Ad Astra: Jose Miguel Sokoloff and the Infinite Bookshop

“Life is very much like walking into a bookstore. You walk into a bookstore and the first thing you realise is that you don’t have enough time to read every book. There’s no way. You’d probably like to… but would you? If you did that then you couldn’t come back to the bookstore ever again. So you have to be selective about the choices you make, and take home what you can handle and do the best we can.”

Jose Miguel Sokoloff is talking about the importance of being selective in advertising but it feels like a very apt image for ordering one’s thoughts about JMS (as he’s affectionately known) himself. For one thing, it’s highly probable that this is a dilemma that he’s tussled with many times. A constant, searching reader he’s always got multiple books on the go - when we speak, he’s just finished ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ and a book about octopuses, and he’s juggling Thomas Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’, a history of France called ‘The French Mind’ and ‘The Confessions of Saint Augustine’. A single dad of three sons and a daughter, he makes a point of reading the books his kids are reading for school. He can’t read every book in the book shop - but that won’t stop him trying. 

(And for another, it’s a useful reminder to the editor. Jose Miguel has had such a fascinating career, with so many aisles to venture down, that a bit of curation is needed. Wish me luck.)

He’s never without a book or two on the go, and that’s something that’s been true since he was a kid. Growing up in Bogota, his parents had an interesting rule about his and his sister’s pocket money - there was no limit to how many books and records they could buy.

Jose Miguel was, by his own admission, ‘pretty shit at art in school’, but creativity would seep in by osmosis. His grandfather was a pioneering furniture designer who had come to Colombia from Russia, his uncle was an architect, his mother a US-educated cultural attache for a bank, who loved jazz and classical music. His sister would eventually become an art historian and curator. At first glance, it appeared that he took after his engineer father - he recalls an early personality test that highlighted a structured and authoritarian streak.

All that changed when, as a young business student, a friend showed him around the agency where he worked.

“Here’s the thing, I was a posh kid. I was a kid going into advertising from a posh school and nobody thought I was taking it seriously,” he explains. The agency leadership was suspicious, taking him for someone who assumed they’d just waltz in. And so they figured they needed to put him to the test. “So they gave me what they thought was effectively the worst job they could possibly give me.”

And so he was sequestered in a dark corner of the media department, where he had to pore over every magazine and newspaper out each day to cut out the ads from the agency’s clients and competitors.

The joke was on them. “It was probably the most formative job ever. I was from Monday to Friday, 8.30am to 5.30pm, surrounded by work. Most of the work was so boring and so shit but I was surrounded by such boring, repetitive, shit, unimaginative work all the time that whenever there was something slightly intelligent, slightly creative, it really lit up my day, it was like a breath of fresh air.”

Soon he got a feel for the brands and agencies that were doing better work than others - and it also started to flame an ember of creative ambition. “I thought: work and the way we advertise cannot be so pedestrian and so condescending and so dumb. We have to do a better job.”

By now, he was on the Leo Burnett training scheme, which would take him through the various departments. He figured he was on a trajectory to become an account guy. On his creative rotation, though, something clicked. After having his ideas trashed by a creative director, Jose’s steely side was switched on. While he was being pushed to polish up his CD’s ideas, JMS decided he would do no such thing and continue to write his own ideas, which the CCO let him present to the client.

“So, as you can see, I’ve always had a little bit of a problem with authority.”

When the client then opted to run with the young upstart’s ideas, said upstart found himself summoned into the creative director’s office with a call of ‘SOKOLOFF!!!’ Braced for a dressing down, the agitated Argentinian turned to him instead, saying “What you did there was fucking amazing. You have everything to  be a creative director. Don’t waste your life being an account executive, you should be a creative. You’ve got everything it takes, you’ve got balls, you’ve got good ideas.”

That gave him the confidence to do what he believed was interesting - and it bolstered a contrarian and confrontational streak that had been there since school debating days. It’s a personality trait that lends itself to getting challenging or uncomfortable ideas out the door.

“I thought, if I want to do this now, I’m going to have to do stuff that is a little bit shocking, that is a little bit contrary to what everybody has done, that is different. And I had the good fortune of working in an environment where that was allowed. They kind of expected that of me because the rest of the agency was very solid and correct.”

And that contrarian confidence also drove his decision to make a break for it and run his own agency. Well, sort of. Having been promised the chance to leave Colombia to work in London by the Leo Burnett leadership, Jose stumbled upon a fax between the office’s new CEO and Michael Conrad asking to keep JMS in the country for another year while he settled into the new role. He was, he reflects with the benefit of a few more years behind him, perhaps more furious than he should have been. Instead of going to the CEO to have it out, he instead went for lunch with two friends (Francisco Samper and Humberto Polar) at another agency who told him they were going to start their own place and thought he might be the perfect third co-founder… That’s how snap decisions are made.

“Frank Lowe used to say that all agencies start up differently and end up the same. I started out very differently and ended up running this huge agency.”

The early days of SSP3 certainly put Jose Miguel’s confidence to the test. “Oh Jesus,” he laughs, “It was extremely exciting because you could make decisions and nobody questioned you and you had the final say. But it was very scary because we didn’t have money to start an agency - starting an agency is an expensive thing. So what we came up with as a solution was buying an agency that was worth less.”

Essentially, buying an existing agency gave them a credit line with media agencies as, in these days, revenue was a commission on media spend. While taking on an agency that was in such ‘deep shit’ that they didn’t have to pay anything seemed like a money-saver, they soon realised that meant that they’d also taken on the agency’s eye-watering debt. But despite the added financial pressure, the creative work was always the priority.

“There were many times when I thought we would not make it. Going through very difficult moments and never taking our eyes off the work, and making sure that our work was fun and fantastic and very noticeable and that people were talking about it brought us clients,” recalls Jose Miguel. They opened the shop doors on June 15, 1996, and by November they were the second most awarded agency in the country. By 1998, they were the third largest.

Jose Miguel had to quickly evolve from creative to creative leader. As he explains, it’s something that he had to figure out as he confronted his own strengths and weaknesses. The skilled debater became quick to realise when he’d lost an argument, and when he needed to give his talented creative and experts the freedom to do things their way.

“It’s not something I built, it’s something that I became,” he says of leadership.“But I know very well what I can do and where I can add value and I know very well where I kind of become a burden. In most of these instances what I think people needed was to know that somebody has their back, and that somebody was going to be there if things got bad, and that somebody was going to find a way out if things got bad - but that they were free to experiment.”

Ultimately, he says, that there was one guiding principle and everything was in service to it. “I always said that our agency was not a democracy but a dictatorship. But the dictator was the idea and we all worked into it. I was equal to everybody and when they needed me to sell, to call the client, to get extra budget, to go to the presentation to present, I was always part of the time.”

Perhaps the most famous set of ideas to come out of that agency were the projects they did with the Colombian Ministry of Defence, using creativity to help demobilise the guerillas fighting in the country’s civil war, often living deep in the forest. Groundbreaking activations like ‘Operation Christmas’, ‘Operation Bethlehem’, ‘Rivers of Light’ and ‘Your Mother’s Voice’ helped to create a pathway back to society for people long estranged from their families. These campaigns, he says, were perspective setting.

For one thing, they were relatively easy to sell into the client - when you’re dealing with military commanders with little to lose, a lot to gain and deep emotional connections to the cause, having spent many Christmases fighting in the jungle, it tends to contrast sharply with the usual client quibbling. It was also a creative campaign that had a very precise, simple, objective success metric - the number of demobilised people. “I think it is a difficulty that we face every day in our world - which is how much we can prove that it works.”

These days, JMS is based on the other side of the world - he finally did make it to London. As global chief creative officer, he’s less ‘in the weeds’ - but the network of creative leaders around the world that he works with is endlessly stimulating to his curious mind.

“I’m still a classic advertising nerd. I’m still a junior creative director at the bottom of my heart. I still love anything that gets made. If you ask me what’s the best piece of work there is, or the best piece of work that we’ve ever produced, I always think it’s something that we’re producing now.”

The climate in which that work is made is changing dramatically, which is both shaping the creative and throwing up fundamental questions.There’s the increasingly challenging economic climate (“I think clients are realising, more and more, that their job is to sell their products, not to market their beliefs”) and what he describes as an “avalanche of information and data”, and clients and agencies alike are having to figure out what to do with it, whether human creatives will even be needed.

“I think all these fundamental questions are what’s going to continue to shape our industry,” he says. “I think we’re still way more complicated than the machines we create and I think we still react not very rationally to things. I hope that human intervention is still needed to not only come up with different solutions to the same problems, but to communicate them in different ways.”

Which brings us back to JMS’s imaginary bookshop. We are, he says bombarded with shelves and shelves of data and seemingly infinite options when it comes to media options, platforms, technological toys to play with. Jose Miguel’s theory is that people need to do less, but do it better. Instead of trying to cover every single base, be selective. If TikTok’s the place your audience is, go there. Learn from the luxury brands that have a very clear idea of where they don’t want to be.

For creatives specifically, that means having absolute clarity about why they are doing what they’re doing. They should be creating ideas that should help clients sell products and grow - not simply making stuff to fill space.

“We stopped thinking about our purpose as creatives. Our purpose seems to be: let’s fill the world with shit. As much as we can, wherever we can. If there is an open space available to buy, let’s fill it up with advertising. We should have a responsibility. We should say: let’s give people something they can enjoy. 

“Let’s not create more noise,” he says. “Let’s create a little bit of melody and harmony.”