Toronto copywriter Janet Kestin and art director Nancy Vonk are so comfortable with each other’s habits, quirks and views on the industry that after a full decade together at Ogilvy & Mather, the three-year cocreative directors happily continue to collaborate on new ads and guide the teams working under them.

Their coming together was largely a fluke. Kestin, content as a kids magazine writer after having left the ad business three years earlier, took a freelance job with Vonk, already an O&M full-timer. The ad was for Kotex through O&M Chicago, and they spent a Victoria Day weekend putting it together.

‘I don’t think I ever would have come back if not for the accident of Nancy and I working together on that freelance job, because I was trying to not be in advertising at that time,’ says Kestin. ‘I had this idea of what my perfect advertising circumstances would be, and that included a ‘soul-mate’ kind of premise. I did this freelance job with Nancy and all of my plans for the future [changed].’

Folks at the agency persuaded Kestin to join up, and her partnership with Vonk began in earnest. While some creatives never seem entirely happy with their partners, Vonk and Kestin have remained close, able to share the burden as creative directors.

‘It is very much like a marriage,’ says Vonk. ‘You have to have the chemistry and two people that feel very comfortable with each other. In our case, there is no ego. One isn’t trying to outshine the other. We are very honest with each other – we don’t bother to sugarcoat anything. When you totally trust and like each other as much as we do, that can only ever be a good thing.’

Vonk adds that she and Kestin are enjoying their status within the agency, and that their kinship and mutual respect prevent them from falling into traps other cocreative directors may encounter.

‘[Having cocreative directors] is a relatively new phenomenon, and I think it can be a recipe for disaster if the two people don’t see completely eye-to-eye,’ she says. ‘But as far as we’re concerned it is a tremendous benefit to have two people in that spot as long as you’re on the same page. You’ve got to be singing the same song, which of course we don’t always.’

They describe their approach towards their creative teams as ‘tough, but fair.’ They encourage teams to be as adventurous in their thinking as possible, and set the bar high. Kestin says they also try not to shut down potentially controversial ideas, in an effort to give the teams confidence and give the clients credit for wanting the best work.

‘I think it is very easy to say ‘the client will never buy that’ when you do something different,’ says Kestin. ‘Often clients are braver than agencies give them credit for. The only way you ever find that is if you let people push and push. We try really hard not to cushion anything here, so we always go in with the best work that we are capable of. Our teams know that and that makes them braver, too.’

Kestin and Vonk point to Dove Soap and Imperial Margarine as ‘brave’ clients. A recent spot for Imperial, involving a potato that, upon seeing its tub of margarine is empty, leaps off the ledge of a microwave and impales itself on a fork, was pulled from the air due to online complaints that it made light of suicide. The team, somewhat baffled by the controversy surrounding the Industry Films-produced spot, has followed it up with a less jarring ad involving a potato being separated from its margarine playmate by a divider on a grocery store conveyer belt. They say, however, that the original spot may end up back on-air, and was perhaps the victim of overreaction.

Still busy

Vonk maintains that O&M is busy despite the latest slowdown being experienced at some North American agencies, and which has trickled down to the Canadian production houses. She says many of the Canadian agencies with U.S. parents have been content to run U.S.-produced ads in Canada, which somewhat undermines Canadian creative and makes the current marketplace even more challenging.

‘[The recession] has been a more severe thing in the States, whereas I think some of the Canadian agencies aren’t quite experiencing the same thing,’ Vonk says. ‘We are so busy we hardly know what to do.’

With a client base that includes IBM, American Express, Kraft, Motorola, Timex and Unilever, Kestin and Vonk are rarely bored by their job. They say that, going forward, they hope Canadian advertising will stop holding the consumer’s hand through every spot and magazine ad, allowing creative people to go further and generate appreciation of the art of commercials, as is the case in other markets, such as the U.K.

‘Advertising is seen with a certain amount of respect [in the U.K.] and people rush out to theatres to see the Cannes reel and all of that stuff,’ says Kestin. ‘I would love us to get to the point where we believe our consumers are intelligent, instead of feeling like we need to spell out every single thing and talk down to them.’

-www.ogilvy.com