As SHOOT celebrates a milestone, its 65th year of publication, we continue a recently launched series of interviews and features that will run throughout the summer on SHOOTonline and in SHOOT‘s newsletters and special PDF Issue with digital distribution in which industry executives, creatives and artists reflect on the changes they’ve seen over the decades, as well as essential dynamics that have endured. These folks–from different sectors of the business–will also share their visions and aspirations for the future.
Perhaps most importantly, this special SHOOT coverage enables us to look back on the industry’s history, learn from it, and plum relevant lessons that will help us now and beyond. Mark Twain once famously said, “History doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.” Twain’s insight underscores the importance of the past and its role in helping us better shape today and tomorrow.
Such perspectives are invaluable yet sadly often not properly considered as society’s tendency at times is to overlook history and its significance. Additionally, the new generation navigating our industry sometimes isn’t aware of the relevant history, having not experienced it firsthand. Hopefully helping to close those gaps will be SHOOT’s 65th Anniversary coverage which seeks to provide historical context and to benefit from its relevance to the present and what may lie ahead.
This week we connect with Dave Rolfe, global head of production for WPP/Hogarth which has been his home since 2021. Prior to that, he served as head of production for global business marketing at Facebook. Over the years, Rolfe has established himself as one of the industry’s leading agency heads of production, widely acknowledged for his transformative impact on clients and brands. Before Facebook he was global EVP, director of integrated production at BBDO New York for eight years, playing a key role in that shop’s creative success, garnering accolades for work ranging from social and innovation to Super Bowl, as well as high-profile cause-related work. Earlier he was partner and global head of production at Crispin Porter+Bogusky for 12 years. He’s put an indelible stamp on industry-leading work for clients including AT&T, Burger King, GE, Mars, Bacardi, Microsoft, Anheuser-Bush, Domino’s, Volkswagen, MINI, as well as Sandy Hook Promise and American Legacy Foundation’s Truth.
Here are reflections and observations from Rolfe in response to several questions posed by SHOOT:
SHOOT: How has your business model evolved over the years? What principles and beliefs have remained constant to help shape your company/agency/organization? What dynamics have changed, causing you and your company to adapt–and how have you adapted?
ROLFE: Looking at the question, as seismic as change has been lately–and it all relates back to digital transformation in engagement and consumption habits–I realize that the wave began in my earliest phase of my creative production leadership, in the early 2000s.
Back then we were pushed to expand a single piece of broadcast media into a multi-channel experience, but this was personalization in its most rudimentary form. So the roots were there. The consumer has always been in control–back then it was more about the “water cooler” plus the wallet–and now technology continues to drive greater ability for consumer-centric creative experience.
As to what’s needed now to adapt, I tend to break it down in two almost clumsily unrelated themes–firstly, embracing systems, and secondly, partnering more in culture rather than with culture.
We’ve got to embrace the need to be more systemic about how our assets are made— through everything from platformed management of work, the slingshot accelerant of AI, and upstreamed modularity leading to more effective activation— this effort will make assets easier for the sake of emphasis on experience. And asserting into culture, we should embrace (and by embrace here I mean the actual hugging kind) a totally reformatted media and talent landscape– begging us to partner more adoptively into the creator space, and while we’re at it, recognize entertainment as algorithmically tethered as anything– we have the right to stop viewing ourselves as outsiders soliciting our way in to culture.
Per the latter, I recall the seminal experience of working on CP+B’s “And1 Mixtape,” circa 2000. We were basically cohabitating with street basketball icons, traveling and filming them, making a literal, rambling video mixtape, with VHS as the presumed media (a slam-dunk on E-Bay)– but really it was the cultural hotbed of the street courts themselves, as our distribution vehicle, that became our medium. Experience > Assets. Click Here to see video.
SHOOT: What lessons have you learned over the course of your career that remain vital to you today? What new or recent lessons have you found particularly significant?
ROLFE: I think you may only be as good as the company you keep. That company can be a company, a like-minded community, a set of peers, a partner that maddens and pushes you daily or a portfolio of partners that you co-depend on. Times when I’ve felt less effective are the same times that my outward expression and engagement had ebbed.
And btw, “the company you keep” is not meant to be hierarchical. The act of partnership, collaboration and teamwork can outstrip what is singularly assumed to be creative precedence or standard. Breaking the rules (by countering the expected way to make creative) is always better with a team!
SHOOT: What industry developments over the years–and/or recently–have had the greatest positive influence on you and your company, agency, organization? Whose work has had the greatest positive influence on you?
ROLFE: From a standpoint of right now, there’s no question that gen AI creation is more inspiring to me than scary. I’ve always been pro de-hierarchical in my creative and making preference, and these tools, ahem, are certainly democratizing vis a vis traditional production.
What it’s meant for WPP, Hogarth and our studio environment…it’s simply fully disrupted the notion of how creative making can be invested in, structured and deployed. (Meanwhile it’s a helluva age for creative technology, which is a “discipline” that I’ve asserted as core to creative and production for 20 years.)
As for those I admire, I’ve loved watching forerunners like Jason Zada and Ari Kushner–who are founder-producers cum creative technologists, btw–play gen AI ping-pong on LinkedIn. And I’ve gotten off the couch per our own iterative dev in motion-based gen AI!
SHOOT: What changes in the business do you love and why? And, what changes in the business do you dislike and why?
ROLFE: As above, I think maximizing personalization has always been present, and I think trending that direction–into a state of consumer-led “configuration” of our creative experience builds–is a healthy thing. So I love making work that inherently feels co-creational. I made “Whopper Freakout” and the biggest freakout was watching all the copycat versions on YouTube (in 2007!). Click Here to see video.
But mind you, this isn’t about resisting collective experience, or the importance of the singularity of scale. But I think–and have always thought–that everything is about connecting with an identifiable audience construct. In 2017, at BBDO, we made a music video that hacked Facebook’s livestream delay, called “Live Looper” with Downtown Records and the band The Academic, to launch their hit “Bear Claws”–our audience goal was simply, and explicitly, Reddit techies, and we achieved it which then led to the video’s more direct fan appreciation and spiked virality, in the targeted sense. Click Here to see video. (I basically spend hours a day talking about “targeted virality” now, with WPP’s commitment to more keen audience understanding through AI–today’s superpowers there are as creatively fertile as ever.)
Even the Super Bowl isn’t just a quantitatively significant audience, it is moreover an extremely large set of groups, each predisposed to (miraculously) fetishize watching your ad— a gigantic yet niche contextual moment! When Ogilvy NY made Verizon’s Super Bowl partnership with Beyonce’ in “Can’t B Broken,” aside from it launching her forthcoming country masterpiece, it was a tapestry of small bits designed (very much by the queen herself) to distinctly resonant with niche audience— it was chalk-full of niche easter eggs. Click Here to see the video.
So, as we at once question our stubbornly legacy behaviors in creating while we celebrate ways we’ve continued to drive culture, we’ve been either coping with or commandeering changes in media absorption and commerce practices. That we’ve steadily built things that are more purposefully resonant within selective audiences is an accomplished thing. We just need to spend more time geeking out on what’s worked, where and why, and keep improving on that.
SHOOT: What do you look back on as among your greatest accomplishments professionally?
ROLFE: I almost never share this, but what has impacted my success in production is for the past twenty years I have continuously ramped up my media studies as much as I have my creative or production studies. I spoke at more media conferences in the 2010’s than I did creative functions— making dozens of Lowe’s “Fix-in-Six” DIY’s on Vine made me a sort of creative-based media consigliere, in 2014. Click Here to see video.
Halfway through the journey I realized the science of connection was as important as the creative distinction driving it, and combining that thinking is a fruitful way to view production.
SHOOT: What prompted you to get into the advertising/filmmaking business to begin with?
ROLFE: The beginning? I got my creative muscle from my mom’s side of the family, and possibly my grandmother, Elizabeth Morrow, who passed when I was 22. She was in Portland, and she had a well-regarded but not-for-everyone restaurant and art gallery combo called The Gazebo. All it did was make tasteful people adore my grandmother and dismay those who wanted an expected restaurant experience. I waited tables there starting when I was 12 (think of the dismay caused!).
She was eccentric, always wore purple and loved servicing people who appreciated crafted experience. I recognized that she was creative first and I wanted to go that direction from my early teens onward— and film was an obvious route.
SHOOT: Looking towards the future, what are the most pressing questions for which you are still seeking answers as you seek to meaningfully evolve your career and your company? Responses can span such sectors as the economy, business, creative, technological, media and/or any other area you deem relevant.
ROLFE: Addressing that through the lens of a scaled organization, we need to re-organize our approach. Scaled servicing in our business can remain potent, and of value in consolidated practice, but it will need to streamline and re-wire its value structure— could be performance-based (though from beyond just asset or media performance), licensing or subscription of platformed or model-based service, could be IP-based value, could be more marketer embedded, overtly consultative or network-management. (Pick your quiver!)
Those who have believed in curating, or have biased themselves toward distinctive experience will remain as important as ever. But meanwhile the tools and by extension the structural format have dramatically changed, so it’s requisite that those, even with marked skills in distinction will need to adapt to the new “how.”
It’s a cyclical process, and here’s how I see it in advertising: as supply-side enjoyed inviolable demand (traditional creative advertising), demand-side inevitably asserts dominance (media and consumption marketplace pivots), and thus legacy supply-side must re-engineer its essential value (less demand for labor-intensive creative experience). Then meanwhile a new supply-side evolves (democratized creative and publishing practitioners) and creative marketing adopts and becomes possibly unrecognizable from where it was thirty years ago (marketing transformed).
SHOOT: What’s your fondest industry remembrance? Your most profound remembrance? Your funniest remembrance?
ROLFE: I was recalling a breakout moment, quite fondly, over an outdoor lunch the other day…
I can catch a grape or other small object in my mouth from as far away as anyone can throw it. My dad taught me. I was somewhere in Florida on a shoot in about 1998 and I was a jr. producer and I was sitting (quietly, insignificantly) circa the director at a 30-person long lunch table. Something came up, could have been how the grapes were yummy, or something. I made my conversational (career?) debut by spouting out “I can catch that grape in my mouth from as far as anyone can throw it.” The director heard me, and was bemused and almost offended by the notion. French accented, “You can, huh?” I reddened and nodded. The athletically inclined 1st AD was selected to make the toss, I embarked a ways away, below, in this sort of trellised lot. For a moment (I was far enough away, at least 60’) I thought they’d just wave to me and laugh it off, turning back to their lunch. But the 1st made the arching toss. I appeared as if staggering as I adjusted positioning— my career soaring and then rapidly descending through the air in the form of a spinning purple projectile— and landed the grape, was tasty indeed. I was the hero for the day, and was asked to repeat the stunt at time or two a year from then on. I owe my livelihood to what I got good at when I was 9.
SHOOT: When did you start reading SHOOT and what were you doing then? How has SHOOT been useful to you during your career?
ROLFE: Without SHOOT, I would not have become a successful producer. As much as I valued creative taste and opinion and the throes of back-and-forthing your way through creative advertising, simply having knowledge is critical. Nothing can truly beat homework.
I committed to trying to be referentially encyclopedic very early on, and I found its value in creative conversation (never shy from reference, it will affirm your route or correct it), navigating the talent landscape and moreover, it just made me feel I could pretend I was producing the work I hadn’t yet.
Without question, SHOOT’s tone and objective format remains as useful as anything in high-end creative media comprehension, from remarking on what’s relevant to providing topical provocation.
I read every issue my first 15 years, and I still grasp for it now, to keep me in the game.
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Publishers note: Thank you to Dave Rolfe for contributing to our series of 65th Anniversary articles which you will see over the next few months.
Here’s a fun look back at some of the content and Ads relating to our 50th & 40th Anniversaries.
>Click Here to see a feature series we published in the months leading up to our 50th Anniversary Issue which includes interviews with Lee Clow, Robert Greenberg, Bob Giraldi, Larry Bridges, Rich Silverstein, Stephen Dickstein, Phil Geier, Joe Pytka, Bryan Buckley, Joe Sedelmaier, Dan Weiden, Susan Credle, Noam Murro, Tony Granger, Kevin Roddy, Kristi VandenBosch, David Lubars, Jon Kamen, Stefan Sonnenfeld, Tom Kuntz and Lance Accord.
>Click Here to see the SHOOT 50th Anniversary Issue published in Nov. 2010.
>Click Here to see SHOOT House Ads leading up to our 40th Anniversary Issue published in Nov. 2000. A big hit at the time, they are still fun to look at. The Ads featured Cheryl Berman, Alex Bogusky, Texas East, Nitza From, Llye Greenfield, Matt Miller, Tom Mooney, Barbara Mullins, David Perry, Joe Pytka, and Scott Ross.
>Click Here to see Industry Ads from the SHOOT 40th Anniversary Issue published in Nov. 2000
>Click Here for our special 65th Anniversary Retro Banner & PDF Issue Ad Rates.
