experiments that you’re always working on. What are some of those?
Morgan Tierney 20:44
Yeah, I think we are always looking at ways to rethink Rethink. And because it is our one-word business model, we like to interrogate what are things that we could be doing different from a process standpoint, that, again, makes life just that much more enjoyable and helps employees have, maybe not work-life balance, because long hours and weekends can be the nature of the beast and advertising, but work-life harmony, at least, and feeling like the work that you’re working on is the type of work that you want to spend time on. So one thing that we identified as a pain point in advertising, is the Monday client presentation, which is just this awful thing where the presentation gets shifted out from let’s say it was on a Friday, you asked for more time and account says oh, yeah, no problem. We can do it on Monday. Well, congratulations, you’re now working the weekend. Because whether you say you or not, it’s going to be in your head all weekend that dreaded Monday meeting is looming. And there’s no reason for that. You can train your clients just like you train them to accept not billing for time, you can train them to accept having the meeting on a Tuesday. So we came up with this loud and proud we said no more Monday meetings. And we’ve been working really hard to make that a chiseled in stone signed in blood reality. And I think so far, it’s been going really well. Our clients have all internalized the fact that Rethink is not available for their Monday morning presentation. There’s virtually nothing, no advertising emergency serious enough that it can’t wait until Tuesday. And it just allows teams to have that weekend, take that breath, because a burned-out creative isn’t coming up with great ideas. They’re doing whatever they can to stay afloat. And then they can come to the project with fresh eyes on a Monday and prepare for the Tuesday presentation. So we launched that industry-wide, we made a whole video, committing to it, that we played at the Strategy Magazine Awards last year in front of all of our peers. So they know that this is a thing at Rethink. And we want to get other agencies to try and adopt that too. So a lot of the things that we experiment with, and we try aren’t intended to just be pure sell from over Rethink. They’re intended to be opportunities for our industry to just do things differently and make life a little bit better. Like I keep saying so. We know that it’s not necessarily the biggest ground-shattering thing, but having no meetings on a Monday can make advertising just that little hair of a percentage better for people to work in? I think another one that I wanted to highlight under experiments is this thing that we did last year, I know some of your other guests have talked about having these sort of hackathon days, or having these. We have our own of course, we branded it, we call it R&D Day for Rethink and Develop Day. So not the most groundbreaking thing to have a hackathon day per se. But there’s this one idea that came out of our last R&D Day. And it was the idea of how our agency for example, is closed. In the week between Christmas and New Year’s, so sort of that magical liminal space week when time ceases to exist, and a lot of our clients are closed, and we’re closed. But people don’t necessarily have the opportunity to get out and live their best lives during that week off. It’s sort of a recovery week between Christmas and New Year’s when people are taking a breath. And we still have that. But out of our last R&D Day, identified an opportunity which was to take a week off in the summer to and as much of an effort it is to close the agency and again, explain that to all of our clients. It was something that we committed to and we called it Independence Week, because we’re an independent agency at Rethink, we will always be independent. And that’s something I’ll talk about in a bit too is we’ve actually committed to never selling, which is counterintuitive, perhaps but we’ve taken big steps towards ensuring that Rethink will never sell. So we instituted Independence Week, on the heels of this R&D Day, it was the brainchild of a handful of free thinkers from different departments. And rather than just say, hey, we’re taking a week off in the summer, we decided to reach out to other independent agencies and say, hey, you should do this too, because it’s something that the big global holding companies are not going to want to do. Like they’re beholden to their quarterly revenue numbers. And they like I’m the creative I’m talking about numbers, but they’re beholden to certain KPIs that do not allow them to just close for a week in the summer. And if I’m wrong, I would encourage them to go ahead and celebrate Independence week with us. But it’s just another example of something that we’ve done to not only do sell promo and give our employees a break, but try to encourage other agencies to join in on as well. And it’s something that we’re really excited to do every year, because we did it this year. And it was great when there’s no one to contact you when the agency is closed. And you truly know that you can delete slack off your phone and log out of your email and you’re not going to miss any calls. No clients are going to bother you. No coworkers are going to bother you. It was a really much-needed reset. And what’s usually our busiest time of the year, summer. So just a couple examples of things that we’re doing to try and rethink Rethink.
Jeremy Weisz 26:32
What do you remember, Morgan is another fun example of what’s come out of an R&D Day?
Morgan Tierney 26:41
Well, I mean, every time we’ve done R&D Day, there’s a bit of a dip. How often do you do them? Usually once a year, I think you use them twice a year. We’ve been doing them for 10 years now.
Jeremy Weisz 26:50
So format, how does it work?
Morgan Tierney 26:52
Yeah, the format of R&D Day is we divide everyone at the agency up into teams from across departments. So usually you’re with five or six people you might not work with every day. And then we have a some sort of a brief or an assignment. So we’ll usually brief the week of R&D Day. So we’ll let people know what’s coming. And we’ve had all kinds of different briefs. So the very first R&D Day was a hackathon in its truest nature, where we were trying to come up with working prototypes of digital ideas in one day. So every team had one poor suffering coder, who is frantically typing up to the last minute, but we did come up with some working prototypes. Other briefs that we’ve had, including…
Jeremy Weisz 27:34
What would be an example of prototype?
Morgan Tierney 27:38
My team came up with a, it was 10 years ago, but an app that was meant to be a habit tracker that distilled everything down to one question asked to you once a day. So keeping in mind, this was 2013 or so it’s definitely not revolutionary by today’s standards. But we actually made this thing in a day. And we’re able to step away and say, we made this app called Did You Blank Today? And it just is designed to ask you one question, once a day, you track it, and it gives you a color-coded numerical like visualization of that. So very simple. Other teams did things like one team programmed a, they made a robot office dog out of a Roomba that day. So that was cameras linking the robot office dog in our office to the one in the Toronto office and the Montreal office. So year one was focused on working prototypes. Other themes that we’ve had include one year the focus was all around content, because it was right around that time when the amount of deliverables that we had to come up with were rapidly exponentially multiplying. So it was no longer you’re making a TV commercial. It was your thing needs to work in every different YouTube format from six second to true view. It needs to work on a vertical screen, which was a whole new thing. Vine was popular at the time, I think and TikTok was not yet a Twitter. Let anyone’s I was so still not a thing. But Instagram video gifts were a thing. So every team was assigned a different video format. And even podcast was one of the format’s and we aligned on a theme that everyone can make their video content around and the theme was lunch, something that we’re all familiar with. And every team had to go away and come up with their own piece of shareable content designed to fit the specifications of a specific form of video or audio. So that was one year that was a very fun, silly year. Some years are more fun and silly than others and other themes we’ve had included trying to come up with ideas that would solve problems in our cities and break through on a local noose level. So this was in the early days of our Montreal office. So we were up to three offices at the time. And every office was jamming on ideas to try and come up with solutions for local problems. So in Montreal, for example, like road construction is a big issue in Toronto, I think it was, again, it came down to what you want for lunch, it was how you decide what you want for lunch was one of the team’s ideas. And they came up with this thing where it was a rapidly changing Instagram video, and you just press your thumb on the screen to decide where you’re going for lunch that day. This like simple things you could do to solve problems in your city. And one that came out of the Vancouver office was the idea to, instead of a rainbow crosswalk to turn the entire Bird Street Bridge into a big rainbow. And it was kind of positioned as this like, this will never happen. idea that was maybe just a little bit of a pie-in-the-sky thing. But before we knew it, we had CBC and CTV and all of these media outlets knocking on our door asking, Is this real? How’s this happening? Have you talked to the Civic engineers? And next thing you knew we were talking to the Civic engineers? And it didn’t actually end up happening due to structural concerns with the bridge, but just, but R&D Day, it’s, it’s had all kinds of outputs. And we actually just had one, our most recent R&D Day was this past Friday. And the focus was on ideas around our Molson Coors beverage company, partner clients. So we have a bunch of beverage clients who are hungry for breakthrough work. So we decided to throw all four offices, the whole agency at it and just have a jam. And it was also an opportunity for us to reinforce our commitment to peer review as part of the Rethink machine. So we call it beer review. And it was a day of blue sky thinking around all things beer and beverage related, and then evaluating each other’s ideas, using crafts, which is our acronym for the way that we evaluate great creative.
Jeremy Weisz 32:22
So how do you do that? So like, obviously, we start off in the morning, you break into groups, there’s a theme, and then the groups just go at it. And whatever that means. And then afterwards, it sounds like you’re doing peer review. And you mentioned crafts, what does that process look like?
Morgan Tierney 32:38
Exactly. So we actually created, we use Google Forms to create a craft scoring system, where each idea on our NDA could be ranked according to a letter. So the C is for clear, your idea has to be clear, above all, otherwise, none of the other scores matter. It has to be relevant, meaning there needs to be a reason to do this idea. Now, at this time in this place, people need to have a reason to want to talk about this idea. It needs to be achievable, meaning you can’t produce a $2 million idea on a $10,000 budget. We actually had like, a fairly healthy budget set aside to potentially produce some of these ideas. So the A and crafts is achievability, which keeps us honest. And then the F is for fresh. So basically, if it’s been done, it’s dead. And you have to do a deep dive on Google and dig into that advertising brain and ask yourself if you’ve seen this anywhere before, and ask other people if you’ve seen it anywhere before, because there’s no feeling worse than selling an idea and realizing it’s been done and having to unsell it. So the F is for fresh, and the T is for true. There needs to be an underlying truth to your idea. If something scores high on truth, then chances are your reaction is something like, oh, wow, that’s so true. I never thought of it that way. And on the other end of the scale, if your idea isn’t scoring high on T, it’s more of like, oh, this is advertising BS, and I am being sold a bill of goods or these brands are trying to manipulate me and then finally, the S stands for shareable. So if your idea scores highly on relevancy and freshness and truth, then chances are it’s going to be a highly shareable idea. And we also like to make sure that our ideas have a thing that is shareable, whether that’s a catchy name, a catchy tagline, or headline or a press headline. So how are the media going to talk about this idea? And shareable is really just our way of saying, If we succeed, and we make this thing, are people going to care? And not just in our industry? Are people going to want to share this workaround? Is it gonna get buzz? Is it gonna get earned media? And that is always a goal for our clients who often have more modest budgets is how do we get earned media on this thing? So one of our like, best client relationships is with the YWCA here in Canada. And obviously a not-for-profit doesn’t always have the biggest media budgets. So we have to really try to dig deep and come up with work that’s going to break through for them.
Jeremy Weisz 35:11
What do you do at the YWCA?
Morgan Tierney 35:15
We’ve done a few things for them in the last year that we’re feeling really good about. So one was this initiative called add the M. And it was a realization, that sports logos like the NBA, the NFL, the NHL, they don’t have a W in them. But the WNBA does. So we added the M, we got our graphic designers to modify the logos to the professional sports leagues. And we created logos for the NMLS the MNHL, the MNBA the MMLB. Because why not? And then we got a bunch of influencers from various sports leagues men’s and women’s sports leagues to say it’s time to add the M for equity in sport. So that was a really popular piece for the YWCA that got a lot of media attention. Obviously.
Jeremy Weisz 36:14
That for me when we think of the crafts, right, it makes me think of the T right? That’s so true. Right? And wow, yeah, it’s just something we don’t even think I could speak for myself. I don’t even think about with it’s the NBA, right. But the WNBA, but it’s not the MNBA. So true.
Morgan Tierney 36:35
Yeah, so true, right. And then that makes it shareable. And it also has a little bit of tension baked into it where, there might be a reaction to someone seeing the MNBA logo and saying, oh, well, you can’t change my beloved sports teams logo. And that’s why we like to say there’s no attention without tension. And if your idea doesn’t have another line, strategic tension baked into it, then again, it might not get shared, it might fall on deaf ears. So we’re very proud of that work for YWCA.
Jeremy Weisz 37:04
Do you remember any of the creative process and coming up with this? Because like, it seems so obvious now, like when you say it, but it’s not easy to come up with this. What are some of the breakthroughs you had with the creative process here?
Morgan Tierney 37:17
Yeah. So this process was with teams across the country, in Vancouver, Toronto, and possibly in New York, I’m not sure if New York was up and running yet at the time, but we had teams working on this women’s empowerment, sort of one-pager brief about what can we do in the space of women’s empowerment in sports. Because we have a few different clients who have appetite for those types of ideas. So the thinking that led to add the M, was sort of on an open brief, it was a cause that we’re passionate about. And we do a lot of work for causes that we’re passionate about. And sometimes we’ll come up with an idea and just ask ourselves, which client is brave enough to do this thing, like come up with the crazy idea first, then reach out to the client, because then you’re not constrained by all of the deliverables and mandatories of the brief and you you’re free to think more creatively. So yeah, we came up with the idea.
Jeremy Weisz 38:19
And it’s kind of interesting, Morgan, because it’s like, listen, if you don’t take this, we’re going to this other company, they’re probably going to take it, it’s gonna blow up. So there’s competitive nature and there too.
Morgan Tierney 38:33
Yeah, I’d be lying if I said that doesn’t happen. And thankfully, we have such a great relationship with the YWCA that they got first right of refusal. Well, they snapped it up. But yeah, yeah, so that was a big win. Even though when we came up with that idea, I remember seeing it from a creative team on the slide. And my immediate reaction was, oh, that’s not achievable. We can never do that. As like we’ll get slapped with a cease and desist in the first day from the NHL or NBA. But sometimes you just we’d like to say go then grow, just do the thing and see what the reaction is. And obviously mitigate risk as much as you can. But if you start small and see if your little minimum viable product idea has legs then once momentum starts to grow, it can really snowball fast.
Jeremy Weisz 39:26
How do you decide on the influencers here? Obviously, if you’re watching the video, you can see I have the page up, you can check all these out, by the way on rethinkideas.com and go to the Work page and I’m on this right now which is the YWCA but how do you then determine now you’ve come up with the idea now you have another step to create as a creative and have the influencers or talent? How do you come up with this?
Morgan Tierney 39:59
Coming up with the idea is actually just the first step in quite a process where we like to think of ourselves as sort of the shepherds of ideas, you come up with your idea. And then you have to sort of protect it and shepherd it through every step of the production process all the way down the line. And we’re control freaks everything. So, we wanted to optimize our influencer process. And we actually created a new department called Brand narrative. So it’s kind of like a PR department, we used to call it amplification. But basically, it’s a department that takes our little germ of an idea and tries to maximize how far we can amplify it, who we should work with vets influencers brings people on board handles a lot of that back end behind finding those people because it can definitely be a very time consuming process. And who you hear a message from is just as important as what the message is. So if we have an idea, then it’s often a shared responsibility of the creatives and the brand narrative team to bring it to life in the world.
Jeremy Weisz 41:12
I want to talk about another example but which is your I know, it’s hard to choose between your favorite children, and I’ll tell you what my personal favorite was after watching. I mean, there’s so many good ones. So it’s hard to choose. But um, any guesses on what you think I was gonna say on? I said before we hit record here, which was my favorite, huh? Granted, I didn’t watch every single one of these. So in fairness, but one stuck out to me for some reason.
Morgan Tierney 41:43
Okay, I’m going to talk about two examples, just because they’re top of mind in recent memory because I can’t like you said it’s hard to choose children. But two projects, where if I run into someone at a party, and they asked me oh, what are you proud of that you’ve worked on recently? There’s a couple projects that I want to point to. And ironically, they’re both books. Like I already talked about a book for the first third of this, but there’s two book related projects. One is called The Unburnable Book. And that was a project where we noticed the trend of unfortunately book burnings back and happening in America and people saying that certain books shouldn’t be on the shelves. So we created an Unburnable Book, and we worked with Penguin publishing, to create the world’s first book that could withstand a bonfire and we actually got the opportunity to work with Margaret Atwood and have her blast this book with a flamethrower on camera to announce the launch of the Unburnable Books. So she’s a flamethrower at a copy of The Handmaid’s Tale, which was then auctioned off at Sotheby’s in New York, and made a big splash. We’re very proud of that book. But another book that we’re proud of is it’s near and dear to my heart, because as a good Canadian kid, I grew up playing hockey and my hockey goalie is this project that we did for Scotiabank, called The Hockey Jersey. So if you’re a little bit background for the non-Canadians, but if you’re Canadian, you grew up with this book called The Hockey Sweater. It’s a children’s book about a kid who moves to a new town and doesn’t have the same hockey jersey and all the other kids are cheering for the other team. And it’s heartwarming, we grew up with it. But there’s no diversity in that book. And so we decided to work with Scotiabank was one of the big five banks in Canada, one of our clients to develop a version of the book called The Hockey Jersey that was updated for the modern generations. So we published this book we worked with an amazing illustrator and amazing author, and created this book that is a real thing in the real world that has actually reached out to and spoken to a lot of underrepresented kids in a sport that is still overwhelmingly not diverse. So we were really proud to work with Scotiabank on a project that feels like it’s genuinely doing good and reaching kids and helping to make everyone feel accepted in the hockey world. So a little bit of a passion project for me. I promise I make other things besides books.
Jeremy Weisz 44:22
One of my favorites, Morgan, is this one The Law Firm Lifesaver. I thought this one was hilarious. You could check it out. If you’re thinking of getting, how do you get creative ideas for yourself, your business your team whenever I suggest going to rethinkideas.com and looking at some of their work because they’ve put probably a tremendous amount of hours and time and energy into this and I thought this was hilarious. And one maybe it’s seeing lawyers underwater. Maybe that was the funny part, but it’s about four with Cleo And it’s so funny. And it’s again, kind of in the crafts so true, right? And how you illustrated this through treading water and being busy. And then I don’t know if you came up with this ahead of time and then Cleo took it on, but I could see a lot of businesses being like, yeah, I want that, right. There’s a obviously a life preserver. That’s the software saving them, but it’s just funny to see how you illustrate that with Treading Water and then the software itself, and then The Law Firm Lifesaver?
Morgan Tierney 45:37
Yeah, I’m so glad that you brought this one up, because it is one of those little like bright spots in my career where we had this brief come across our desk. This was this is a real client brief. We’re clearly filming this has got to be hilarious. Oh, yeah. This was a night shoot in a swimming pool with divers and scuba gear.
Jeremy Weisz 45:57
There’s a fax machine in the pool.
Morgan Tierney 46:00
Oh, yeah, this was this was producers said it couldn’t be done. But it turns out, you just put the fax machine in the pool and figure it out. So this one came to us as this sort of b2b brief that was, I saw it and I was like, Ooh, software for law firms? Is this something that is going to be conducive to a great creative? And the more we talked about it, the more excited about it we got, because we realized that there is this clear insight around how it can feel like you’re drowning if you’re working at a law firm and passion project for me too, because before I worked in advertising, I was working as a legal secretary. So I saw firsthand the reams of paper, the rooms full of bankers, boxes full of binders, and how for a lot of small law firms, lawyers just want to help people like lawyers aren’t necessarily the Boogeyman. There are a lot of these small firms who just need to clear out all that paperwork and have a solution that can help them not tread water anymore. So this was an example of as soon as we had that idea. And we landed on The Law Firm Lifesaver. We were off to the races, and we were looking at swimming pools, and we were booking the dive team and designing the inflatable inner tubes that represent the software casting the spokesperson, the Clio Lifesaver Lifeguard, and yeah, that one for me is just a real bright spot, even if it was an all-night shoot at a swimming pool in Ontario.
Jeremy Weisz 47:30
I know we have a few minutes, and I really want to hear your path and journey. Can you take me through just intern and just the pathway you took to partner?
Morgan Tierney 47:43
Yeah, definitely. I’ll give you the Coles notes on that. But so my background isn’t in advertising. I graduated with a psychology degree in 2008. Which, if you might remember that’s a pretty big global recession that was going on at the time. So I took whatever jobs I could get. I took temping jobs, I worked all over the place. I had a theater background, which wasn’t the most useful for me, but it taught me that I really enjoy writing and I really enjoy making things and creativity. But because of the recession, I ended up working as a government legal secretary, the most buttoned-down environment that I could imagine, and spending my days photocopying, collating phoning witnesses, flipping through really dry material, and lots of time to think about what I wanted to do with my life. So when the time came, I found out I was gonna get put on this really grisly file that was all about abuse of sled dogs, it was really dark stuff. And I was like, I can’t work as a legal secretary anymore. This is not the kind of thing I want to be reading around about all day. So I knew it was time to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. And I just decided, hey, I like writing. But I almost never finish anything longer than a minute. So maybe advertising. I was the kid who watched all the commercials. I’ve been absorbing it my whole life. It’s in there somewhere. So I went back to school, I did a post grad certificate. And the first agency I applied for, for my internship was Rethink. I saw they had a Vancouver office, I knew they had a great reputation. I liked that they were sort of this disruptor agency that was growing. And so I did my internship at Rethink, and we happen to get a really significant new client, which was Shock Communications while I was doing my internship, so I got to have that magic moment where the founder of the company is celebrating a client win and goes hire the interns, right. So from that moment on, I was just really thrown into the deep end. I think I produced 12 TV spots in my first year, which is insane. It was really just in the spirit of Clio being thrown into the deep end, and it was sink or swim. And I think just consistently, you learn to trust that your brain can solve problems can always come up with more ideas can do the one or 100 thing. And over time I got promoted through the ranks like creative director, partner, now executive creative director in the Vancouver office. And I’m leading the biggest creative department in Vancouver along with my creative partner, Leah Rodgers. So the founder of the company, Chris Staples, who is a great way with words, once said, you want to promote from within, you want to take a little puppy and raise it and train it and then tie it to a rocket ship and light a match. And I really do truly feel like that sums up my experience at Rethink where it has been like being on this rocket ship, going from this agency that had 50 people in Vancouver and a handful in Toronto when I started and seeing this explosive growth that’s happened through Montreal, now into New York and beyond to the point where we’re not really thinking about Rethink as a Canadian agency anymore. We see ourselves as an international player. And we want to be that number one independent agency in the world. So we’re dreaming big, and the phone is ringing. And yes, you go through some growing pains along the way. But I really do feel like now is the most exciting time ever to be at Rethink. And the work that we’re doing is the best ever. And we just want to keep raising the bar for, not just advertising agencies. Again, we’re just thinking bigger we want to raise the bar for all creative companies and have help others in our industry do the best work of their careers.
Jeremy Weisz 51:42
Morgan, I want to be the first one to thank you. Thanks for sharing the ideas, the journey, the book and your work. Everyone check out rethinkideas.com And Morgan I want to be the first one. Thank you so much.
Morgan Tierney 51:55
Thank you so much.
