Ari Weiss’ Final Interview: His Hope Was “Kind of World Domination, I Guess”

I spoke to Ari Weiss on 16 January, in what would become his final interview. It was for a story about how and why independent agencies around the world are disrupting the industry. He had plenty to say on the matter, having left the world of holdcos to set up an indie, Quality Experience, last year alongside Cristina Reina, Dan Gonda, and Colleen Leddy.

Ari and I worked together at DDB, albeit from a distance; he was global CCO based in New York, I was head of communications in Australia. Yet he was visible, and his impact was felt, in DDB offices around the world. He was exacting in his standards. He absolutely shaped how we spoke about, and presented, the work. 

He led the agency to become Network of the Year at Cannes in 2023, and said then, “I believe Bill Bernbach is smiling down on us today. Not only because we won Cannes Network of the Year, but also how we won it. With a group of incredibly talented people from around the world that wake up every day to prove creativity has the power to move any business forward.”

Ari died on Friday 14 February, Valentine's Day, after a long battle with cancer, and just a couple of weeks shy of his 47th birthday. Here is Ari's final interview, lightly edited for clarity.

I think the biggest shift is you have a dedicated team that is of your picking and is of the calibre that you expect. A chief strategy officer, a CEO, and a chief creative officer. Having that group attack all the problems together ultimately makes us a very potent group.

It's harder to get that group together, surprisingly, in these big networks. They exist, of course, the great talent exists in these networks. It's just harder to get them dedicated. So if you're pulling someone from London, or you're pulling someone from Australia, or you're pulling someone from Brazil, it's amazing, and the talent is phenomenal, but are you going to get their full attention? And that is the harder thing to do.

What's beautiful about being an independent, especially an independent that's built like we are, with such incredible talent across the various principles, you have incredible dexterity to move very quickly and come up with incredible solutions to challenging problems. So I think there's more consistency to it now, funny enough, than there was before. Before, it existed, and we'd get lucky and we'd pull that group together in a moment's notice, but we couldn't always pull that group together. And now we can.

I mean, we'd be lying if we said we didn't consider it. It's something that's always in the back of your mind as you build the work for the client. We were very deliberate that the first work out the gate had to be phenomenal work, you know. We go in with the philosophy that I've always gone in with, which is be prepared to sell anything you're willing to show, and if you're willing to show it, it better be phenomenal. 

We had great clients, and they picked really smart work for their particular problem, and then we were able to craft the heck out of it. I don't think too much of it would have been different between big agency and small agency, to be honest, other than the group that we pulled together initially for it, like I spoke to earlier, I think that's the biggest difference.

And then, if I'm being really honest with ourselves, probably the degree to which we got favours pulled is just greater in an independent than it is a big multinational. You still get great favours pulled for you at big agencies, because you have big ideas and great ideas, and nobody ever has the money that they need to pull the idea off, and so you do end up getting favours. But we overextended the favour bank on Tonal, which I think everyone would do again, but we definitely felt bad about what we had to ask to get something of that calibre and that length done for a relatively small budget.

It helps, for sure. Up until then, we've been showing historic reels and some great work that we'd all been a part of at various different agencies in our career. And people knew what they were coming to us for, so I don't think there was ever a surprise.

That was a really beautiful part about starting our own agency, is that people come to you very deliberately. They come to you for a certain style of work, for a certain calibre of work, for a certain amount of attention that you're going to reach for the brand. And that's something that we were always very mindful of. But it's certainly nice to have the Quality Experience version of that work now, so that it's not just hearsay and rhetoric, it's actual, quantifiable, 'Here you go. This is what we've done.'

The Tonal work outperformed over 200% from a sales goal perspective versus what they've done in the past. And so to have work that's not only that powerful and engaging, but also that effective and efficient is really a goal of ours.

We don't want to make art for art's sake. We're not in the museum business, you know. It's really nice to see work that we put so much heart into, like Tonal, and so much passion into, like Tonal, turn around and have such great business results.

We were out in Prague at the time, and we were doing calls with the various partners that we were looking to work with on this project, and everyone had a really great treatment to the film. We had really good approaches, but Aubes [Aube Perry, director] in particular really blew us away, kind of went to this next level where he brought the protagonist to the film.

We didn't have the protagonist per se initially, we had more of the vignettes of exploring the crappy past and the disappointment of the old school workouts. But when Aube brought the protagonist to it, we were all like, 'That's the way we have to go'.

And it's quite interesting, because Aube was the lesser of the known directors that we were speaking to at the time, but his approach and his vision and his single-mindedness for what he thought was right against it was so intoxicating.

I think of the startups of years recent, obviously Mischief is the one to watch, and they've had the hot hand for the last few years. They really started out of a pretty shitty situation, and Greg [Hahn, Mischief founder] maximised it and really turned it into a lovely operation that has a fantastic culture and does really nice work. 

I think that, short of them, we're seeing a lot of pop ups from other countries start to try their hand in the US. I spent six years at BBH in New York [after] their incredible launch in London. And it's hard, it's really hard, to make the other country's agency translate to another country. We tried to do it a bit with adam&eve in the DDB network. And we started to get some traction, and we started to get some really nice work out of the New York office, but it took five years before there was anything. And to be honest, even the five years, it certainly wasn't as noisy as we had hoped it would have been.

So I think that's the real challenge. You see less startups in the US, and I think you see less of them because it's a bigger pay to play mentality, and you have such a robust freelance community in the US that freelance just makes a lot of sense for a lot of individuals who might otherwise start their own agency.

You see it here more than anywhere. That plays back in my DDB role. When you brought [freelance] people on board, and in Brazil or London, they looked at you a bit cross-eyed and kind of like, 'Why would you do that? And aren't you getting B or C rate talent?' Versus in America, you're really getting the A grade talent, and you're paying through the nose for it, but you are getting the A grade talent.

It is kind of world domination, I guess. The goal is not just North American, although we're going to bite off what we can chew each year as we grow. What I love that DDB did offer was scale, and the ability to offer product in different countries and different translations and different local activations based on our global insight being really performative.

So that's something that I would like to offer down the road, for sure. We want to master this market first. That's certainly the goal first. When a client comes to us and asks us to open an office in London, or Sao Paulo, or where have you, I think we would certainly say yes, as long as they were of similar vision and ambition.

It's a lovely time for independents. The financial crunch that all the larger holding companies are feeling gives a little bit more freedom and a little bit more liberation to the independents. And I think that juxtaposition, that kind of tension between the two, makes it a real moment for the independents. The next handful of years are well set up for the independents.

And then the larger holding companies will become flush with cash again, as they always do, and they'll want to buy up the independents at that point, which they always do. I would love to stay independent forever, but we'll see. We'll see how it goes.

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