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MillimeterCreative Fire
Dec 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Craig Erpelding
Chicago loyalty keeps talent local.
Left to right: Don McNeill of Digital Kitchen, Dave Mehrman of Norton Rubble & Mertz, and Alex Foucre-Stimes of Vitamin. Photo: John Gress
In 1871, when the Great Fire burned Chicago to the ground, up rose the second city. The descriptor is still used today — most famously by Chicago's native-born comedy troupe Second City, which is now in its sixth decade of creativity.
Most recently, in the town that hosted The Blues Brothers and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the film industry put Chicago to work on The Dark Knight, Wanted, The Promotion, and more. However, day to day, the city's content creators revolve less around movies and more around advertising.
With Chicago's Leo Burnett fueling the advertising revolution in the 1950s (alongside New York's Bill Bernbach and England's David Ogilvy), the Windy City's agency environment has become a global hub sporting offices for top firms including Bernbach's agency DDB Worldwide, Ogilvy & Mather, and Draftfcb. These giants are the engine for the city's vibrant content-creation community.
The siren song of Hollywood doesn't speak to everyone. Some people go and then come back home. Some use a film-school education to build lives and careers half a continent away from the big white sign that watches over Beachwood Canyon. Any community is ultimately made up of individuals with their own reasons for committing to content creation. While Hollywood's allure draws people from afar, the loyalty of Chicagoans drives a hometown passion that keeps talent local. Here's how three individuals are making it happen in the second city.
Don McNeill, Digital Kitchen
Don McNeill is a principal and cofounder of Digital Kitchen, a 6500-square-foot facility in Chicago's River North district, a cozy section of the downtown laden with old warehouses and new condo conversions that stretches along the North branch of the Chicago River. His professional career started in Los Angeles years ago with a company that did Japanese commercials — matching big brands and their massive budgets with actors such as Harrison Ford and Brad Pitt. Following that adventure, McNeill made TV shows for NBC Universal.
But in 1997, he wanted to move his family to Chicago, and he got an opportunity with Ogilvy & Mather as a senior partner and executive producer. He quickly found that being in such position, it was paramount to understand the town and quickly evaluate the vendors.
“When I got to Chicago, I was surprised, quite frankly, how much advertising there was, but how few really genuine creative partners there were,” McNeill says. “I'm no historian on this subject — but what happened back in those days as Leo Burnett, J. Walter Thompson, and Ogilvy grew here in town, so did a bunch of editors. These [editors] started their own companies, which when I came along, were really big [editorial] organizations.” It wasn't what McNeill was used to in Los Angeles; he'd worked in smaller boutique places where billable hours were less important than forging creative alliances with clients.
McNeill says he thought he could bring some of that culture to Chicago. In fact, he thought it was necessary to the kind of successful communication that sells messages and products. He saw a wide-open market for adding creative collaboration to production and post, providing value to clients by taking part in the intimate process of creating ads that work.
Thus, shortly after moving to Chicago, McNeill called upon a friend he'd collaborated with while producing creative at Ogilvy: Digital Kitchen, Seattle founder Paul Matthaeus. Together they opened Digital Kitchen's Chicago office in 2001.
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