J.J. Foxx, Producer/Copywriter, Clear Channel’s, Creative Services Group, Atlanta, Georgia
By Jerry Vigil
Each year after the RAP Awards, we like to visit with one or two of the new names that have popped up in the competition. One of those names is J.J. Foxx, the producer for the spot that won Best Commercial – Large Markets. The spot came from Clear Channel’s Creative Services Group in Atlanta, for which J.J. has been a producer/copywriter since early 2005. In November of 2004, we visited with Jim Cook, Sr. VP of Creative Services for the CSG and got the lowdown on the CSG and it’s newly launched “Less Is More” initiative. This month, we take a look at the CSG from the trenches. We learn a little about J.J. Foxx and a little more about this hard working group of people that make up the CSG, which has done a lot in the past couple of years to improve radio’s stopsets and clients’ pocketbooks nationwide.
JV: Tell us about your early years in the business.
J.J.: I feel like I kind of fell ass backwards into it. Like every red-blooded American boy, I wanted to be a rock star when I was in high school. I was a music junkie. I soaked up music and collected music and was finding new music all the time. As I got older, I realized, oh man, maybe I should have spent more time playing guitars than chasing girls and drinking beer and listening to music. So I kind of wandered towards radio. When I went to college, I picked the communications major, not really knowing what I wanted to do. But then I started gravitating towards radio as my college years went on, and I really submerged myself in college radio. The station was WFSE, and I did the on-air stuff, I was the Music Director, you know, I just did everything I could.
But it wasn’t until after college that I wandered into the production room. Believe it or not, I interned for Jim Cook when he was in Erie, Pennsylvania. I went to a college about 30 minutes away from Erie at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania and took an internship with Jim and the Promotions Director at the time, Neal Sharpe, who’s now the PD at the Link in Charlotte, North Carolina. I took an internship with those guys at WJET, Jet 102, and it was a real eye-opening experience with regards to what really went on in radio, and I became enamored with it all. When I graduated they didn’t really have a position for me, although they wanted me to work for them. So I ended up going to the country station in Erie, WXTA Country 98, and did part-time overnights and things like that. This was back in 1992. While I was there, Jim left Erie, and not too long after that I went back to WJET. I was an AE for like six months, and I’ll never forget that Sales Manager, when they hired me back he was saying, “don’t think I’m hiring you so you can get your foot in the door to get into programming.” Six months after that I was fired and hired on the same day. They fired me in sales, but hired me to do full-time overnights on JET 102 in Erie. Neal Sharpe at that point was the Program Director. While I was doing overnights, as it is with almost every job, at that time we had to do production. I already knew how to cart things up. I already knew how to do basic stuff. But when you go to work for a station where Jim Cook was, there’s a state of the art recording facility there. I’ll never forget that production room; it had a beautiful board. Don’t ask me what kind of board it was, but they an Otari 8-track reel-to-reel. Jay Bohannan, who is now the PD of the FM talk station in Pittsburgh, taught me how to use that production room. I would go in and experiment and do all kinds of things before I’d go on the air at midnight and just develop my production skills like that. Then a couple of years later, we made the move to a digital editor. I think the first digital editor I worked on was a Roland DM80, and Jay Bo taught me out to use that too. I was in a unique situation where I could experiment and develop my skills.
JV: Where’d you go next?
J.J.: Actually I stayed in Erie for a while. I left Erie in 2000, but while I was at Jet 102, I did every shift on that station, except mornings. I did imaging. I did commercial production. I did continuity, all at the same time. It was pretty busy. You learn how to get things done. Then in 2000, Jet Broadcasting was sold to NextMedia. I could have stayed on, but my wife decided that she wanted to see what else was out there. She’s a nurse and I kind of followed her. We packed up and our first stop was Atlanta. Jim Cook worked in Atlanta, and I had stayed in semi-contact with Jim over the years after he left Erie. I told him that I was coming to Atlanta and he said, “make sure you call me when you get here.” Once we got to Atlanta, I called Jim and he brought me on as a contract producer in the evenings for the Atlanta cluster for Clear Channel. We were here three months, and one of the PDs for WGFT here in Atlanta, Ken Charles, was moving up to Clear Channel Houston to take over the AMs in Houston. He was looking for production people. Jim got me talking to him and we ended up going to Houston at that point. I did commercial production for KTRH, KPRC and KBME.
I did commercial production there for about a year and then Jim called me in Houston and said, “hey, we’re starting up a station here in Atlanta that I think you’d be ideal to image.” That was always my goal; I wanted to do imaging. So my wife and I came back to Atlanta in 2002, and I’ve been here ever since. I did imaging for WMAX the 80’s Channel and 94.9 Lite FM. Then when the MAX went away and became Real Radio 105.3, I imaged that and continued to image Lite throughout that time.
Then when Real Radio went away, I was just imaging Lite, and that’s when Jim Cook and Bob Case starting talking to me about coming over to the Creative Services Group as a producer. We talked for quite a while about it and then I jumped at the chance because it just sounded fantastic, a job where you just get to be totally creativeall the time. When I came on board officially, in January of 2005, the Creative Director at the time was Robert Summers. We would all get together and kick ideas around, and he wanted to see if I could write. That time with him was like having a year’s worth of guitar lessons one on one with Eric Clapton. Robert took me under his wing and taught me some writing skills. It was just amazing. So now with CSG, I’m writing and producing.
JV: We should give Robert Summers credit for being the copywriter on both the winning entry in the RAP Awards and on the one that came in as the first-runner up as well.
J.J.: Yes, he was the writer. He resigned January of this year. I think he had some other things he wanted to pursue. But he was our National Creative Director and wrote both of those entries for the runner up and the first place. I still talk to him from time to time on the phone. I still call him my sensei, my guru. There’s still so much more I would love to learn from him.
JV: What’s one thing you learned from him about copyrighting?
J.J.: Write something every day. Write every day and when you write, revise — write and revise, write and revise. And have a strategy when you’re writing. Come up with a strategy before you write.
JV: How many people are there in your position at the CSG?
J.J.: I’m a producer/copywriter. I think we all have those stripes right now. Vito Gorinas is our other producer. And then we have a music director, his name is Jason Phelps. They’re going to be hiring another producer in the very near future.
JV: What are Jason’s duties as the music director?
J.J.: Jason is a singer/songwriter. He composes and records jingles and music beds that we may need. He does a lot of custom work for clients. I wouldn’t call them jingles because we want to try to take a different approach to the jingle and make it more of a song, like a 30 second song rather than singing the phone number and the location of the client.
JV: How does the CSG get their clients? Can any Clear Channel station have access to you guys?
J.J.: Only the top 25 markets, I believe, at this point, can approach us about doing creative for their client. We tend to gravitate towards the top clients, like a top ten client at a particular station, somebody who has the potential to spend big bucks. We help them get a strategy and get their marketing and their spot right with the strategy in an effort to get them the best return on their investment.
And we don’t just approach it on a spot by spot basis when we do something for a client. We do a campaign, and we strive to make that campaign something that can be an ongoing thing, rather than just three or four spots that you run for short while.
JV: That’s still a lot of AEs and a lot of clients to potentially deal with, when you’re talking about all the Clear Channel stations in the top 25 markets and all of the AE’s at those stations. Any time they feel they have a client that’s big enough to send your way, they can and do?
J.J.: Yeah, but they contact us through Bob Case. He is the VP and General Manager for the Creative Services Group.
JV: Does he more or less filter out what clients will not end up on your desk and which ones will?
J.J.: Exactly. He’s the gate keeper.
JV: What kind of contact with the client do you have on a typical project?
J.J.: Once the person contacts Bob, we have the AE with their client fill out a creative work plan — a series of questions that can help us understand where the client is coming from, where they want to go, what they want to do, what they hope to achieve. Also, we find out background — their current situation, what they’re running on air right now, what they’ve done in the past. We find out who their competition is and lots of different things to get a really good feel for the client.
After we get the creative work plan, we’ll set up what we call a creative consultation. We’ll get on a conference call with the AE and the client, or if the client is local here in Atlanta, we’ll sit down face to face with the client. Then we’ll just pick their brain. If we look at the creative work plan and there are other questions we want to ask, we’ll ask them. We’ll get a feel, get to know the client, get to know what they’re about, what makes them tick. Then we go into the writing process.
We mull over the writing process, and once we get a campaign that we want to present to the client, we do another conference call or a sit down and present the scripts to them. From that point, if they give the stamp of approval on the scripts, we take them into production. Now sometimes we’ll actually demo something out and produce one of the spots before letting them see the copy, especially if it deals with a lot of sound, which we try to do more and more. That way we can demonstrate to the client what their message will sound like and what they’re strategy will sound like and where it can go from there.
JV: What’s your turnaround on a typical campaign? When the project hits your desk, do you have a week, two weeks?
J.J.: The writing process, from the time we talk to them on a creative consultant, usually takes about five business days to come up with the copy. Once the copy’s approved, it’s about five business days to turn around the production, to produce the campaign.
JV: That’s pretty fast for the quality of work you’re churning out.
J.J.: Yeah, and it can be stressful. But you know what? When you’ve got great copy and you’re working with great stuff, it just all comes together and gives you that warm and fuzzy feeling that every production guy I think can identify with.
JV: About how many spots are you writing and producing, between you and Vito and Jason?
J.J.: It varies from week to week, from month to month. And once a quarter, we’ll put together what we call spec campaigns. We’ll talk to sales managers all over the company and find out what are some hot client categories that can really use some creative to get a client to step out on it. I think every quarter we’ll do an automotive campaign, because that’s always a big category. We’ll put together spec campaigns like that, maybe three or four a quarter, and then we’ll post them on our website for the rest of the company to use. The AE’s can download this information, the scripts, the research that we gather with it and the spots, and all they have to do is take it into their production facility and have them put their client’s tag on it.
So, like I say, we work on three or four campaigns a quarter, but then we’ve got all the customers that come through, so it’s really hard to say how much we do week to week. I mean, this week, I’m sitting on a lot. By the end of the day today, I’m hoping to finish up two campaigns. I’ve got two more campaigns that I want to have done before Friday. I mean fully produced. And then I want to demo out two spots from a campaign that we want to present to a client either later this week or early next week.
JV: So it sounds like you might write and produce a dozen or so spots in a given week.
J.J.: Possibly. It depends on how long the writing process takes. Sometimes when we’re going through the writing process, we might have like 12 scripts that we’re looking at, four different campaigns — which is going to be the best, you know? And then, of course, nothing goes to waste. We have those ideas saved, so if the strategy comes up again, we can revisit those ideas. But, yeah, maybe a half a dozen things, and mind you it’s not just individual spots. I mean a half a dozen campaigns going at once. There’s always something going on.
JV: Are you finding yourself working a lot of extra hours, or do you manage to capture it all in an eight hour day?
J.J.: We kind of joke around here. It’s like we’re always working. I don’t think my brain ever shuts off because if I’m not producing or writing, I’m reading a book. I’m checking out different radio formats to get a feel because you never know which format you’re going to be writing for. I’m watching TV. And the way I watch TV is funny; I tune more into the commercials and the messages, and I’ll check out the production on the RAP CD — things like that, just always doing something.
And we have a research director here too. So if I don’t have a piece of research that I need or whatever, I can go to our research director; her name is Summer Mullen, and she’s amazing. She can find information on everything.
JV: I wonder how the CSG compares to a typical major market ad agency. It sounds like the place is a combo agency and production house, but probably unlike most out there because you’re directly connected to the Clear Channel group.
J.J.: I’ve never worked in ad agency, so I can’t answer that question. But we are very fortunate here at Creative Services Group to have a few people that have come from the ad agency side. Our current Creative Director, Liz Smith, has years of ad agency background. Terry Yorkmark, our Senior Writer, has a long, long history of working in agencies.
JV: So Terry is yet another writer there?
J.J.: Yeah, he’s another writer we have. And our research director, Summer Mullen, is a writer too. Then we have what we call a “swat team” of people elsewhere in the company that we’ll send other projects too. If we’re overloaded, we’ll send them a project to work on.
JV: Well, you must have a ton of resources to work with, one of which is probably a huge talent bank of voiceover people.
J.J.: Yes, we have what we call the CSG voice bank. We are constantly soliciting for demos from independent talent or people within the company, and we have all of that, the demos and contact info, at our fingertips. Joe Lomonaco, who works for Clear Channel in Rochester, New York, unearthed this plethora of independent voices from all over the country. He was able to get us all these demos and found some wonderful people for us.
Here’s another thing that we have done, and this was something that was probably staring us in the face all along and it kind of flicked us on the forehead. One of the show producers upstairs for Clear Channel Atlanta came to us and said, “Hey, I’m involved with a couple of improv groups here in Atlanta, and these people would love to do some radio voice acting.” And we’re like, “no kidding?” So she has hooked us up with many people.
JV: Do you get a lot of in-studio voice over people?
J.J.: Yeah. If they’re local Atlanta, we bring them in. A lot of times we’ll do ISDN or just via email. When we set up a session outside the studio, we direct them either on the phone or on the ISDN.
JV: You’re probably directing more voice talent now than you ever have in your career, am I right?
J.J.: You are absolutely correct.
JV: What have you learned about that in the past year?
J.J.: There are many ways to get people to act, to say, to convey what you want them to convey. Vito and I and Dave Savage, who works for Clear Channel Atlanta, just did a presentation last week at the Clear Channel “meeting of the minds” where we talk to other producers and imaging people in the company. We gave a presentation on coaching voice talent, where to find interesting voice talent and such. And yeah, directing talent is something that you just develop over time because sometimes you’ve got to run out in the hall and get someone. And I know guys that do commercial production day to day can identify with this. You’ve got a three voice spot. You’ve got to find the three voices… now. You’ve got to run out in the hall and go “okay, you, come in here.” And you’ve got to get them in there, get them comfortable, and line read them sometimes. And you pick up various techniques: never give them the script. Just feed them the lines. Don’t let them sit down. Do not put headphones on them because either they’ll shy away from the mic or they’ll fall in love with their voice. And trust me; we’ve got enough people in this industry that are in love with their voice.
JV: You’ve been doing this for a while now, day after day, coming up with good creative on a regular basis, knocking out the spots that are national quality, etc. Is it getting easier for you? Is it getting harder? How do you manage to keep drawing from the creative well?
J.J.: Well, I know it would sound defeatist to say you’re only as good as the last thing you produced, but I don’t think it’s a defeatist thing. I think it’s a constant challenge for someone, because if you do a great piece of creative, a great campaign, it just makes you want to strive to make the next one even better. And how do you keep the well from going dry? The biggest thing people need to realize is you never stop learning, ever. You can learn from everybody you talk to. I was talking to some people last week, guys from smaller markets. I learned stuff just talking to them, stuff that they do in their studios that I didn’t even think of, and it’s like, “Wow, that’s cool. I want to try that.” So you never ever stop learning. The tips that we gave people last week were like, get out of the studio. Go to lunch. Don’t go to lunch with your co-workers. Go by yourself and just listen to people talk. Listen to how they talk. Listen to what they’re talking about it. It’s great food for thought.
JV: How do you feel about radio’s future as we battle the satellites and the iPods and the internet stations and such?
J.J.: Well, as far as satellite radio, I read something recently that echoed my own thoughts. When cable TV came out, everybody was like, “Wow! Cable TV. Less commercials…,” blah, blah, blah. You turn on cable TV nowadays, and you’ve got plenty of commercials. You’ve got infomercials, you’ve got commercial stations, and what else do you have on there? You have your local channels. It’s the same way with DirecTV. You get your local channel package.
And getting back to keeping the creative juices flowing, here’s something Bob Case, our VP/General Manager mentioned that he had heard. It was the chief marketing officer for McDonalds worldwide who said, “We need to start getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.” We get into our comfort zone and we think that that’s the right way to stay because we’re comfortable doing it. But if we get comfortable with being uncomfortable, the creative is just going to get better and better and better and better.