5 Minutes with... Zach Hilder

Adobe Firefly is a proud supporter of LBB. As part of the sponsorship of the ‘5 Minutes with…’ channel, we spend time with some of the most innovative and creative minds in the industry.

For today’s edition, we spoke with Zach Hilder, executive creative director at creative agency 72andSunny. A five-time Emmy winning creative, Zach is currently based in LA where he has co-led the agency as ECD for over four years. He previously worked at 72andSunny as an ACD from 2012 to 2013.

Before joining for his second stint in 2019, Zach was ECD at BBH in LA for three years and before that, spent time across a host of America’s most influential creative hubs - R/GA, TBWA\Chiat\Day and Energy BBDO, to name a few. Working with key clients in recent years like the NFL and Call of Duty, he was named in Adweek’s ‘Creative 100’ in 2022, and has also seen great success in 2023, reaching #2 on the USA Today Ad Meter for the NFL’s Super Bowl commercial, ‘Run With It’.

Speaking with LBB’s Ben Conway, Zach discusses having the best job any 12 year old could wish for, the thirst for solving newly dreamt-up problems, and shares advice for making “stronger, smarter and stickier” work. 

LBB> What creative content inspired or interested you most when you were growing up? 

Zach> The great action movies of the ‘80s and ‘90s. ‘Die Hard’. ‘Commando’. ‘The Road Warrior’. You can see a direct reflection of it in my work. I like to blow shit up. The dialogue has to be super punchy. Everything I do has all gotta be a spectacle.

LBB> You’re currently four years into your second stint at 72andSunny - how had the agency and the industry generally changed since your first time there? What experiences and lessons have you brought from your time at R/GA and BBH? 

Zach> At BBH, they say, ‘When the world zigs, zag’. That’s harder than ever these days when every day the world zags. But I don’t let that change my approach to ideas. I always try to find the edge in everything we make. And riding that razor’s edge and sharpening it is what we use the creative process for. I want to see how far we can take things before they break. How crazy or absurd can we make a joke? How much drama and tension can we ratchet up? How far can we push the action? Hopefully, if we take our idea far enough, it will break through whatever is happening in the world that day.

LBB> What’s the most important piece of advice you received early on in your career? How does it influence you and your work today? 

Zach> Craft. Craft. Craft. When I was a junior, I had to print out and present Subway radio commercials to my creative directors. They would redline the copy and give it back to me. And we would do this all day. Those ads never won any awards or were even any good, but this practice instilled in me at a very early stage in my career to look at words critically. And it’s advice I now give to my senior creatives who want to be CDs – to ‘creative direct’ your own work before anyone even sees it. To critically poke holes in it from an objective point of view will only make the work stronger, smarter and stickier.

[Above: 'Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3' - 'Makarov Returns']

LBB> 72andSunny has made a name for itself working with some of the world’s biggest brands - the NFL and Call of Duty spring to mind - what do you relish about working with great ideas at scale? 

Zach> Football and video games. I have the best job any 12 year old could ever ask for. They’re also two of the biggest sports and entertainment platforms in the world, each with hundreds of millions of fans across the world. So that sets the bar for the work. It has to be big enough and exciting enough for the voracity of their audiences. 

LBB> You saw great success at the Super Bowl this year with Bryan Buckley - what have been some of the year’s biggest creative success stories for you personally this year?

Zach> Coming in #2 in the USA Today AdMeter for our NFL Super Bowl ‘Run With It’ commercial was a very proud moment. We took the biggest marketing stage of the year, and spotlighted the women and girls pushing the game forward, starring Diana Flores, the greatest flag football player in history. Flores showed the world, yet again, that football is for everyone and helped playfully debunk the myth that if it’s not tackle [football], it’s not ‘real’.

LBB> While we’re on the topic… can you tease any Super Bowl plans for 2024? 

Zach> There’s a 100% chance that it may or may not have Taylor Swift in it.

[Above: NFL's 'Run With It' Super Bowl Spot]

LBB> Who or what in the industry inspires you at the moment? How are you continuing to develop your creative mind? 

Zach> I get excited about new opportunities. At 72, we talk about wanting to work with the most ambitious brands on earth. Budgets and product news come and go but the ambition and the thirst to push for what may seem like the impossible is really what we're looking for in client partners. It's these new challenges that we place on ourselves that develops my creative mind. Always looking for new solutions to problems that never existed until we dreamed them up two seconds ago. Like, how do we get a kid to start playing football in Ohio with his friends, run across the country where he meets a dozen of the greatest NFL Legends only to deliver the game ball live on the Super Bowl in Miami in front of 150 million people? These are the problems we like to solve.

LBB> What was the project or piece of work that you felt really changed your career? And what gave you a lesson you’ll never forget? 

Zach> Definitely the first Super Bowl commercial I ever did, which featured the kid running across the country to deliver the game ball live at the Super Bowl. It changed my career but also my family finally understood what I did for a living. It taught me how to build what I call ‘Culture Bombs’. There’s a lot of ways to execute any idea but if you break down each element of the film’s execution to make it the most flammable object possible, then when it drops in culture there’s a good chance it will blow up. 

For example, we didn’t just hold a casting session to find our star, we held a football tryout and invited the best, most charismatic, young football players in LA to compete for the role. Then, through every next step of the production process, we looked at what would make the film explosive, from the NFL player pairings, to recreating a real New Orleans parade to every word of dialogue to the song we picked and down to the ending, when our star runs out of the tunnel followed by 32 kids picked from every NFL city. Add that all together and boom - the next morning, Oprah calls.

LBB> Leading 72andSunny as an ECD, what is your current philosophy and ambition for the agency? What type of work and partnerships will define you over the coming months and years? 

Zach> We just had our global town hall meeting and my message to the agency was, ‘Your resilience is your brilliance’. What I mean by that is: getting to ‘great’ is hard. Really hard. We get that tight timelines force us into just solving the brief. And yes, that is a win. But it's important not just to find the right answer, but also the exciting answer. Solve it in a way that will make it unignorable to the world. It's important to ask yourself, ‘Will anybody care about this idea?’. If the answer is ‘some will’, you’re onto something. If the answer is ‘people are gonna shit their pants’... then that’s the stuff we’re looking for. 

Basically, I’m just trying to get the world to collectively shit its pants.