Alex Campbell Brings Creative to the Forefront at SuperJoy

The late president and creative leader of The Martin Agency, Mike Hughes, always urged his employees to “seek joy.” Hughes said this in his obituary, which he wrote before his death from lung cancer in 2013: “The greatest joy in our business comes not from a gold medal or a place in the industry hall of fame—it comes from doing the work and from doing it with people of integrity and ambition and good humor.” That sense of joy Hughes espoused lives on in the adventurous production company started by The Martin Agency, which is called SuperJoy. There are plenty of production houses in the ad industry, from in-house shops to specialty post-production houses, all with their own focus. SuperJoy is carving out its own niche in the space by being collaborators in the creative process and helping creatives expand their arsenal by venturing into new areas. Under its new leadership, SuperJoy aims to bring a sense of fun to the production process while putting out work that pushes the limits of creativity. Leading the charge at SuperJoy is recently hired vice president, creative director Alex Campbell, who serves as the creative and business lead for the production house. He brings with him a focus on creative exploration, expanding creative expression through the post-production team while adding digital, physical and social experiences capabilities. Campbell takes over for Dick Gordon, the founding director of editorial at SuperJoy, which replaced Martin’s Running with Scissors post-production group. Gordon left to become the editorial creative director at Rocketcar, a creative content house in Richmond, Va. That sense of joy lives on in the production work that Martin and SuperJoy pull together, and it’s echoed by the two people in charge of those units: Campbell and the Martin Agency’s head of production, Tasha Dean. Campbell came to SuperJoy in January after stints at production house The Mill and TBWA\Chiat\Day New York. While there, he eventually led creative operations and production at 180 BIOS, a start-up agency within the TBWA network with a mission to test and prove a different way of producing content and developing creative work. Throughout his career, New Zealand native Campbell has always married creativity with technology, being at the forefront of new techniques, including motion graphics, social design, UX design and XR. He brings that forward thinking to SuperJoy. Campbell met Dean when they were both at TBWA, and the combined talents of the two make for a powerful production duo. Dean, who has been with The Martin Agency since 2018 after nearly a decade at TBWA, brought on Campbell as a freelancer in the later half of 2021 and knew he would be perfect to lead SuperJoy. SuperJoy wanted to bring in a leader who could push into new spaces, including digital and social platforms and even the metaverse, but also have technical knowledge behind the scenes. "Alex was a perfect fit. We brought him in, we really sharpened the point of view on what SuperJoy stood for, in content and experiences. And we have been formulating the teams around that center of gravity,” Dean told Adweek. Building a sandbox for creatives While The Martin Agency focuses on more traditional forms of production, SuperJoy serves as something of an incubator for its creatives to experiment with new technologies. To that end, Campbell is its lead chemist. He told Adweek that he hopes to position SuperJoy as a content and experience design studio, both inside and outside of The Martin Agency with its team of artists, engineers and organizers, and he hopes to help revise the role of production within creativity. “There's a tremendous amount of creativity that gets left out of the room with the way that production and creative teams have historically worked together. A lot of producers are creators and I think that the opportunity we have SuperJoy is to lean into that more,” said Campbell, who added that in the past he was fortunate to work with teams that treated him as a third creative that knew how to make things, which created trust and ultimately better work. Dean agrees that production should come in earlier in the process as well and has been championing that at the Martin Agency. SuperJoy gives that concept a collaborative boost. It arms its producers and creatives with all the tools they need to stay at the cutting edge of technology. Capabilities include all manners of animation, AI filters, 3D artistry, social platforms, motion graphics and VFX, AR, VR and other virtual production technologies. SuperJoy invites its 35 staff members, as well as those at The Martin Agency, to experiment with those technologies, building a “sandbox” for people to be creative, because if they know how to use those tools, it will be easier for them to include them in the creative process and pitch them to clients. “Our creative teams really feel like they can walk down at any time and talk to an artist and decide, ‘I want to try I have a shooting stage, I want to try making a TikTok, I want to try making a Twitter story,’ whatever it is that they want to experiment with,” said Dean, who added that the technologists and producers are learning from the classic linear storytellers in the creative department. “We can be technical subject matter experts. That's a dynamic that I haven't really seen in other shops,” added Campbell. Collaboration with its agency and clients More than just being that sandbox for creatives, SuperJoy is also a collaborator with both the agency and its clients. By bringing production into the creative process earlier than with a traditional production house, SuperJoy becomes a strategist as well, helping to push clients to experiment with new technologies and platforms as well. “As we get more into performance, and data-led creativity, as we get more into the metaverse and things like that, clients really do like to be transparent and kind of come along for the ride,” said Dean. Clients like DoorDash, Ritz and Old Navy appreciate that SuperJoy is able to help shape the creative as a partner. “The fast-paced and collaborative approach from SuperJoy makes it an idea partner on key productions,” said Aurelien Simon, CEO at Platige, which worked with SuperJoy on “Now Upon a Time,” a storytelling project that reimagines classic tales with modern, empowering messaging. “The addition of Alex Campbell in its leadership will undoubtedly strengthen its strategic and creative output.” “Content now needs to be just about anything bespoke for any channel. Having SuperJoy as an extension of the agency means we can make high quality content customized for every space,” Martin vp creative director Mik Manulik told Adweek. “SuperJoy allows us to feed our rapid response model and get content out at the speed of social.” Martin and SuperJoy will continue to push the boundaries of creativity, according to Campbell and Dean, and venture further into the metaverse and influencer spaces, which will produce tangible work over the next few months. And SuperJoy will even dabble with NFTs and intellectual property. All of their efforts merging tech and creative, Campbell says, help bring production out from the back end. “When you have creative teams that are honestly really excited to have someone who's production minded, that's willing to help shape and mold and not break their idea early on, and they get on board with that fact, the chance of the idea dying, it just diminishes almost to zero,” said Campbell. The Martin Agency Is Adweek's 2021 US Agency of the Year

Creative Convergence

How The Martin Agency Utilizes Its Production Arm SuperJoy as a Creative Sandbox

Alex Campbell explains his vision as the new head of the production agency

Kyle O’Brien

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Kyle O’Brien