This 26-Year-Old Ad Man Says Advertising Takes Itself Too Seriously — He Wants to Crack a Few Jokes | 100 People With Ideas

The few creative projects that have made Jean-Baptiste Le Divelec somewhat known are all personal projects he made for fun and posted online.

Jean-Baptiste Le Divelec is a French ad man working in China; friends call him JB. In 2012, at 22, he graduated in digital marketing from the INSEEC business school and joined the French independent creative agency FRED & FARID. Two years later, JB moved with FRED & FARID from Paris to Shanghai.

Over four years, Jean-Baptiste worked on HP's "Gamers Know" posters and an ad for the game Clash of Clans, a game ad for Air France, fashion ads for Diesel, a "Like Yourself" campaign for Cosmopolitan magazine, and car ads for Porsche — one of which built a piece of music out of the engine sounds of seven generations of the Porsche 911. None of it made him particularly famous.

The few creative projects that did make JB somewhat known, by contrast, are all personal projects he made for fun and posted online. For most people in advertising, creative work is one part of the job. For this Frenchman it is more than that: "Creativity isn't just work. I don't need to make creative work only for the job — I like what I do, and I want to finish these personal projects," JB says.

This June, JB and a friend made a "personal project" called Poolmoji. The idea is simple: paint emoji faces onto billiard balls. Yellow balls that cry, laugh, stare blankly or look cool tumble around the table, and the effect is faintly "bizarre." The balls split into two sets, one with happy faces, one with unhappy ones. "If you want to play, you can say 'I want to play with this set' or 'I want to play with that set,' and you can write numbers on the back of the balls," JB explains.

The pool table belonged to the office — the boss had bought it so JB and his colleagues could unwind over a game. Nobody expected this restless bunch of ad people, sitting around at lunch, to come up with a set of emoji pool balls.

So JB went to Winigreeni, a designer friend who is good at painting on 3D models. Painting the balls, shooting the photos and video, and editing the GIFs took two to three weeks. Once it went online, "Love it!!," "so cute!," "haha" poured in from delighted users; some even asked JB whether the balls could be mass-produced, wanting an identical set for themselves.

YouTube's official Twitter account also posted about it, collecting nearly 1,400 likes and 300 retweets.

Poolmoji was not JB's first "personal project." Last Chinese New Year, he used a week of holiday to fly back to France to see his family. With nothing much to do at home and no appetite for sitting in front of the TV, he decided to spend about three weeks on a "crazy personal project." What JB calls crazy might strike most people as dull.

The project was to cut the American director Stanley Kubrick's 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey into 569 GIFs and upload them to GIPHY, the largest GIF site in the world, so that together they play as one continuous film.

2001: A Space Odyssey GIF video, via: jbledivelec

On the surface this is a little dull. Underneath it is a provocation. Online, copyrighted work is covered by a principle called "fair use," under which people may comment on, report on, or study copyrighted material.

But whether GIFs infringe copyright is still disputed. At this year's Rio Olympics, the organizing committee explicitly barred anyone other than official rights holders from using GIFs to broadcast Olympic content online or on mobile platforms. Last October, the National Football League (NFL) asked Twitter to suspend two GIF accounts for copyright infringement, among other cases.

"What is fair (use) and what isn't. I needed to push things to the extreme and see how far I could go," JB says. His GIF-film page is still up, and he has not been sued. Some people think what he did was very clever; others think it is not fair use at all — there is no commentary, it is just a copy of the film.

As an ad man, JB finds his job "always demands keeping up with trends," and when a new trend appears he "gets excited and wants to make something, even if it doesn't mean anything." Those same trends are why he has "confidence that I can always find an idea," and why he never worries about running dry.

Emoji is one example; Beer VR is another. Much of what advertisers call VR or 360-degree immersion is, in JB's view, just "jumping on a trend" — "boring," "not very interesting." The real use of VR, he thinks, is entertainment.

So he bought a beer mug and a pair of VR goggles on Taobao and made a 360-degree immersive beer video. Drink a beer while watching through the goggles and it feels as though you are inside the beer yourself. "It's purely for fun," JB laughs.

Beer VR video, via: jbledivelec

The New Yorker is hard to come by in Shanghai, so JB hollowed out a copy's cover and slid a spare Kindle inside. The Kindle was subscribed to The New Yorker's cartoons, so it looked almost like the real thing. JB told the cartoonists what he had done, and they thought it was "cool" and said they "loved it." They include Liza Donnelly, Bob Eckstein, Joe Dator and Farley Katz.

"Once I have a new idea, I try to make it. I'm not afraid to do anything I'm interested in. Sometimes you come up with an idea that doesn't need to serve a brand — we just need to come up with a lot of ideas and then go make them, and it doesn't take much time," JB told QDaily.

This is nothing like the state he works in: no client to serve, no plan to follow, only his own ideas, which feels freer. JB doesn't think the two are in conflict — Beer VR could become an ad if a beer brand were attached to it, though in fact no advertiser has come to him about it.

JB knows perfectly well that clients often "kill creativity": put a brand logo on something that was fun to begin with and the life goes out of it.

"The fun stuff online doesn't always come from clients — it comes from art and play. Art doesn't need a client. If you have a good idea, you don't need to please a client, and a client won't give you anything in return for it," JB says.

Even so, JB chose to work at an ad agency, and has stayed five years. Partly because he feels he has "no urge yet to get rich — I work pretty long hours every day, and there's no time left for anything else." Partly because over those five years, "I'm creating something new every day, China's story is brand new, so it never feels boring," and because he can keep "growing" at the company.

Agencies, in JB's view, differ a good deal from one another.

The big holding-group creative agencies are "like the mafia" — "huge," and they "control the client." The independent agency he works at is more like an "independent band": "independent," "free." "You can write the songs you want to sing, even if no one likes them — it's your band. If you sell out to a big brand, you can make a lot of money, but if you only work for the money, you lose your soul." JB is very happy with where he is.

These independent agencies are like independent designer labels in fashion: unlike the big 4A agencies, they operate more flexibly, though their resources are usually seen as thinner. JB's colleague Zhang Wenwen thinks "4A agencies are more traditional, so their account people matter more and hold the leading role," while "at independent creative agencies it's the creative director and the creative team that matter more."

Li Yuanyuan also agrees that independent creative agencies put more value on creativity and freedom — "fewer processes, higher efficiency, and better value for ideas" — while "big companies have more bureaucracy, and their personnel and process troubles drag down the creative process." She is a copywriter at J. Walter Thompson (JWT), one of the 4A agencies. "Big clients have business relationships with big agencies — the holding group might assign the account to a big agency, and then the work below gets handed down to that agency's subsidiary offices," Li Yuanyuan says.

But this "independence" is only relative, since clients constrain it too. To keep clients happy, JB has to keep working — "overtime and late nights." "We often don't finish until midnight, and we might have to work weekends too." He points at his hat: "This really is a stressful industry — look, I already have a lot of gray hair."

JB comes from Bougival, a small town "very close to the Palace of Versailles." It lies west of Paris and has just over 7,000 residents, but Claude Monet once lived there, so "everyone in town is very proud of Monet," and "a lot of streets are named after him." In 2007, at 17, JB entered SUP DE PUB INSEEC, INSEEC's advertising school in Paris.

The decision came from JB's mother. French students were expected to go and look at schools, and she suggested: "Do you know this school? It's about advertising." JB, who had never thought of advertising as a career, found it "really interesting," sat the school's entrance exam and passed. "I found out I really liked it, because I never had to study math and physics again. It was a completely new world — it was great," JB says.

He has turned this into a piece of popular life philosophy: "When you're young, you don't know what you want to do — you have to choose, and that's the same for everyone. Sometimes we make mistakes in our choices, but that's fine, you can't always be right."

So even though JB "wasn't sure when he'd become a creative," he was willing to try. In 2011, still a student, he chose to intern at FRED & FARID, the agency he liked. At first the work wasn't creative at all — mobile UI design, and building and designing apps. Two years later his boss asked him: did he really want to become a creative?

"Yes," JB replied.

At the time, FRED & FARID was looking to expand overseas, with Asia as a new direction. In 2012 it opened a 1,000-square-meter office in Shanghai, focused on digital and social-media creative and planning — exactly JB's strength.

In 2014, JB, who had "never been away from home for more than two weeks," got on a plane to Shanghai. It was his first time living abroad, and he worried the whole way. "I was so scared. I didn't know anyone there, I had no friends there. Maybe I could take a short trip or something, but I never expected to actually live in China," JB says.

But so as not to have any "regrets," JB came to FRED & FARID Shanghai anyway. Two years in, he thinks it has gone well. "I was surprised — it's great here. Living here as a Westerner really broadens your horizons. You change, you meet different people, it's great. People should get out of their comfort zone and scare themselves as much as possible," JB says. He is even thinking about living in yet another country, for the "new feeling."

When we met JB at the Wagas in Jing'an Kerry Centre, he was wearing a black cap marked with an "S" and printed with the Oriental Pearl Tower — Shanghai. "I just bought it nearby. I didn't want one with a 'New York' logo, I wanted one that represents Shanghai. Haha, a Chinese cap, the Oriental Pearl Tower," JB says, laughing.

Still, JB feels the difference between life in China and in France, and doesn't understand Chinese humor or some of the new things around him — Bilibili and livestreaming, for instance. "I genuinely don't get this one. So many bullet comments flying across the screen. Everyone loves it — even watching a show, people want to scroll through the bullet comments. I feel like everyone at the company watches this stuff and doesn't mind the comments flying all over the video. I don't understand why people write comments like that. I get that people want to comment, but isn't that supposed to be under the video, like on YouTube? There are some other apps I don't get either. I've really tried to understand livestreaming — those girls talking to their phones, livestreaming themselves shopping. I really don't understand why 10,000 people would watch these girls; they're just girls. But they're all pretty girls, and 10,000 people like them and comment on how pretty they are," JB says, thoroughly baffled.

But as a creative, JB needs to try to understand the websites and apps Chinese people use, and to "learn to write Chinese copy." "If you don't understand it at all, it's hard to make creative work," JB says. To him, Chinese companies and American companies are not that different: both "just expect good ideas." And in creative work, "the most important thing is curiosity, and then building your own [advertising] sensibility and having your own creative point of view," JB concludes, in a rare serious tone.

Most of the time, though, he is more like a mischievous kid, cracking jokes about the ad industry or about social trends.

On the awards section of Jean-Baptiste Le Divelec's LinkedIn page, for example, he lists that he once caught 66 fish in a week in a competition. When we asked him about it, he burst out laughing and explained:

"This industry can be too serious sometimes. People treat what they do as very solemn — changing the world, that kind of thing, way too serious. At the same time we're supposed to entertain the public, to make something different. I don't like being that serious, and I like cracking jokes about this industry. In advertising, on the creative side, awards matter a lot. So people in advertising put every award they've won on LinkedIn — I won this one here, I won that one there. I think it's ridiculous, it doesn't mean anything. So I played this little fishing game, Ridiculous Fishing, and I won an award in that game too, so I put it up. It's just a joke, but I really did catch the fish, and I'm proud of it — it was really hard."

(At the interviewees' request, Zhang Wenwen and Li Yuanyuan are pseudonyms.)

Cover image via: designboom, sobadsogood