J. Walter Thompson

“Walter”

Ran across this and chuckled a bit. I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for all things Walter and this design, commissioned from one of the “Archer” animators who were housed over on Williams Street at the time, is my all time favorites. We used this illustrated version of J. Walter in several Atlanta Office in-house efforts during the early 2010’s and it was a really fun identity to work under. With the demise of JWT, feels like a good opportunity to showcase some of the fun history of the agency that may quietly disappear over time.

J. Walter was a Marine, and in 1947 the Agency began one of the longest client relationships in all of advertising that continues today. I was proud to work on that piece of business, and it led me ultimately to VMLY&R to work on the US Navy.

It’s funny how the world works sometimes.

Work – The JWT Holiday House – 2013

The JWT Holiday House, featured in AdWeek

In the Fall of 2013, I was made director of the Dallas Technology office of JWT / Atlanta. One of the first things I wanted to do was create an environment of innovation, experimentation, and creativity. So I bought everyone in the office a new (at the time) Raspberry Pi microcontroller and told them to go nuts.

The result was this brilliant little bit of fun that we delivered to both the Atlanta and the New York office, to connect the two with a little Christmas Spirit thrown in. It was a huge success and wound up making the list of best agency Christmas cards for that year.