Ad Astra: Debbi Vandeven and Creativity in the Eye of the Cyclone

Debbi Vandeven isn’t the ‘V’ from ‘VML’ - “I wish it was me - but you can believe what you want!” she jokes - but she has been such an integral part of the agency’s extraordinary growth story over the past two decades that she is perhaps an honorary V, inheriting it from retired co-founder John Valentine.

As we speak, Debbi is in the eye of the storm - though cyclone might be more appropriate given Debbi’s base in Kansas City. (That it’s Kansas City Missouri and not over the border in Kansas City Kansas is a trifling detail in the face of such rich storytelling potential, of which more later.) She’s at the centre of one of the biggest stories in adland, the mega-merger between the erstwhile VMLY&R and fellow WPP brand Wunderman Thompson, to create VML, a 30,000 people-strong network across 64 markets.

Debbi’s no stranger to bringing brands and teams together - VML’s history is one of mergers and acquisitions. When the founders retired and WPP acquired VML in 2001, Debbi was part of a leadership team of late 20- and early 30-somethings that continued to grow the business.

“We just kept building the company with things that made us want to stay,” says Debbi. Well, there’s no place like home. “It started in Kansas City, but if you were going to leave because you wanted to work in New York or you wanted to leave because there was another discipline, like say, you were truly into video, we just kept putting it in the company.”

This isn’t even Debbi’s first experience of bringing together two massive brands within the WPP stable - in 2018 VML was knitted together with Young and Rubicam, a creative agency with a history stretching back to 1923. What a lot of people don’t know is that she and VML CEO Jon Cook had already established a relationship with the Y&R leadership team by sitting on their board, which aided the transition. Similarly Debbi is full of enthusiasm for her relationship with the leadership team coming over from Wunderman Thompson, including VML’s global president Mel Edwards, with whom she’s enjoyed collaborating at WPP strategy meetings. She also says she’s excited about the people she’s going to get to work with, like Bas Korsten, the Wunderman Thompson co-CCO who is stepping into a new role as global chief creative officer innovation and EMEA CCO for VML.

Whatever changes come through the integration of the teams from VMLY&R and Wunderman Thompson, the values and culture that have been cultivated from that Kansas City hub and which Debbi and her long-term colleague, ally and friend Jon Cook are a guiding light.

“I feel very fortunate because I’ve had such a great partner in Jon. Some people might say we have Midwest values: work hard, keep doing what you love, be really nice to people. Our culture means a lot to people.”

And that culture spread right around the world. Debbi says that one of the things that she loves about her global role is the opportunity to learn about other cultures, as well as bringing together teams from around the world. “I have such a strong global creative team and leaders… and they’re really connected. Not only do briefs go global, but if somebody needs help on anything, they can help each other. So that, to me, is one of the biggest things. You can go off and do something by yourself but that’s just not the way our company works. Our company works as a team," she says. One delightful example of this international cooperation was a project last year that saw teams from Colombia and India collaborate on a project to tackle period stigma by using a specially tailored teas.

This new phase for VML brings with it big expectations and close scrutiny, something of which Debbi is keenly aware. Creativity is going to be at VML’s core and Debbi will be its champion. 

“I’m humbled to be in the position that I’m in. I feel like the weight on my shoulders is very different from others. I know that and I know that people are watching to see what we do or if we stay a really great creative company,” she says. “I’m going to tell you that both Jon and Mel together have said that we’re going to double down on creativity as a company.”

And right now, with the combined capabilities and heritage of agencies like J. Walter Thompson, Geometry, Young and Rubicam, Wunderman, Debbi and her team of creatives have a really diverse playground in which to play. From commerce and technology to branded entertainment  (check out the festive Coca-Cola films starring Colm Meaney and Octavia Spencer to get a taste of what's happening there) and important growing areas like accessible design, there are a lot of toys in the toybox.

So what of the woman herself, tasked with championing creativity across this huge, diverse new group?

Even as a little girl, Debbi’s creative potential was obvious to the adults around her. At school she’d be taken out of class to spend more time in the art studio. When a family friend took her to visit the advertising agency they worked in, her path was set.

“I had seen a creative director, and I saw what they did and I was like, ‘oh, that’s what I want to do’. So I went to university knowing that I wanted to be a creative - I didn’t know for sure if I could do advertising or not but what I really knew is that, no matter what, art would be part of my life.”

And it was. After college, Debbi set up a design agency with her husband Jeff, where they built up a sizable number of clients. But Debbi’s creativity and curiosity were to take her beyond traditional design and art direction to a quirky new niche known as ‘the internet’. All of a sudden, it was everywhere.

“I already had the fine art part, had worked with my husband and said, I want to learn more about it from a different angle, because we owned our own business. So, I went into a masters in marketing and advertising and everything was about ‘the internet’. Every single paper, every single presentation,” she says. When she learned that VML, which had started out as a traditional agency, had started doing digital work, she figured that was where she needed to be. Thanks to a culture that never saw digital as something to offload or outsource, but to embrace, Debbi and the rest of the creatives were able to actually get to grips with the technology.

In her early days at VML, the focus on the emerging digital field meant that it was rich pickings for visually-driven art directors and designers like Debbi - but limited scope for people looking for big storytelling opportunities. As technology developed it was those storytellers that Debbi purposefully lured back.

“One of my goals at VML was that we’d lost a lot of amazing creative talent right at the beginning of the digital explosion and it was mostly because the technology couldn’t really keep up with really great storytelling. So you saw banner ads, websites, which had great design (which is why I did it), and then my goal was, as soon as the bandwidth was big enough to start bringing back the storytellers. So we just wove it into everything we did.”

These days, it’s that intersection of storytelling and cutting edge technology where VML sings - not least when it comes to one of Kansas City’s biggest local heroes, the fast food giant Wendy’s. Whether it’s the famous Fortnite hack that saw Wendy herself turn up in-game to destroy frozen food or the more recent Boomer Book, which has seen the brand embrace its inner boomer to attract gen Z to its Facebook presence.

Debbi’s warm, well-mannered and wholesome aura exudes those Midwestern values that she holds dear. But don’t let that fool you into thinking her creativity is ‘nice’ and neat. There’s a MacGyver-y edge to the way she approaches and thinks about her creative practice - she’s solution focused, constantly looking to learn about new tools for her kit and she revels in the iterative ‘messiness’ of creativity.

“A little bit of chaos is fine. I think it’s messy, I think the whole creative process is messy. It will eventually get to where it’s not, but I swear, even right before you launch it’s messy. I think you have to be comfortable with not knowing where something’s going. I feel a lot of creatives are better at that, right? I don’t need everything lined up for me.”

As we chat, Debbi shares one little nugget that might reveal quite a bit about her creative spirit. A voracious reader, her favourite genres are historic fiction and what she jokingly refers to as ‘prepper books’, dystopian stories of the fall of civilisation and the end of the world.

“They’re still fiction but if there’s something that happens that changes society really fast, that gets back to humans - will humans help each other or will it fall to pieces really fast,” she explains.

I don’t know about you, but in a zombie apocalypse or post-cataclysm wasteland, an adaptable creative thinker who thrives in the unknown and has a clear-eyed understanding of purpose and solid leadership experience might be exactly the sort of person I’d like to have around.

Decisiveness too is a quality Debbi values in a creative leader - and which also wouldn’t go amiss when you’re trying to rebuild society. That’s particularly true in the new business side of her role, though when it comes to assessing work too, whether in reviews or juries, it helps too. She has a razor-sharp focus on the intended purpose of a particular piece of work, its KPIs or brief to really sort the interesting from the great.

“The number one thing in new biz in my role is to make a decision fast. That is because I’ve seen some of the teams, sometimes they’ll spin - we call it spin - because they’re trying to get to more and more ideas. At a certain point, you need to be able to take the idea and tell the full story for a pitch - and you don’t have very long to do it,” she explains. “You have to be able to make decisions fast as a creative leader - I think that’s a knack. All my friends in the industry, they’re good at it. I’ve watched them. Rob Reilly is great at looking at a decision and making it so people can move faster.”

In fact, Debbi’s got a nuanced and balanced take on ‘thinking fast and slow’ when it comes to creativity. As an introvert, she appreciates her alone time and says that quite often the best ideas can come, gently unbidden, as she goes for a morning walk or puts on mascara. Sometimes decisions need to be made fast and ideas are needed urgently, but it’s easy to be caught up in the weeds of it all or be disheartened by short term losses.

“I’ve thought about it, what advice would you give your younger self - I’m like, ‘just enjoy it more’. I think sometimes you’ve got a deadline, you’re stressed about stuff and you don’t enjoy the creativity as much as you should,” says Debbi. 

To get a feeling for the joy that Debbi finds in creativity, she turns to an analogy that sums up her philosophy.

“Because I’m from Kansas City, one thing I always used - and it’s such a great way to talk about creativity - is ‘The Wizard of Oz’. It takes knowledge, heart, courage and spirit to do what we do, right? If you look at all the characters that she meets along the way, it gives you knowledge. We have so many smart people, and so many kinds of technology that we can use, it’s a beautiful story. We know that no matter what we do, you can have all the tech out there that you want, but if you don’t connect emotionally with people, the work won’t stand out… And then courage. We push and push and push to do brave work and make it stand up. And then, with Dorothy, you cannot forget about her not giving up to go home. That’s a big way we look at stuff: just don’t give up.”

Persistence and grit - relentlessness - are key. She reflects on the self doubt that arises when creatives find their ideas aren’t getting chosen and when things don’t go their way. She says that the advice she gives to everyone is to take a moment to accept that nobody’s perfect and that you won’t win every battle - while relentlessly pushing and learning from your failures and the people around you.

There’s so much about the job that Debbi finds fun, whether it’s working with her team, or reviewing work - and she wonders if sometimes the thing that gets in the way of that fun for many creatives is a sense of guilt. 

“I think the last couple of years have been hard, since the pandemic, and macroeconomics are affecting so much globally… I have creatives in Ukraine, their whole life was shattered. So there’s been a lot of intensity around the world, and I do believe - not making light of any of that - that it’s nice to have a place where you have a creative outlet,” she reflects.

Another thing that has changed since the pandemic is clients’ level of creative ambition. “A lot of clients now look at creative like, ‘does it actually stand up? Are we going to stand out with our work? Is it more creative than it used to be?’ We have several clients who want to be Marketer of the Year at Cannes now; I’ll be honest I didn’t see that several years ago,” she says. 

Big clients are proactive and hungry for education, to learn how to really assess and think about creative work. There’s a spectrum between those companies that have a culture of creativity and those that are not so far along on their journey and still struggle with how to judge the work, using research as a crutch.

“If you want to test everything, you’re probably never going to get amazing work out there. And I really mean it. I think you should test to be sure you’re not doing anything offensive, I’m all for that and I want to be sure that whatever you do would not damage a brand. But when you get really into testing, and testing every little bit, you’re never going to get a Wendy’s Fortnite. Wendy’s doesn’t test, clients like Coca-Cola, right now, they’re not testing.”

In spaces like branded entertainment - whether that’s film, music or gaming - a lot of that work isn’t being tested either. “That’s good marketers understanding, with their gut, what’s going to stand out,” she says. 

Testing work to death is one thing, but research is quite another. With so many options in terms of platforms and channels, marketers face a dizzying array to choose from - and it’s constantly being added to. “If you have all these channels - and I’ve heard it from marketers every time - they don’t know where to put their message, because there’s so much they can do. So, my advice is, if you’re going to do research, do research on your audience. Let’s really figure out who we’re talking to, and then let’s come up with the best creative ideas for where we need to reach them, but not reach them in every single channel.”

Understanding that audience is even more important as artificial intelligence unleashes infinite possibilities. It’s clear, when talking to Debbi, who’s career has always been driven by curiosity and openness, that the unlimited creative opportunities afforded by this rapidly evolving technology as well as the coming together of two giant agency brands is thrilling. In terms of creative work that's capitalising on this technological explosion and delightful, personal experiences afforded by AI in spaces like retail and commerce, the likes of OREOCODES from the US and I See Coke from the UAE offer a taste of what's to come - and this year's big UK holiday ad for Boots shows that emotional, blockbuster storytelling is here to stay too.

So as the cyclone of change blows through WPP, thrusting Wunderman Thompson and VMLY&R together to form a supergroup traversing the yellow brick road of advertising, there’s so much magic and possibility whirling around in terms of technology, client aspirations and spaces to play - and Debbi is raring to go.

“I’m in the position, creatively, right now, where I’m excited. I think anything we can dream up, we can build,” she says. “I feel like everyone’s really excited because ideas for clients now are kind of endless.”