THE MAKEOVER
It’s the week of the 2005 Tony nominations and SpotCo principal/ creative director Drew Hodges is sitting in his office wracking his brain to remember what month the musical Dirty Rotten Scoundrels opened this season. “Are we, like, completely in a coma?” Hodges asks no one in particular, before he remembers the musical opened in March. Given that this year SpotCo created branding for more theater productions than ever—19 Broadway shows and 8 off Broadway—which subsequently received 53 Tony nominations and 12 wins, no one would blame him for forgetting a date or two.

When in 1996, Geffen Records hired Hodges to market Rent, SpotCo was Spot Design, a five-person studio with clients in TV and music—including MTV, Nickelodeon, Sony Music, and Geffen Records—and no experience with Broadway theater. That outsider status does much to explain the aesthetic shakeup Hodges initiated with his work. Spot Design’s clients in other sectors of the entertainment industry wouldn’t countenance advertising that wasn’t as exceptional as its product; there was no reason, according to Hodges, that theater shouldn’t adopt the same position.

At the time, the dated aesthetic of most Broadway advertising —which tended to be short on concept and long on the use of bland icons—was overdue for a makeover. With his campaign for Rent, Hodges made the bold decision to feature the cast members, none of them famous at the time. “No one understood why we’d photograph the talent because they weren’t stars,” he says. “People understood photography to deliver a celebrity’s face, but they didn’t understand that photography could deliver the mood and tone of a show.” That’s what SpotCo’s raw, contemporary photomontage, shot by Amy Guip, did for Rent; it gave consumers a taste of the theatrical experience.

That year, Spot Design became SpotCo, which is today a full-service advertising agency specializing in Broadway, with 42 staffers, media buying and planning capabilities, and a lion’s share of the business to be had on Broadway. The agency’s campaigns for productions like Rent, Avenue Q , Chicago, and De La Guarda, among scores of others, is credited with catapulting Broadway into an era of marketing modernity.

ABOVE: SpotCo is often credited with being the first agency to fully tap the emotional range of photography in theater graphics, with this groundbreaking 1996 campaing for RENT, shot by Amy Guip.