The independent agency world — news, work, people and thinking.
From Junior Designer to CCO: Sinan Dagli’s 17 Years at BSSP
Sinan Dagli joined BSSP as a junior designer in 2009. Now its CCO, he talks about the rule that kept him, the walls he never hit and LA.
Sinan Dagli, chief creative officer at BSSP, has held exactly one job in advertising. He walked into the Sausalito agency in 2009 as a junior interactive designer, fresh out of Rochester Institute of Technology with a motion graphics reel and no clue how to write a TV script. Seventeen years later, he holds the title co-founder John Butler held before him.
The promotion lands with momentum. Dagli played a key role in BSSP’s California Lottery win alongside Canvas Worldwide, a five-year contract that MediaPost reports carries a maximum authorized expenditure of $550M.
“This is my first job, so everything I learned, I’ve learned it here,” Dagli says.
In an industry where creatives change logos every 2 years, that sounds like a quirk. Listen to him long enough and it starts to sound like a strategy — loyalty built on a simple rule, a chip on the shoulder and a refusal to get comfortable.
Sinan Dagli, Chief Creative Officer, BSSP
The two-out-of-three rule
Someone once gave Dagli a test for any job: money, opportunity and people you like working with. Check at least two boxes at all times, or you start getting jittery.
BSSP kept checking them. He met his wife there, and the office jokes about “BSSP babies” — which he admits “sounds a little bit cultish. It’s not.” More important, he never hit the barriers that stall careers elsewhere.
“At certain places you feel like you’re running into invisible walls or speed bumps you didn’t even know existed,” he says. “I never ran into those, and my personal mission now is to not have any of those walls.”
He credits founders Butler, Mike Shine and Greg Stern as the giants whose shoulders he stands on. Butler hired him in his early 20s and handed down a rule Dagli still hires by: bring in people better than you.
100 emails, one RadioShack
Graduating in 2009 was rough timing. Dagli wanted New York, so he wrote nearly 100 emails to agencies — each one by hand, not blasted — and still has them archived in an old GoDaddy account. Almost nobody answered.
BSSP found him instead. Butler, a Rochester native with RIT ties, had a connection, and the agency had just won RadioShack, one of the largest accounts held by an independent at the time. It was hiring, so it flew him out.
His first TV brief brought a small moment of panic. A script? He didn’t know what that meant yet.
The black sheep in a family of doctors
Dagli grew up in Istanbul in a family of academics and scientists. Both parents are doctors, his sister went to Oxford and uncles went to MIT. He once failed at least seven classes in a single high school semester — “not a little bit,” he says. “Full crash.”
What he had instead was Photoshop, which he started tinkering with before his teens, and an uncle who was a client of Wunderman Istanbul. At around 14, he landed an “internship” that mostly meant sitting in a corner.
“It was people coming together, doing something creative, and then there’s tangible output in the end,” he says. “That clicked.”
The ambition and curiosity his family instilled, he says, are the main reason he is who he is. It’s also what he hires for now with CEO Tracey Faux-Pattani and executive strategy director Jake Bayham — curiosity about anything, preferably not advertising. It should be your personality, not your job description.
Independence, minus the unicorns
Dagli doesn’t romanticize it. “Whoever tells you that one way is just unicorns and rainbows is going to lie,” he says. “We have to eat what we kill. There is no net that protects us.”
What independence buys is decision speed — including the decision not to do something. Three or four people get together, make the call and go, without phoning New York and then Paris. He’s careful that speed doesn’t mean a bull in a china shop: “We can be very surgical, but also fast.”
Then there’s the chip on the shoulder. A 33-year-old agency gets tagged “legacy,” and Dagli treats that the way Michael Jordan treated slights in “The Last Dance.” He took it personally.
“We have to work twice as hard as any other shop to always look ahead,” he says.
The agency is 33. The attitude isn’t.
Beast Mode in a sea of sameness
The latest proof runs during NFL broadcasts. BSSP has worked with AWS on and off for roughly seven years, including an earlier NFL campaign called “Stat Dad.” The new spot puts Marshawn Lynch, an Oakland native, and Too $hort’s “Blow the Whistle” behind Next Gen Stats — the catch-probability numbers fans use to settle arguments.
“If you’re a fan, stats are incredibly important,” Dagli says. “That’s how you determine trash talk.” The real brief was avoiding the sea of sameness that swallows most tech ads in a commercial break.
He’s just as proud of ESPN’s “Sports Forever,” built on audio from the network’s first broadcast in 1979 promising sports 24/7 — a pointed reminder as Netflix, Apple TV and Amazon pile into live sports. “You don’t have to write anything,” he says. It earned an Emmy nomination. It didn’t win. “Sad.”
What’s next: LA and uncomfortable conversations
Dagli partners with head of production Kate Wallace to run BSSP’s production arm, and the agency’s LA office is growing alongside its New York presence. The goal is more production capability that buys both speed and quality.
The bigger job is fighting complacency. Butler’s old line — what worked in the past won’t work in the future — still steers the room, and Dagli welcomes the uncomfortable internal debates that come with it.
He also wants out of advertising’s echo chamber. “It is running,” he says of the work, “but is this registering?”
Learn more
BSSP
Sinan Dagli LinkedIn
BSSP LinkedIn
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
