EVP/MD Chris Mumford Talks "Good & Tough"
Martin Agency exec explains how to be 'good and tough' in the ad industry
BY LAUREN RENZ
November 29, 2016
Chris Mumford, executive vice president and managing director of The Martin Agency, recently spoke at the Newhouse School as part of the Eric Mower Advertising Forum about the current and future state of the industry. The Martin Agency, with offices in Richmond, Virginia, New York City and London, is a full-service agency with more than 500 employees. The agency is responsible for creating the GEICO insurance company’s award-winning caveman and gecko campaigns. Before his talk with students, Mumford answered questions about how to stay competitive in an evolving industry.
What do you feel is most important for maintaining an environment where great ideas are continuously born?
I’d say it begins with a cultural commitment. Everyone is so different in this business. I’ve had a lot of luck being around great people where a lot of great work happens. I’ve found patterns that I’ve followed, and it has been very messy to get to this point. Usually that’s what makes it so rewarding. We’re a company full of love and caring. But we have huge accounts with massive budgets and high expectations, so we’re also managing a lot of tension. You really have to love all aspects, and then it feels like anything is possible. The old ways of making things happen are gone. Frankly we’re in a marketing industry that’s like the Wild West, and you’ve got to embrace it.
Chris Mumford, of The Martin Agency, recently spoke at Newhouse as part of the Eric Mower Advertising Forum. Photo by Saniya More
The Martin Agency has worked with GEICO for 25 years, and in that time has created infectious campaigns like the cavemen and gecko campaigns. How did these come to fruition?
It’s really easy to come up with ideas that have been done before. Imitating is not hard to do, but what’s hard to do is come in and do something that’s never been done before, and share it with a bunch of people who can build on that idea. Then, you watch the collaboration happen. The key to all this is creating a safe environment, where people can do this and feel great about coming up with new ideas.
These campaigns were the first of their kind for many reasons, one of which was the multiple story lines. Can you talk about that?
You just don’t have this kind of client agency relationship long-term, so it’s quite remarkable. Our relationship with GEICO is different than with most accounts. The way we got to the work that we do for them comes from a very strategic and tactful decision. There were several big decisions over the years that made us innovate in the space.
We were trying to create the personality of the brand, something that differentiated GEICO from other insurance companies. We had four or five story lines running at once, and other agencies would ask what’s up with that? We did it purposefully. One, we had a very large media budget. Second, we realized that the shows people were consuming had multiple story lines. We took advantage of this media trend and started using different story lines in our commercials to create message tweaks. We may have the gecko talking about the fact that GEICO’s been here for 75 years and we may have another campaign that talks about saving money. They all feel like a family of commercials, but they all do different things for us.
How has the Martin Agency changed in the time you’ve been working there?
The reason I think the Martin Agency has been so successful over the past 50 years and will continue to be successful in this era of high change is our culture. Our culture is built on a set of values and a set of behaviors. Our behaviors are creativity, which means world-class creativity. It’s about collaboration and bringing the right chemistry together to solve problems. It’s about agility and the ability to adapt, and it’s about courage and being able to take risks as human beings but also as marketers.
The way we describe our culture is ‘good and tough’; good to each other but tough on the work. It’s the juxtaposition of really great people that care about each other, but want to come together and do something that’s never been done before. We didn’t call our culture good and tough 15 years ago—but I started almost 20 years ago, and we were good and tough then, too. We’ll keep on being good and tough in the future, but with an emphasis on using cutting-edge creativity to solve problems.
Lauren Renz is a junior advertising major at the Newhouse School.
Photos by Saniya More, a sophomore broadcast and digital journalism major at the Newhouse School.
