The Work That Made Me: Dooley Tombras

Under Dooley Tombras' leadership, Tombras has been named a Fast Company Most Innovative Company in the World and Ad Age Independent Agency of the Year.

Dooley is a sought after speaker and has been featured in the NY Times, Wall Street Journal, Wired, Forbes, Fast Company, USA Today, Business Insider, and Inc. He has been named to the ADWEEK Creative 100.

As President of Tombras, he is responsible for driving the Tombras culture of Connecting Data and Creativity for Business Results. This has resulted in numerous client Cannes Lions and EFFIE wins for marketing effectiveness.

In 2022, Dooley founded the Tombras School of Advertising and Public Relations at the University of Tennessee to drive industry change and improve diversity & inclusion in advertising.

Dooley has led work on iconic brands including Orangetheory Fitness, MoonPie, BUSH’s Beans, Pernod Ricard, Subway, Walmart, and Rolls-Royce.

LBB> The ad/music video from my childhood that stays with me…

Dooley> Pizza Party the board game, owned by Parker Bros. I can still sing the entire thing. 

LBB> The ad/music video/game/web platform that made me want to get into the industry…

Dooley> The work my dad was doing on McDonald's. As a kid there's no more visible or relevant brand than McDonald's and I thought it was so cool he was part of it.

LBB> The creative work that I keep revisiting…

Dooley> I'm an old school NES guy. RBI Baseball, I've been playing since 1987 and I've never stopped. 

LBB> My first professional project…

Dooley> I was a strategist on a Smoky Mountain Convention and Visitors Bureau tourism campaign. 

LBB> The piece of work that made me so angry that I vowed to never make anything like *that*…

Dooley> I've never been angry at other people's creative work but I've definitely seen some things where I thought – it's time to look for a news article about this work going up for review. 

LBB> The piece of work that still makes me jealous…

Dooley> The old BK work, including Subservient Chicken and Whopper Sacrifice, which is why it was so sweet when we hired Jeff Benjamin, who worked on both. 

LBB> The creative project that changed my career…

Dooley> Moon Pie Eclipse in 2017. The campaign where we declared MoonPie the official snack of the solar eclipse, along with a well-timed tweet dunking on Hostess set the agency on a new trajectory. 

LBB> The work that I’m proudest of…

Dooley> The Tombras School of Advertising and Public Relations at the University of Tennessee. We partnered with them to bring diversity to the industry, and it's working better than I could have imagined. Giving back, and getting a more diverse and more highly-trained pool of talent into the industry will have generational impact. 

LBB> I was involved in this and it makes me cringe…

Dooley> A Krystal all you can eat campaign. I still love the brand, but nobody should eat that many Krystals. 

LBB> The recent project I was involved in that excited me the most…

Dooley> We partnered with Google to make an AI-powered billboard for PODS, that drove through New York City and wrote thousands of hyper-localised headlines, taking into account time of day, weather, location, and so much more. We called it the world's smartest billboard, and would have previously been impossible.