🏆 Landing Legoland—Q&A With Whit Hiler, ECD at Ad Age 'Small Agency Of The Year' Cornett
04/04/2023
If the trajectory of Whit Hiler's advertising career strikes you as unconventional, that's only because it is. Forget the background in art or copy. Hiler took a different route to becoming an executive creative director—and so far, it's working out pretty darn well for him.
In fact, mere minutes into a conversation with him, two things happen. First, you can't help but like the guy. And second, you start to appreciate the virtue of possessing just the right amount of naïveté to pursue ambitions someone who "knows better" might foolishly dismiss out of hand.
In this Rick and Quick interview, this ECD at Lexington, Kentucky-based ad agency Cornett (teamcornett.com) talks about his evolution from car salesman, to agency new business rep, to award-winning creative chief. Along the way, he shares how this 50-person Ad Age "Small Agency of the Year" (2021) scored a little account called Legoland Resorts—and helped A&W fix a 40-year-old "marketing fail." From March 21.
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IN THIS EPISODE
🚗 Driving a Modern Don Draper: The evolution as a 21st Century Mad Man (at 0:58)
👕 From retail logos to Legoland Resorts: How hard lessons beget big wins (at 1:24)
👩🏻💼 Behind every great ad agency: The wife-slash-boss leading Cornett (at 2:38)
🥊 Joining and jousting A-List agencies for the win—one interlocking plastic brick at a time (at 6:00)
🍔 Helping A&W fix a 40-year-old marketing fail with a little help from "A Beautiful Mind" (at 8:19)
Approx. 11 minutes, 15 seconds. For US audiences. Review cookie and privacy policies for iTunes, Spotify, Soundcloud and all other streaming services.