Brent Anderson, an Honored Alumni Speaker for Homecoming Week, Shared More About His Creative Roots
Once a student in The Daily Universe lab writing mozzarella headlines for Pizza Pipeline ads, advertising alum Brent Anderson (’99) is now the Global Chief Creative Officer for TBWA/Chiat/Day. He will present an Alumni Achievement Award lecture during Homecoming Week on Thursday, October 10 at 11 a.m. in the Music Building Concert Hall.
Q: When did you know you wanted to study communications?
Anderson: Uncommonly early in life. When I was a sophomore in high school, I wanted to be an illustrator. I loved art. I loved creating. I loved making. I had a flash of what can only be explained as “highly unusual teenage foresight” especially given that teenage me could barely plan anything more than eight hours away. At that time I thought, “I don’t know if I have the confidence in my illustration abilities alone to provide a good living for my future family, but I still want to find something that involves creativity.” Wildly wise for an unwise 15 year old.
During my junior year, I connected some dots that my (former) scoutmaster and fellow ward member, Ted Phillips, owned a small advertising agency in downtown Salt Lake. He was kind enough to allow me to job shadow him a couple times at his agency. He introduced me to the creatives there, and he also arranged a visit with a graphic designer friend who designed logos. Something immediately resonated with me about people who were harnessing the unpredictability and magic of creativity within the framework of a business. It felt like a win-win to me.
Q: When are you most excited about your work?
Anderson: I am most excited about my work when we as a team unearth an original, smart, exciting idea right at the beginning of the creative process. I love hearing a great idea distilled into a single sentence or seeing one image, script or slide in a Keynote presentation that just makes you feel, “Oh, that’s brilliant.” It’s exhilarating. It’s instant. It’s a feeling of “We must make this.” I have been at it long enough to register the moments I feel that way, follow my instinctual positive response to it, focus on it and move it forward. It never gets old.
What is a favorite memory at BYU?
Anderson: I somehow totally lucked out and got a job as an art director/designer at The Daily Universe for my senior year at BYU. And I do mean “lucked out.” I didn’t know what I was doing at all. I was not particularly strong at (nor particularly even good at) any of the creative software programs, and my resume was pretty pathetic. How I got the job is still a mystery to me. Our biggest client was (the-one-and-only) Pizza Pipeline. We had a contract and agreement with Pipeline to make three new ads every single week to run in the paper on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. That was absolutely baptism by fire. That task alone completely overwhelmed me (and my co-worker, Mr. Brian Deaver). It felt like we made 1000 ads that year. Luckily, by the time I graduated, Pizza Pipeline was still our client and I knew my way around my Mac computer infinitely better than eight months before when I bamboozled my way into the job. And I left with a bevy of unused ideas and headlines around “mozzarella.”
How has your Comms education helped you to share the light and hope of Christ with the world?
Anderson: Much of my own BYU experience (and my subsequent professional experience) has been learning and improving upon the processes, techniques and practice of distilling important messages into simple, digestible, compelling and clear ways. This is something I have really had to practice again and again with those all around me.
“Simple” can sometimes be the most difficult to achieve. Shaping whatever thought, principle or idea that you want to communicate to others to be both compelling and clear is a constant challenge. Alma taught his son (and us all) that “by small and simple things are great things brought to pass; and small means in many instances doth confound the wise” (Alma 37:6). I am beyond grateful that my BYU education helped lay a foundation for me as I try to help, teach, lift and serve others. My education helped me — then and now — in simplifying and distilling the way that I try to minister and serve in my family, ward, community, agency and discipleship with the Master.