Andrés Ordóñez
Chief Creative Officer, FCB Chicago
Andrés Ordóñez, Chief Creative Officer, FCB Chicago
When it comes to getting a job done, it’s fair to say most of us take a ‘good enough’ approach – and, when we’ve completed the task, we’re only too happy to put up our feet. Not so Andrés Ordóñez. “I’m always thinking about how I can push things a bit more. I want to be better as a leader. I want to have work in the world that we’re all proud of. I want our agency to become that place where everyone wants to work,” he says. So, it’s only fitting that, as CCO of FCB Chicago, he has found an agency whose #NVRFNSHD (Never Finished) ethos mirrors his own.
It’s a mentality which has served Andrés well through more than 20 years as an award-winning creative, working with clients as diverse as Walmart, City of Chicago, Wrigley, Bayer and the National Safety Council, and garnering a haul of trophies along the way. Growing up in Bogotá, Colombia, “my whole world was advertising, one way or another,” Andrés remembers. His mother, a model, was the face of Kent cigarettes, while his father ran his own creative agency. “There were always advertising books and magazines around in the house, and I was constantly sketching and drawing things.” After winning a place at Miami Ad School, he started his career at BBDO Puerto Rico, later moving to Zubi Miami, Bravo, Energy BBDO and now FCB Chicago.
Alongside creating campaigns for household names like Wrigley, MillerCoors and SC Johnson, Andrés is dedicated to agenda-setting work that drives genuine social change. “I’ve always had a little bit of an obsession with giving back,” he says of campaigns such as HeroSmiths for Bayer, which aimed to increase survival rates from heart attacks by turning 1,800 people surnamed Smith into an army of aspirin carriers; and Prescribed to Death, a travelling memorial to America’s opiate prescription crisis, whereby the faces of real-life fatalities were precision-carved onto individual pills. “I feel like (as advertisers) we have the power to make people buy whatever we want (sometimes things they don’t need) so we have to do things for good too.”
This was the driving force behind FCB’s recent project, Boards of Change, which scooped a coveted Black Pencil at this year’s D&AD Awards and saw 150 artwork-covered boards that protected Chicago storefronts during the BLM protests transformed into voting booths, to encourage voter registrations in underrepresented Black and Brown communities. It was important, says Andrés, that the messages of anger and hope weren’t simply disposed of: the cycle of Black history needed to be disrupted, and by giving people the opportunity to register to vote, it put change into their own hands.
For Andrés, this is just the start of his ambitions at the helm of FCB Chicago. “After D&AD, someone said to me: ‘so now what?’ And I was like: dude, there’s always another Black Pencil.”
Interview by: Selena Schleh
