Mix It Up

Tor Myhren laughed.

He sat in black slacks and yellow sneakers in a glassy meeting room. Manhattan’s 23rd Street lay just below. It was mid-February, and he had been explaining his ideas for the splashy new headquarters of Grey Group, the advertising giant that gave the world “Choosy Moms Choose Jif” and Playtex bras on TV. Three months earlier, the company had moved into a downtown landmark building formally known as the International Toy Center, after spending nearly half of its 93 years in a midtown skyscraper straight out of Mad Men. “This was a totally, totally raw space, and I said to the architects, ‘Let’s keep it as open and as close to this as possible,’” says Myhren, Grey New York’s chief creative officer, his legs neatly crossed in a vintage Wassily chair. “At one point, I was getting really mad at them, saying, ‘Why did you put a wall here?’ They were like, ‘It’s a bathroom, Tor.’”

His laugh was quick and dry. Myhren is a hands-on boss, the sort who signs off on everything from the latest Super Bowl ad to which band plays the company party. He sees the agency as an extension of his personality and has been known to pass out copies of The Fountainhead to creative staff. Around him, his vision had sprouted to life: exposed ceilings, floors scrubbed to their original reddish concrete, glass every which way. So much glass it could have been a display case or a panopticon, depending on whom you asked, and instead of private offices, workers sat at communal tables. “Our business is all about collaboration, sharing, taking an idea, playing on it, layering another idea on top of it. That was physically impossible in the old space,” Myhren says. “Here, you walk in, there’s light, energy, the neighborhood, the street.” That the headquarters became a tribute to collectivism from a fan of Ayn Rand, the poet laureate of individualism, is clearly not lost on Myhren or on the building itself. On an exposed wall behind him, someone had scribbled the first line of The Fountainhead: “Howard Roark laughed.”

These are tricky times for the industry. Ad agencies are under tremendous pressure to distance themselves from Madison Avenue, as the old methods for the hard sell—the sensational print ad, the 30-second TV spot—collapse under the weight of the Internet. Razzle-dazzle offices are a relatively cheap way to telegraph to clients that “We’re with it!” without necessarily being with it. They’re the new office-party ice sculpture.

Some agencies throw Astroturf on the walls. Others decorate with carousel horses. Grey’s headquarters in the heart of the Flatiron District blows them all away. Spread over the lower floors of a 15-story monolith that was all but boarded up three years ago, it’s a triumph of urban preservation in a neighborhood defined by its architectural heritage. In a few masterstrokes, Studios Architecture transformed a creaky old building into an airy, loftlike confection tethered effortlessly to its surroundings, and thus provided Grey the best possible self-advertisement: its own offices. “Let’s face it, it’s a business of cool,” Grey’s CEO, James Heekin III, says. “The move was an affirmation of where we wanted to take the agency.” Don Draper, it seems, has gone beatnik.

Earlier that week, 200 Fifth Avenue looked gorgeously radiant. Snowy light from a window facing east onto Madison Square Park flooded the second-floor lobby and slipped over the Hans Wegner chairs in the waiting area and the curious wall art: three gold monkey heads exploding from the canvas (a Myhren touch). The light continued through a freshly rebuilt courtyard, then seeped into the other side of the building, where creatives busied themselves shilling stuff to the American public. “This is the main space,” Tom Krizmanic, a Studios principal, announced. “It’s still connected to the park, so it’s got this amazing New York feel. And now it’s looking to the future with this modern addition.” He gestured to the courtyard, which cozily framed the snowfall. Damned if it didn’t look like an advertisement.

Four years ago, Grey was the Talbots of advertising—big, reliable, and terribly dowdy. It had convinced America to glut itself on Olive Garden breadsticks and lather up in Pantene for hair so healthy it shines, but buzzy campaigns—the sort that get noticed in a crowded media landscape—weren’t its bailiwick. After the communications conglomerate WPP bought Grey in 2005, Heekin, the newly minted CEO, set the agency on a different course: new people, new branding, new headquarters. Those efforts are finally paying off. Last year, Grey landed 17 of 18 new pitches, including campaigns for the NFL and T.J. Maxx, and fattened its operating profits by 44 percent, at a time when other ad firms were picking pennies off the ground. The creatives produced good work along the way, managing to make a financial-services company interesting with some sassy talking babies, and turning footage of the Saints running back Reggie Bush diving into the end zone into something approaching art. “That was what was going on, but all in the old boxy building,” Heekin says. “So to move down here was incredibly symbolic for us.”