Walter T. Geer III arrived at what was then VMLY&R in the summer of 2020 and left VML six years later as Chief Creative Officer of Innovation for North America. He’s proud of the run — health, brand experience design, innovation — and says the talent he worked alongside ranks with the best of a 25-year career.
He also left without a next job lined up, and made a point of saying so out loud rather than running a quiet search.
“I’m tossing the dice and doing a bit of a gamble,” he says. “Let’s part ways, let me put it out there that I’m leaving, and see who comes.”
So far the gamble mostly involves cycling.
“It feels great to just do nothing and wake up and go to the gym. I’m cycling like 100 miles a week. Family time is good. I think everybody in their career needs that moment to just stop.”
Taking the time on purpose
Offers are coming in. He’s being picky about them.
“The opportunity has to be bigger than a role or a title,” he says. “I’m looking at where I can build. I’m looking at where I can create ownership, and where my experience across culture, innovation, technology and brand transformation can have the greatest impact.”
The timing has a neat symmetry to it. Adweek reported his arrival at VMLY&R on July 31, 2020 — near enough to six years to the day. Six years in one building counts as tenure these days.
Where the work got personal
Health was the door into agencies, at TBWA\WorldHealth, and Geer took the category on with some hesitation. It rearranged what he thought the job was for.
“This is a space where you can, if you want, change the world. You can shift perception.”
There’s a name behind that conviction. Timothy Moore worked with Geer for a couple of years and was a close friend. The week before Christmas, Geer was chasing his address to send him a bottle of champagne.
Moore texted instead that he was heading to the ER. He sat in the waiting room eight or nine hours, telling staff something was wrong with his leg. One of the last things he wrote to a friend was that he felt like he was going to die waiting for help.
He died in the waiting room.
Reading up afterward, Geer found Serena Williams among the people who’d had to fight to be believed.
“You’re talking about a woman who knows her body probably better than any human being on the planet. That’s her job.”
That’s the origin of The Advil Pain Equity Project, and of the way Geer talks about craft.
“Great work comes from a place of telling stories that people can connect with and understand because they’ve been there. And when you’re able to do that, man, you can do significant things.”
What he’s seeing on the independent side
Talent is the thread Geer keeps pulling.
“There’s a hell of a lot of really great talent going into that space,” he says. “A lot of folks are realizing, wait — what if I pump the brakes a little bit? What would things look like if I went to start my own thing?”
He’s careful about the places those people are leaving. VML is an incredible shop, full of some of the best he’s worked with anywhere.
What independents have is a different clock.
“What makes independent agencies interesting is the flexibility. The ability to move quick and pivot quick.”
Finding the right person and getting them onto a project fast is genuinely hard at scale, holdco or otherwise. The economics, he notes, tend to reward the people who go.
The Jon Cook effect
Jon Cook is a big reason Geer went to VML at all, and the affection is obvious.
“It’s hard to find senior leaders who are genuine and humble. First few meetings I went into with him, this is a guy that’s not afraid to say, I don’t understand something. Can you explain it to me like a kindergartner? You’re not going to see many leaders, execs, do that.”
His theory is that it travels. “There’s a trickle down effect. When you go to organizations like that, it trickles down from the top.”
The institution gets credit too — a Kansas City digital shop that merged its way through the consolidation era and stayed standing. Look who was there, Geer says, and look who’s left.
Cook added the global CEO job at WPP Creative in February, putting Ogilvy, AKQA, Burson, Landor and Design Bridge & Partners alongside the VML operation he already ran. By Geer’s rough math, that’s a trip from a 25-person shop to roughly 35,000 people.
His verdict on the job: “I wouldn’t want it.”
The people he watches
Ask Geer whose work he admires and he goes back eight or nine years, to a 3% Conference stage in Chicago and Shannon Washington.
A young woman stood up to ask a question and started crying partway through. She apologized, then explained: this was the first time she’d ever had a conversation with a group creative director who was another woman.
The room sat with that one.
Geer has followed Washington ever since, and still sends her work to ask what she makes of it. “She’s an incredible creative, a great visionary, and just really has her finger on the pulse.”
Getting the industry’s nerve back
The last Super Bowl left Geer cold, and he puts it down to a general flinch among CMOs.
“We’re missing the boldness and the braveness. Where the fuck did that go?”
He’s got energy for the fix. He talks about flipping tables, about walking into a place and doing something that makes a room react.
The prescription is nuance — the specific, lived details that tell a community you see them, put there by people from that community rather than approved by them at the end.
His example is “For the Love of Californians,” VML’s first brand campaign for Covered California. One spot made for a Black audience ends with a kid running down the stairs in a wetsuit, dropping his towel to hug his mom, while his dad waits outside holding a surfboard.
Some viewers catch every layer. Others move right past it. Both reactions are the design working.
“Understanding culture means understanding lived experiences. Claude and ChatGPT do not do that. Cannot do that.”
He finishes on Maya Angelou. People forget what you said and what you did, but they never forget how you made them feel. That, in his telling, is the whole job.
One last thing about the man joining the indie ranks. Asked how many pairs of glasses he owns, Geer held up a case roughly the size of a tackle box. His two problems, he says, are sneakers and glasses.
Welcome to the indiehood.
Learn more
Walter T. Geer III LinkedIn
The Advil Pain Equity Project
VML
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Doug Zanger is the founder and editor-in-chief of Indie Agency News. He is also the founder of the Creative Bohemian consultancy, lives in the Pacific Northwest and is insufferable about it.
