Naked Pizza Founder Gives The Deep Dish On New Orleans’ Startup Culture

It is not a stretch to assert that Robbie Vitrano is one of the most creative American entrepreneurs living today. Having co-founded Idea Village, which has launched numerous New Orleans based startups, and established Trumpet Ventures, which he describes as a “technology-based, startup-sensitive, advocacy-oriented, creative company,” Robbie Vitrano is a business-savvy creative who is out to change the quality of the business community, particularly in New Orleans. He is the Co-Founder and Brand Architect of Naked Pizza which is aiming to change the face and environmental footprint of fast food, and Robbie has spoken at previous PSFK conferences.

Some key takeaways from our extended interview with him include:

• Businesses with the architecture of an advertising agency do not need to limit themselves to doing advertising work.
• Leading a client to recognize the true value and meaning of authenticity is harder than it sounds.
• Hurricane Katrina happened 2 years before the financial meltdown; this means the city got a head start in developing smarter businesses that address underlying social issues.
• Don’t be afraid to turn down business. After Hurricane Katrina, Robbie and his colleagues began turning down all out of city work to focus on the needs of the surrounding community
• On the ad industry: “As long as we aspire to truly be experts in content, context, channels, and markets, we need to be responsible for their manifestation, in terms of what is “made” as well as the social, cultural, environmental and economic consequences therein”

Tell us about your background.

I began my life in journalism and moved into advertising. After stumbling into the writing of Howard L. Gossage, I became hooked on the mashup of brands, content, storytelling, media, and cultural influence. I started a small agency but eventually headed to L.A. and landed at Della Femina‘s creative department.

I then returned to New Orleans, working at an up and coming regional shop called Bauerlein as a writer. I became creative director and eventually president. After an unsuccessful bid to buy the shop, four of us set up Trumpet. Upon returning, I was confronted by the massive social implications of a city in decline. I started to question our role and impact in the context of using communications to help determine civic priorities. It was still far too complex for me, but my path started to take shape.

What developed in New Orleans over the latter half of the 20th century was a contraction that consisted of multi-generation, family run businesses who had most everything invested in status quo and essentially adopted a protective, conservative position in the city. So between 1960 and Katrina, the city experienced a massive brain drain. In returning to the city, I was observing the technology boom taking hold in places like Silicon Valley, Boston, and Austin but hardly touched New Orleans. I believed that the opportunity was to use the construct of an ad agency.

Tell us about Trumpet Ventures and your role as Chairman. 

Pat McGuinness and I formed Trumpet Ventures and in early 2007. We knew Trumpet should be built from the inside-out as a technology-based, startup-sensitive, advocacy-oriented, creative company. We became much more focused on the behavior of clients, the dynamics of their business and the impact of their actions on the greater community. As a creative, you naturally want that context front and center in the brief; as opposed to being an input, it became the measure of whether or not we’d take on a client.

Given the traditional business climate of New Orleans, clients weren’t used to probing authenticity or consciousness and in truth and we weren’t entirely sure what it all meant either. We had little to no idea of what was needed to support businesses which help instead of harm, but were sure that this was the right way to build a company.

Trumpet was learning the language of startups, the complexity and moving parts therein, the value of (to steal a phrase) baking the marketing into the product or business, but still dealing somewhat naively with the requirements of taking an early stage company through the iterations of seed funding, proof of concept and B-round investment. We helped launch some of the city’s most successful tech startups including iSeatz, Turbo Trip, and we were selected to launch Fresh Direct in New York – a great success and nice plum for a tiny agency.

That changed in August of 2005. After the destruction of 80% of New Orleans, we chose to more deeply commit ourselves to the areas where we believed we could have the greatest impact. Trumpet returned to New Orleans in answer to the call of creative potential. We decided to burn the boats and focus on something beyond recovery in New Orleans. Within the tragedy, opportunity and obligation of responding to the needs of our destroyed city, I found my focus.

Trumpet was one of the first companies to return to operation at a time that the city was still under a military-enforced curfew. People flocked to the shop to chew on ideas ranging from grounded to unhinged new initiatives for education and public safety reform, disaster relief, businesses, art projects and even some sinister hints of shadow governments. The result was us resigning all of our out of town work to focus on the work in the city. We worked on foundational issues such as master planning initiatives, the city’s 311 system, standing up tourism, mental health resources, and connecting assistance to local businesses. We also started to work on putting together the necessary infrastructure for vetting and supporting early stage companies including the creation of an investment fund. We also decided to try to better leverage our physical footprint and resources, purchasing a 12,000 square foot former icehouse in a flooded part of town. We expressly designed the open floor plan around collaboration, with Trumpet at the center, surrounded by entrepreneurs, startups, media companies, NGOs, and community advocacy groups.

How is New Orleans advantageously positioned as a hub for social entrepreneurship and innovation?

The main driver of entrepreneurship here is the need to recover and reinvent a culturally important city. That motivating cause, coupled with the opportunity to try new things, has proven potent. There is an explicit sense that New Orleans represents a once in a lifetime opportunity to address troubling aspects of modern society with real, instructive solutions. Perhaps a chance to redefine and reawaken the American Dream.

The recession exacerbated doubts about the path and behavior of business and also clarified the connection between business and the communities they impact. Business is a subset of society that has an obligation to contribute to its health and sustainability. As a result of Katrina, New Orleans had a two-year head start on the realities of the recession, confronting problems beyond symptoms, connecting the dots between entrepreneurs and solving the problems of the community. We focused on the motivations and the building of networks and the ecosystem and while it’s still act two, that has manifested in some pretty magical ways.

Given this, it seems pointless to ask whether Katrina was a good thing or a bad thing. What’s more important is owning the moment and asking the important questions. For New Orleanians, when facing the very real possibility that we would lose our city forever, the important question was “What do yo want this city to be?”

That’s a powerful brief for social entrepreneurs and innovators.

How has your background in advertising informed what you are doing now? Do you see yourself standing outside the ad industry or perhaps helping to evolve it?

My bias is that the people, craft, tools and process of the advertising industry has enormous, underutilized potential. Like the economy, it was narrowly focused and often on autopilot for almost half a century. Digital and diffuse content distribution systems and, not insignificantly, the recruiting pressure from cool startups shook things up. For years the industry has been battling the race to the bottom and its attendant insecurities via compensation formulas, hoping to find a silver bullet that would result in clients paying them for the “value on their ideas.” This has never been resolved because it was an impossible scenario. We now know that ideas are in abundance, but execution, in the form of productizing, infrastructure, sustainability, functionality, and social benefit is where value is created.

I’d rather get my inspiration from work like what I saw at PSFK’s Gaming for Good — folks like Bogusky, Wieden and Arnold applying the craft and tools to engaged people on Climate Change.

In short, the indisputable value is in making things. Many have suggested that this is not the primary focus of advertising, but I’d argue that in this day of frictionless collaboration, you have an obligation to fully integrate your part of using communication to shape priority and focus with the right engineer, artist or plumber in order to fully realize the inspiration and thus define value. As long as we aspire to truly be experts in content, context, channels and markets, we need to be responsible for the manifestation, in terms of what is “made” as well as the social, cultural, environmental and economic consequences therein.

The goal should not be to launch another campaign, but actively iterate and/or morph, based on the actual experiences of creators and users and how that experience leads to new things. Like Gossage eschewing campaigns in favor of writing only one ad at time, and not beginning work on the second until he understood the reaction of his audience to the first.

Looking back at 2011, what were some of your highlights from this year’s work. Furthermore, what do you anticipate 2012 will offer Trumpet and the NOLA community at large?

One of the most fascinating projects I’ve been involved in was working on the redesign of a 80-year-old credit union in the context of the new role that money and credit is playing in our society. The company is transitioning from a patriarchal CEO to one that grew up around the considerations of social justice and finance. This is a guy (New Orleans native Steve Hennigan) born to lead in this volatile time of financial insecurity.

Another is the continued growth of Naked Pizza into an international force, engaging people up and down the food supply on considerations that link production, policy, health, nutrition and markets. It’s mind blowing to consider that via a platform of pizza, we’re collaborating with some of the most important minds in health, nutrition, business and technology. We have 24 stores open from San Diego to Denver to New York to Dubai.

In 2012, Naked will open in Sydney, Manchester, Beirut, India and Nairobi this year. Beyond that, Trumpet and our NOLA community will continue to refine the development of our entrepreneurial ecosystem including ways to share our knowledge with other communities around the world. We’re working on putting together a program to meet requests from New Zealand, Japan, Ireland and U.S. communities to not only share the experience, but help in designing the system that supports community-appropriate entrepreneurship.

Thanks Robbie!

Naked Pizza

Trumpet