Al McWilliams is not the kind of person who waits for something to happen—he goes out and makes it so. In high school, when most of us were just happy to not be beaten up for our lunch money, Al was making money by selling his friend’s ska band cassette tapes. (Lest you think this was some fly-by-night enterprise he ran out of his locker, know that the return on Al’s initial $700 investment was over 1000%).
And while some of us would have just put our feet up and said “Done” (while, perhaps, smoking a cigar and rubbing our hands together like Scrooge McDuck), Al went out and started
Quack!Media, an advertising agency and multimedia firm in downtown Ann Arbor. His company now employs 12 people and produces videos and advertising campaigns for a variety of clients.
Your clients are quite diverse—the Red Wings, The Ride, Lincoln Consolidated Schools, the Port of Long Beach—what are some challenges in working with such a diverse client base like that?
They seem so different, but they are really facing similar challenges, and they can learn so much from each other. It’s hugely satisfying when we can find the link between a port in California and a professional hockey team in Detroit. I especially love helping public agencies learn from the broader commercial world. In the past, public agencies hadn’t really thought about (advertising and promotions) but they are starting to now realize that part of your mandate is to communicate what you are doing with your constituency. You want everyone who is affected to hear the information and understand it, so that when you have a public meeting people show up informed.
The Ride, for example, really gets this, but more agencies are coming around.
What did you do for the Port of Long Beach?
One of the things we did was to make a video to show how a port works. Everyone thinks that the port is run by tax money, but it’s not. It actually generates a lot of money for the city and then runs itself out of its own income. It produces revenue for the city. We made a
three minute video to explain how it works.
How do you work with folks like school boards members, who are probably dealing with things that they never expected to deal with when they first signed on for the job?
We do seminars where we work with internal staff and teach them how to operate better. We want to train them on how to communicate so that when something happens, you have already thought about how to respond. A lot of problems that you would need us to fix aren’t going to happen if you follow some basic rules of communication.
Like what?
Don’t ever write or even say anything that you’re not okay with discussing in a public hearing. You think no one will find out, but chances are it will get out—so assume that it will.
And even if it doesn’t get out, you want to stay in the practice of making sure that everything you say in private is okay for public consumption.
Speaking of which, can we talk about the fuss that was raised when you were nominated for the DDA board? I am one of the people who live tweets the City Council meetings, and we were amazed by how some of the public treated you.
(Laughs). It’s so ridiculous that it makes us look really good. I had current clients call me, thinking it was a prank and that I wrote it. Now in our workshops, I can use (this experience) and explain to clients how I followed my own advice. I tell them, “look, people were saying horrible things about me, and how did I respond?” And the answer is that I didn’t respond. I didn’t even acknowledge it. And soon, people move on, because they don’t care. But if you start caring, now there’s a story. If it’s not true, or it’s exaggerated or even if it is true and you don’t want people to talk about it, you don’t talk about it. The story is the fight. People don’t tune into boxing matches to see someone punch a guy once and see him knocked down—so if it’s true, own it and take your dive and the fight is over. Move on.
Tell me about getting in touch with Adult Swim.
When we stopped doing the educational videos, I looked at what we had in our agency and saw that we fit the model of what Adult Swim was doing. So, I called them up and said, "We should make shows for you."
What?! Did you know anyone there?
Nope, I just cold called. Apparently not how it’s done, but I ended up making contacts which led to us making videos for them and later Comedy Central.
It seems like no one wants to pay for creative content anymore. What advice would you give to kids who want to start their own cool business and get paid?
Remember that just because you may have a cool job or business, that doesn’t mean you will do it for free. You can’t brand yourself as the place that gives it away. Sometimes you think you are going to do something for a huge client who has no budget, but you do it to get exposure. In your mind, you are thinking they will refer you to the big paying, big budget jobs. But that doesn’t happen, because now you have branded yourself as the place to call when you have no budget—you become the cheap work guys. We want to be the big budget place who does the greatest work.
How could Ann Arbor improve as a city?
We should be what a population center is going to look like in 50 years. The current idea of what a city is was planned thousands of years ago. In the future, we could have autonomous cars, we could have transportation under ground -we don’t know what sort of change will come, so we need to be thinking ahead and thinking about it. We need to set a clear plan, like the Climate Action Plan, and then follow it, let it guide our decisions about how we plan.
What would that look like?
Part of that for me would be for the city to be built up instead of out. I live here because I have a dense population center that has a corn field two miles away. That’s why I moved here. That's not true about most other places in the country. If you have this much density, you are then surrounded by 50 miles of suburbs. In order for that not to change, we can either arrest our population at what it is now, or we can guide it to build up instead of out.
Additionally, because some people like myself want to live in close proximity with other people, and we want to live “up” and have offices go “up”, then that makes it possible for other people to live “out” in the space around us. If we weren't stacked up, we would not have the resources to pay for the infrastructure "out there". A mile of road in Ann Arbor with thousands of taxpayers to pay for it, costs the same as a mile of road out in Scio Township, with two people living there and paying
taxes. So without the overspend here, you couldn’t afford that lifestyle out there. Folks should not be whining about resources being spent in the more dense areas, they should be thanking the folks that want to take the bus everyday because without them, we couldn’t afford to give you a road all to yourself. It's like, "Come on, where's my cupcake? I'm doing some good here!"
Patti Smith is a freelance writer. Her first book, Images of America: Downtown Ann Arbor, was recently published by Arcadia Publishers. It is available on her website, www.TeacherPatti.com as well as at bookstores in the Ann Arbor area.
All photos by Doug Coombe.