It was the ad that divided opinions and sparked internal politics, but in this week’s My Creative Career, Ain’t founder and chief creative officer Riommi explains how a chance meeting with Fernando Machado set the wheels in motion for one of the most controversial campaigns in recent advertising history.
Creativity stems from curiosity, that’s something that Jorg Riommi has known since his childhood. That curiosity evolved from drawing to music – he played in bands for 20 years – to photography and eventually writing.
As a student in Italy, Riommi studied the science of communication at the Sapienza Università di Roma. In the third year, he began to discover the power of advertising and “fell in love” with it. “I had booked a trip in Ireland and bought myself a book of Guinness’ historic advertising,” he explains. “I just fell in love with the fact that somebody pays you to do art. It kind of put together all the passions that I had.”
The fact that adland is constantly evolving and changing also intrigued the youngster, who knew that he would never get bored. There’s always a problem to solve.
After completing his degree, Riommi’s first job was working at media tycoon and former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Mediaset broadcasting network. Riommi co-wrote a pilot show for the network, and it got picked up. This was the early 2000s and he made the decision that he would try anything to get himself where he wanted to be within the advertising industry.
His next step was seeking out ad agencies in Rome. Four names stood out: JWT, Saatchi & Saatchi, McCann, and Y&R. He decided to start with Saatchi & Saatchi, showing up at its prestigious Piazza del Popolo office without a portfolio—just a strong drive and a bold request for a copywriting job. He repeated this approach at JWT, where a creative director advised him to put together a book of ideas. Soon after, Saatchi offered him an internship position – which was unpaid at the time – marking the start of his career.
Thankfully, eventually, they did pay him and Riommi spent 12 years of his career at Saatchi & Saatchi in Italy, South America, Romania and Germany. This all led to him becoming the chief creative officer of Publicis Groupe in central and eastern Europe in 2018.
There are a handful of projects that stand out to the creative for different reasons. For The Automobile Club of Romania there was ‘Mr Bear Driver,’ a mobile game that actively involved kids in road safety. Another was an electric billboard for Renault to promote electric cars which were placed in high-polluting areas.
But the project that stands out for Riommi was Burger King’s controversial, utterly divisive, 2020 ad campaign that featured a moldy Whopper. It all started with a chance meeting in Dubai two years prior, in a hotel with the fast food chain’s global chief marketing officer at the time, Fernando Machado.
“I was having breakfast, and I spot him across the room, eating breakfast alone,” recalls Riommi. “I approached him and said, ‘Sorry to bother you during breakfast. My name is Jorg. I tried to send you an idea twice, but you never got back to me. So now I’ve met you can I tell you the idea?”
Machado, politely, said no as he was eating but gave Riommi his email to send over his pitch. That idea was commissioned and became Burger King’s “No Show” ad. The concept played on a unique situation in Romania, where the nation’s only Burger King was located air side in Bucharest’s airport, requiring customers to have a boarding pass to enter. Riommi’s idea was to partner with a flight ticket portal, allowing people to purchase tickets for just $10 giving them an excuse to access the airport and exchange the ticket for a Whopper meal, (but not fly).
“It was a fun idea. Won some awards. We got some attention. It’s established the relationship with Fernando,” says Riommi. After that, he became the global lead for everything Burger King that was coming out of Publicis.
“That’s how it led to the Moldy Whopper,” he continues. “It was an idea that was presented to me by the team in Spain that we made happen within the team in Romania. I presented it to Fernando Machado, and he said, ‘Look, we’re doing something very similar now with Ingo, that is also very similar to something that we saw in the past from David, but your version, it’s different and better’.”
The campaign introduced a perspective centered on beauty: the beauty of real food, free from artificial ingredients and captured through striking macro photography. This approach combined epic, close-up shots of something typically seen as unappealing with a bold message.
“Then he [Machado] played the politics and brought everybody together for the sake of the campaign, and the industry, in producing this piece of work,” says Riommi. “So, in the end, the craft is more on the Ingo side of things, the packing, like of case videos, more in the David side, but the actual idea in its final form, it’s from us. I can claim that.”
Riommi says he’s always “played the smaller fish” with this campaign but he feels proud of what it achieved, especially since it combined one of his passions, which is photography.
“Credits are important, are crucial,” he says. “I think people judge without knowing the whole story.”
The creative was at Publicis for almost a decade before making the decision six months ago to start his own independent agency Ain’t. He loves that he now has the chance to leave the “corporate” nature of agency life behind and become more creative again.
It’s early days for the start-up but Riommi is excited that Ain’t has just signed up to be part of by The Network, which John Mescall chairs.
“When intelligence meets magic, you know, that’s the beautiful thing, which is creativity,” he says.
Like this story? Read our interview with John Mescall.
