Standing in a conference room where the walls are covered by remnants of a recent brainstorming session, VitroRobertson art director John Vitro was awash in details. He was explaining the strategy behind his advertising agency’s already-published ad for Asics running shoes. The image is simple: a young woman’s breath is visible as she runs in the cold air.
The words are equally straightforward. “My breathing,” it reads. “I like listening to it. That’s why I don’t wear a mini-disc player, or anything like that. I’d rather listen to me. My breathing is there for the same reason my running is, to remind me I’m alive.” Vitro was describing the marketing logistics of the Asics brand, the need to target serious runners in an approach that rewards those who use the shoes and encourages others to try them. But what about ad’s bluish tint, use of a downturned face, the rounded corners of a box with copy on one end and a picture of a shoe in the other? Or the use of the phrase “anything like that,” or ending with the word “alive”?
Somewhere, in those details of copy, image, strategy and design, is the essence of San Diego-based VitroRobertson and its nucleus, a much-celebrated 17-year partnership between Vitro and John Robertson. It’s an elusive dynamic that has collected coveted awards, assembled a client list of national accounts and, in bottom-line terms, generated $3.9 million in 1999, up $1.1 million from ’98.
Part of The Syndicate
“Smart advertising that’s always right for the brand,” is how Rick Boyko, president and chief creative officer of Ogilvy & Mather in New York, put it. Last year, Boyko established The Syndicate, a nationwide partnership of smaller, innovative agencies to share research and ideas. Boyko said VitroRobertson was the first agency he thought of when he came up with the idea. “There’s no formula for their work,” he said. “It’s whatever’s right for the product, and that’s what you hope to have, as advertising. It differentiates itself for each individual product that you have.” If there is any secret to the company, it began when Vitro met Robertson in 1983 at another San Diego advertising firm, Phillips-Ramsey. Vitro was an art director and Robertson was a free-lance writer. They were brought together to work on projects for the United Way and the Del Mar Racetrack, Vitro recalled. At the time, Vitro had been in the industry for six years. Working with Robertson, however, sparked a new way of seeing advertising, he said.
“I recognized his writing as being so far beyond anything I had been a part of before,” Vitro said. “Up to that point, I was doing advertising. After that point, I enjoyed advertising.”
Meeting Of Mind And Soul
Tom Di Zinno, president of Di Zinno-Thompson Integrated Marketing Solutions in Downtown, was also working at Phillips Ramsey at the time. “I think there was an actual soul meeting, right from the get-go,” he recalled of Vitro and Robertson that day. “One saw the talent in the other.” Since then, Vitro and Robertson have worked together steadily, moving up to Chiat/Day in Los Angeles for a year in 1985. Upon their return to San Diego, Vitro and Robertson did freelance work until 1990, when they joined Franklin & Associates as co-creative directors. In March of 1992, the firm merged with ADC Stoorza. By that autumn, Vitro and Robertson decided to leave.
“We felt like we had done the best work that we could at that place we left looking for a way to do better work,” Vitro recalled. Freelance work turned into creating their own agency, which gave the partners more control over the clients they worked with. In the first six months, there were a couple of pieces of business that kept the company afloat, Vitro recalled. Then it began to grow. The agency currently has 10 clients, the newest of which is Kyocera Corp.’s yet-to-be launched cellular phone line. Others include El Cajon-based Taylor Guitars, Yamaha WaterCraft from Buena Park-based Yamaha Corp. of America, locally based Qualcomm Inc.’s global satellite phones and Togo’s Restaurants and Baskin-Robbins, the latter two owned by London-based Allied Domecq PLC.
Professional Recognition
The agency’s work has garnered a slew of awards, most notably three Effies from the American Marketing Association.
The company maintains its integrity by working with clients they know they can be honest with and whose products they trust, Vitro said. The Vitro-and-Robertson partnership still runs strong, likely due to the pair’s noted lack of conceit. “They probably get along so well because there’s so little ego involved with each other,” Di Zinno said of the partners, both in their early 40s. “You know, maybe that’s the rarest commodity of them all.” It is unusual, Boyko said. “Usually those partnerships break off the egos get in the way after a period of time,” he said. “They seem to have been able to get past all of that.” The feeling could translate into office culture, which, said Vitro, mingles passion and fun with an intense, shared desire to succeed. When asked about VitroRobertson’s brand, the firm’s managing director Alan Bonine used words such as “honest,” “genuine” and “creative.” Vitro added the word “human.” He later noted, “We’re not geniuses, but we feel like we can connect with people on a level that is human, emotional and respectful.” The agency is careful to battle complacency, Vitro said. “There’s a phrase in the ad agency business, ‘You’re only as good as your last ad.’ That’s pretty true,” he said. “What’s important to our clients isn’t what we’ve done,” he continued. “It’s what we’re going to do for them. The challenge is to always feel that way.”
Think Tank
On a recent Friday at VitroRobertson’s office at 6th and C in Downtown, the brand was playing itself out in a multitude of projects , a client proposal, a research meeting with Taylor Guitars and a talk with a potential E-commerce client. Also that day, four media plans were being put together, a presentation was made to Yamaha and, on a board near the kitchen area, ideas were posted for the design of restaurant sites that would combine Baskin-Robbins, Togo’s and their sister company, Dunkin’ Donuts. The restaurant assignment was prompted because the client was dissatisfied with what actual designers were bringing in and wanted some additional creative ideas, Bonine noted. Also going on that day in a conference room, Vitro, Robertson and their crew brainstormed strategy for Kyocera. It’s one of the more unglamorous parts of the job, Bonine said. “You sit and talk about it and talk about it and argue about it and then come up with a plan,” he said. His description can’t really capture what ever makes VitroRobertson’s work or voice distinctive, Bonine noted. “The reality is that it is almost impossible to describe the creative process,” he said. “It’s kind of what happens in your head and your heart at the same time.” The process comes down to execution, he said. With VitroRobertson, that execution can be particularly impressive, said Michael Mark, president of matthews/mark, a firm that happens to be located a couple floors above VitroRobertson. “Beautifully crafted, very detailed,” Mark said of VitroRobertson’s Taylor Guitars campaign. “You can just feel Vitro and Robertson you can see their fingerprints on every piece. “I just know that their work is obsessed-over. You can feel it in the page. When you’re reading a magazine and you come across their ad, you just know that you’re in the company of something that had been loved, thought about and sweated over.” He’s happy to have them in the same building, Mark said. “Their work inspires me,” he said. By February, however, VitroRobertson plans to leave its current 7,800-square-foot space for a 12,500-square-foot office in the HomeFed building Downtown. According to business manager Cindy Becker, it will be a graduation of sorts. It’s an opportunity to design offices that look a little more like the agency, Becker said. What that will be is still being discussed. Vitro is rueful about the topic. “A place that will inspire people create energy and buzz,” are some of his ideas. If so, it should end up looking just right.
