VML’s Ryan McManus on how a social impact project changed the course of his career

In his spare time, the youngster would draw, scribble and stick bits of his work to the wall. He had no clue about advertising existing back then. “It was an interesting thing to discover arts as service of commerce, in a way, and how that fits together,” he recalls. “And how conceptual thinking was a was a thing. It was pretty amazing to discover that there was a whole world around that.”

It didn't take long for advertising to become much more appealing to him. During a school assembly, there was a presentation featuring funny ads from around the world. To McManus, it was brilliant, some were a bit rude, bordering on adult humor, which made them even more hilarious to him and his peers.

“We were like, ‘What is this whole world?’ It was amazing. It was a really powerful kind of imagination stoker,” he adds. “And then my dad told me about design and advertising in general and shared a bunch of things with me as I was getting older about how that fits together. I think he thought he might have been good at it in his career at some point.”

After school, McManus secured a spot at an advertising school in Cape Town called Triple A, where he quickly realized it was exactly where he was meant to be. During his time there, a particular project proved pivotal in shaping the adman he would become.

He had been working on it for weeks, and the output was highly conceptual, involving scanning objects, setting them on fire, and experimenting with various textures and layers to achieve the right effect. However, his tutor criticized the work and told him to start over. Refusing to give in, McManus stuck to his vision, presented the project, and ended up being offered a job at FCB in 2001.

“I went there straight away and started exploring and working in the studio there,” he says. “And I was being ordered around by art directors, mounting lots of boards and doing all the basics, which gives you a good eye of them.”

In the years since he’s worked his way up at agencies such as JWT, Havas, Serviceplan and VML, where just this year he was appointed UK chief creative officer.

The project which has made the most impact on him over his career is an initiative he helped start in Amsterdam called Join the Pipe (2005), which is on a mission to reduce plastic waste and bring clean drinking water to those that need it around the globe.

It is doing so by promoting drinking tap water from refillable bottles, while also selling such bottles and other merchandise, which along with donations, funds the core work of installing water pumps in rural communities in the global south. Free access to business education for young people is also provided tied in with reducing school drop out rates.

“It was way before kind of purpose advertising was a thing,” McManus explains. “So, it was a real unlock for me in terms of how impactful ideas could be and really make a difference in lots of people's lives and build a company off the back of a single idea.”

After that, McManus went to a remote island in the Pacific to live for 4 months (which felt like 4 years at the time) to make a documentary. In total, there were around 140 people living there and it was hard work but it set him up for the next chapter of his career which would include shooting music videos and commercials.

One of these stand out projects came in 2007, during his time at Serviceplan, for Sony Erickson and MTV which saw his team project a life-size graffiti artist onto some of Munich’s national monuments. “The police actually arrived and tried to arrest this graffiti artist. It was just a projection on the wall, and it was on the front page of the newspaper and everything,” he laughs. “I loved the experience of doing something really punk in a city that's so clean and kind of organized.”

Work for Absolut Vodka in Ghana followed, which was essentially a hip-hop album created in collaboration with a diverse group of artists. Inside his own creative studio, McManus and his team designed everything for the album, including the cover, using photos taken on set. The team traveled around the country to shoot a music video and a short documentary.

The resulting branded content was powerful enough that people began purchasing the items created, as well as the album itself, from stores and platforms like Apple Music. Ultimately, this helped Absolut back to number one in Africa in terms of sales.

“It was a really for me to see how culture, pop culture and creating work that people want to spend time with can just drive the results that we're kind of always looking for as advertisers,” McManus says.

More recently, out of VML’s New York office, his team created work for Virgin Voyages that featured none other than Jennifer Lopez but in AI form, titled ‘Jen AI’. At the time, McManus wanted to capture the conversation around gen AI and not just have Lopez looking glamorous on a luxury boat, which would have been a bit more monotonous, he indicates.

The Jenny from the Block singer was up for it and formed a good rapport with McManus on set. “It was pretty awkward when I was trying to do accents to her, to get her to do different accents and to behave like a pirate in one scene,” he laughs. “And I remember sort of catching myself doing a pirate voice to Jennifer Lopez in front of me and just going, like, what am I doing? This is so embarrassing. Like, what am I actually doing?”

McManus says that when the cameras turn on, she’s such a professional and it's amazing to see how she transforms into different characters on set.

He’s now been in the role at VML in the UK for 5 months and says he feels so much momentum building up in the agency.

“It's very hard to talk about energy as a thing, but it feels like there is a palpable energy starting to mold up and get bigger and bigger. And as soon as that starts to happen, it kind of grows and grows and creates this momentum. And when that happens, it starts to feel unstoppable.”

Like this story? Read our interview with VML’s Debbi Vandeven, the most-awarded CCO in the world