Uprising: Cooper Bowman Wants Adland to Mount Tsunamis and Give Flamingos Butt Lifts

Cooper Bowman joined Chicago-based creative agency Quality Meats as a senior copywriter in July, after a four-year stint at McKinney LA. During that time, he and his partner won the digital category at the US Young Lions, and were shortlisted for the international stage. Since then, he's worked on campaigns for the likes of Columbia, Little Caesars, Netflix and Popeyes, and is now plying his skills at Quality Meats for clients including Samsung and Jergens. 

Having been home-schooled, Cooper says that he learnt to work independently from a young age, and took after his mother - who has degrees in English and teaching - in developing a skill for writing, grammar and literature. “Sometimes it was like having a private tutor who is also your parent,” he explains. “But most of the time, you’re reading and learning for yourself, figuring out how to work through problems on your own - especially once you get into the later grades.” 

“Think about all the random things we have to become experts on in advertising,” he adds. “We have to absorb lots of minute, detailed information about goods or services in wee baby amounts of time, and sometimes the best nuggets aren’t even in the brief, but buried in expandable info tabs on the product website. Being able to figure stuff out on your own is important.”

Always shy as a child – a contrast to today – Cooper was often buried nose-deep in a book. He started writing his own stories at 12, or admittedly, mostly plagiarising authors like Tolkien and C.S Lewis, and obsessing over the stylistic choices that define the fantasy genre.

At age 13, his family moved to London where his Australian guitar teacher, an industrial design graduate, introduced him to more influences that would go on to shape his adolescence - “Only ever wearing skinny jeans, and deciding graphic design was my future.”

Above: Young Lions US 2022 winner, 'Billion Dollar Dance'

However, soon after enrolling at the Savannah College of Art and Design, an Advertising 101 course, led by industry veteran and author Luke Sullivan, would turn this plan on its head. 

“The first thing he said to me in that class was, ‘By the end of this quarter, you’ll be an advertising major, and then by the end of your career, you’ll be a millionaire’. He was right about the first one. The second is looking far less likely. I have to clarify that he said this to the entire class; this had nothing to do with me in particular. In fact, he told me I should be a used car salesman. And after that, all it took to switch from art direction to copy was a single look at the Photoshop menu bar – terrifying!”

During his time at college, he landed an internship at FCB Chicago and quickly learned both the importance of industry connections, and that advertising was “really, really, really, really, really hard”. He explains, “In school, you get to dream big. You get to make your book whatever you want. You get to write a list of your top 50 agencies and why you want to work at them. You get to hope you’ll be a millionaire. Then you get an internship… and all you write are a bunch of print ads for in-flight magazines thanking the airline for their partnership. Woof. Doesn’t seem so pie-in-the-sky after all…”

During that internship, Cooper worked to become “irritatingly recognisable” so that opportunities would come his way – even if none of his subsequent ideas got made. “The point is [that] making good, funny and cool stuff takes so much more than a brain and a notebook. It takes people,” he says. “Extra double bonus points if those people know you and like you and would work with you again, or perhaps refer you to someone else they know and like at another agency.”

Cooper’s next role took him from a bustling 800-person Chicago office to a pandemic-era remote working role at McKinney’s newly established LA office. Working from his college town, Cooper says this is where he “learned to swim”, figuring out how to work with a new partner, in the ‘wrong’ timezone, and largely over Zoom. “In a lot of ways, I learned how to write, how to present, how to come up with good ideas,” he says. “But that only happens when you get the chance to do those things in the first place. And so I learned what kind of leader I’d want to be 10 years down the road: One that lets the juniors in the deep end, so they can learn how to swim.”

The first “real” campaign he ever did - and still one of his favourites - was for Protect Our Winters, a climate action non-profit founded by outdoor athletes. “And, as someone that also bikes and hikes and skis, and tried to run once but it hurt really bad, it hit super close to home,” he says. “So much of the time we’re method acting as tech specialists or insurance experts or fast food lovers, and so it felt really good to be writing in what was essentially my own voice about a thing that I actually cared about outside of ‘le job’.”

Across this project and others during his time at McKinney, Cooper says he gleaned inspiration and advice not so much from the work, but from the people he worked alongside. “[Ex-GCD] Andy Pearson forced me to be smarter. [GCD] Jameson Rossi made me laugh until I was funnier. [Ex-ECD] Suz Keen showed me how to be the world’s best boss. [GCD] Scott Clark taught me how to believe in an idea. [Ex-art director] Jacq Quinton and [designer] Carlos Ortega made me get rid of the ‘homeschool clothes’. [Creative director] Paul Feldmann showed me what work ethic really looks like…” 

“I owe where I am to the time and effort those people, and so many more, have put into making me better at this,” he adds. “And I know for a fact the list will just keep getting bigger and bigger.” 

After four years, a creative director introduced Cooper to the Quality Meats team and his next adventure soon began. Impressed by Quality Meats’ Weiner's Circle work and attracted to the smaller size - by this time McKinney LA had grown into a larger group with the Durham and New York offices - Cooper made the jump.

Above: Quality Meats' work for Weiner's Circle

“I missed knowing every single person… I missed the way small agencies can give you a chance on pretty much everything that comes through the door,” he says. “The thing that most attracted me though was the name. I mean, c’mon. It’s so weird. You should have seen my parents’ faces when I dropped the news on ‘em.”

This sense of fun is something Cooper tries to bring to his work too. “In what other job on Earth do you get to just sit around and go ‘you know what would be kinda funny?’... It’s unbelievably fun, and the purest part is those early stages where the brief is fresh and any idea is a good idea, and you’re racking your brain for a reason to feature a BBL flamingo (flamingo with a Brazilian butt lift) in the spot you’re writing.”

He’s also excited that brands are seemingly opening back up to comedy, not to mention the wave of creative-led, independent agencies that are overcoming bureaucracy to focus on this approach. But regardless of company size, he believes that “a dose of freshness” is still needed across the board. 

“We recycle ideas. We stay in the safe lane because there’s less traffic. We let the same old barriers stop us from making stuff we know is brilliant, and funny, and worth it. I want to see stuff I’ve never seen before.” 

He adds, “I want to know what working with a gen z director is like. I’d love for the Super Bowl to have the level of simple, powerful, funny, risky brilliance it did when I was growing up. I want to laugh out loud at a commercial. You know what? I want someone to CGI a Brazilian butt lift onto a flamingo, just because. We’ve got to be willing to mount tsunamis to make the work that we really want to see. A lot of the time we stop well short of that.”

One of Cooper’s comrades in this effort is art director, Jayne Goodall, who he partnered with on and off throughout college, and spent the years after begging her to reunite the team. “When she was down for Quality Meats, my levels of stoke reached heights never before seen on this planet,” he says. “Nobody puts more effort and gorgeousness into every single piece of everything than Jayne. It will knock your socks off. And then, if for some reason you’re wearing two pairs of socks, it’ll knock the second pair off too. I feel incredibly lucky to be working with such a bizarrely gifted and intelligent person.”

While trying to match the dedication of Jayne and, of course, impress his mother back at “Bowman Academy”, Cooper is driven largely by the simple desire to “make cool stuff”. He says, “When I can get my head out of the weeds and take a step back, this is an incredibly fun job compared to most of the other ones out there, and every day I’m just trying to make the most of it.”   

“Secondly, and a bit more on the altruistic side,” he adds, “I think a certain level of motivation is to, on a much larger scale, make things a little funnier, or more clever, or more anything at all. I’m sure I could use Google right now to pull up the absurdly high number of ads the average person sees every day. Most of it is absolute drivel, but millions of dollars are being spent to force us to look at it. So the idea that, instead of making another horrible soulless piece of nothing, I can make someone laugh (honestly a smile is good enough); that makes me want to do this.”