Chicago: Rick Hamann: The Labs’ Comedic Layers

How do you sell to a demographic that thinks advertising smells like bullshit? Get the team behind ‘America’s Finest News Source’ to do it. Meet Onion Labs’ Millennial-marketing mastermind Rick Hamann

The above headlines, and many more like them, are examples from The Onion, a satirical website that for the past 26 years has been at the epicentre of American news parody. Sharp, insightful, clever and, most of all, funny, The Onion is hugely successful and hugely appealing to a current demographic referred to as the Millennials, which according to Wikipedia is “the demographic cohort following Generation X… [whose] birth years range from the early 1980s to the early 2000s.”

Rick Hamann describes Millennials as people of a certain attitude between the ages of about 21 to 35 and, as senior vice president of Onion Labs, he and his team are also impressing that group with their own Onion-inflected output.

Onion Labs is the branded content arm of The Onion and works with a raft of brands to harness The Onion’s modus operandi for use on client projects. In recent years they have worked with clients as diverse as YouTube, Coke Zero, EA Games, Dove, 7 Eleven and Audi, but the one thing the brands all have in common is that they embrace the stylistic tendencies of Onion Labs, which in turn embraces the stylistic tendencies of The Onion: satire, parody and a comedic self-awareness.

“What’s interesting,” starts Hamann, “is that because we’re a media company and we have this built-in distribution to millions of Millennial people, clients have always been attracted to us on an advertising level. But over the years those clients have realised that as well as distribution there’s also our inherent ability to create great content, and The Onion is a place where amazing editorial and video comes out every day. Both we and the clients have realised that this fire power can be used for branded content. We started getting more requests from clients to actually create work for them and we saw that was a unique offering for us to be able to deliver.”

Selling to Millennials

Onion Labs has been in existence for some time but it’s only recently, since Hamann was installed as SVP earlier this year, that its offering has come to the fore. “We’ve really changed the entire process of how the content is created,” says Hamann. “We’ve changed the way we approach the client and the way we deliver the work. It’s been a revolution rather than an evolution.”

Examples of Onion Labs projects in recent months include the YouTube April Fool’s Day video, which purported to introduce the new viral memes for 2014 (including ‘bun nutting’, ‘finish lining’ and ‘baby shaming’), the Naked Office video for Skyn condoms, which showed a new arrival to a job confronted by an office of naked colleagues and Tough Season, a series of videos for Lenovo that blurred the lines between real and fantasy American Football.

Each of these projects is very funny and has its tongue firmly planted in its cheek but, in some cases the joke, and the brand, is not always immediately obvious. “Millennials are some of the hardest people to reach with branded messages,” says Hamann. “This is a group of people that have been marketed to since the day they were born and they’ve seen it all. They are some of the fastest to reject marketing and some of the fastest to call ‘bullshit’ on things that smell like advertising.”

Hamann says that the voice of Onion Labs is well-matched to Millennials’ skepticism of traditional marketing and that what Labs does is offer a unique voice. That voice comes from a small core of five Onion Labs staff, headed by Hamann and his creative director Chris Roe, but supplemented by The Onion’s editorial and video teams. Most of the work that comes through Onion Labs is on a project-by-project basis, with clients approaching them for a one-off delivery, but there is a growing band of those clients, like Lenovo and YouTube, that consistently come back for more.

All of the clients, though, have to come through the door willing to “jump off the ledge” with the Labs team because, as Hamann says, “We don’t want to get anyone in trouble, but something we’ve found is that our audience tends to give a lot of credit to brands that are willing to take a comedic risk.”

Rick be nimble

Hamann started his job at Onion Labs in March 2014. Previously he was at BBDO in Chicago, and before that held various roles including at JWT Chicago and the now defunct Element 79. He says that what attracted him to the Onion Labs role was the ability it allowed to be nimble, efficient and realise creative ideas quickly.

“One of the things that’s difficult about traditional advertising,” he says, “is that it can take 18 months to get a concept through the machine.” At Labs, the turnaround is much faster and the barriers far fewer. They come up with ideas, make sure they work and if they get past Hamann and Roe, they’re then essentially out the door. Do standards sometimes slip if the turnaround is that fast? “Even though we’re the branded content arm,” says Hamann, “this is still The Onion. It has incredibly high standards and we have to hold ourselves to those standards at all times.”

Asked whether branded content is advertising’s present and future, Hamann is thoughtful. “The 30-second TV spot still has a purpose in marketing but I think it’s evolving to include more things that are able to connect people to the brand in different ways. It’s a bit of a cliché to say it, but brands need to act more like publishers now. They need to be able to create different kinds of content to solve their business problems and I think branded content can do a lot of that [if] it’s presented in the way that people want to see it.”

Why wouldn’t you?

The way that Onion Labs presents its content is with irreverence, comedy and a sometimes self-mocking attitude and Hamann believes that being based in Chicago perfectly suits the Labs’ method. He’s not the first person to mention the down-to-earth, straight-talking approach to life of Chicago’s residents and, while the Labs’ content is not limited to the city by any means, the company seems able to feed off the collective nature of its home town.

“I think there’s something really special about the comedic sensibility in Chicago. It really connects with people,” says Hamann. “It’s not elite, our parody approach often feels like it’s taking down the highfalutin’ and we’re sort of the comedy of the people.”

Hamann is also very positive about the current standing of Chicago in the collective consciousness of the US advertising industry and says that, despite the fact its client base is skewed towards packaged goods and traditional brands, those traditional clients are starting to embrace innovation. Hamann has also noticed that the city itself is attracting more talent, from both across America and further afield, and is benefitting from that influx.

“We’re starting to see more willingness to come to this city,” he says. “I think people are starting to see what an amazing city it is, aside from the harsh winters, maybe. If you’re a creative person and you could live in an ungodly expensive city like LA or New York or this amazing, much cheaper city with great culture, architecture and food, why wouldn’t you choose Chicago?”

Question of trust

The Onion Labs team is currently working on a campaign for Bud Light that involves 40 – count ’em, 40! – separate pieces of work, but Hamann reiterates that, though it’s certainly not easy, it’s an achievable task because of the chain of trust that runs through every Labs project. The client trusts him, he trusts Roe and Roe trusts his team – and that means things happen quickly.

“We try to have as few hurdles to getting a great idea out of the door as possible,” Roe explains. “Trust is the key point, though,” adds Hamann. “It’s a huge part of the process. If Bud Light, or Honda or Lenovo can’t trust us to deliver brilliant work and I can’t trust Chris then that’s when you start second-guessing one another, that’s when you start questioning everything and when you start down that road you end up questioning yourself to death.”