Thomas Kemeny was born in Hungary, raised in Wisconsin, and defied death as a zombie in a student movie at Columbia College Chicago. And if the first few steps of his career in the unpredictable world of advertising are any indication, he’s set to continue down some unusual paths.

By: William Meiners

The 2005 Marketing Communication graduate sold 30 seconds of his valedictory speech on eBay, spent two straight weeks living at an ad agency as an intern (at least they had a shower!), and moved to San Francisco, city unseen, for a copywriting job at Goodby Silverstein & Partners—the agency that made the phrase “got milk?” ubiquitous.

For Kemeny, the San Francisco gig is the culmination of years of hard work and persistence, which began in college when his interest in interactive multimedia led him toward a marketing/advertising degree. He worked two internships, freelanced for both Leo Burnett and the agency formerly known as Hadrian’s Wall, and “wrote ridiculous letters” trying to catch the eye of a creative director. He was in Los Angeles, in California for the very first time, when he got the Goodby offer. And that’s when the really hard work began.

“The whole thing was scary,” Kemeny says. “I didn’t know if it would be terrible out here. Didn’t know where I’d live. I didn’t even know a single person who lived in San Francisco. But I like taking risks and there’s something exciting about going somewhere where nobody knows you. It’s like you get to be a phoenix and burn your ashes and start over. I moved a lot as a kid, so I guess I was used to this life as a nomad.”

Kemeny made new friends and settled nicely into his Nob Hill neighborhood. He was no less inclined to take risks on the job, however. The riskiest: a “got milk?” campaign where he teamed up with an art director to put cookie-scented strips into five San Francisco bus shelters. With only the “got milk?” logos at the shelters, the smell became the message. “We wanted it to be a nostalgic thing,” Kemeny says, “to give people a smile on their way to work.”

Not everyone found the smell amusing. Special-interest groups associated with obesity and diabetes—and just plain cookie haters—made enough noise to get the scented shelters stripped of all olfactory enhancements after only a few days on the bus shelters.

However, the resulting media coverage, in The New York Times, Forbes, and on National Public Radio, CNN, and “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” among others, helped spread the campaign much farther than the streets of San Francisco. The creative duo also earned OneShow Merit and Cannes Shortlist ’07 mentions.

You’ve likely seen some of Kemeny’s work, especially if you’re a left coaster. He’s provided concepts and words for Comcast, Miller Genuine Draft, and that mildly disturbing Burger King king. “You’re always trying to ‘one-up’ the ad you did before,” he says of the creative process. “Good ideas just sort of happen. You put in a lot of hours pounding the notebooks. You write 300 lines and they all suck. You talk with your partner for hours and write a bunch of really bad ideas. Then, suddenly, seemingly on auto pilot, you write a smart, funny, and charming idea and you have no idea where it came from.”

Kemeny acknowledges, though, that he can trace some of his ideas and good fortune back to Columbia College. He considers Larry Minsky, faculty in the marketing communication department, a big mentor. Minsky also wrote two critically acclaimed books about the advertising business: 25 Words or Less and How to Succeed in Advertising When All You Have is Talent. And thanks to a fiction writing class taught by Joe Meno, author of such left-of-center novels as Hairstyles of the Damned and The Boy Detective Fails, Kemeny brought more “storytelling” elements to his work.

Still, beyond the “aha moments,” the young ad man points out the critical role of craft. “That’s where the writer writes and the art director directs,” Kemeny says. “There’s still a lot of creativity involved, along with pushing boundaries and trying to reinvent, but few people focus on craft. It’s as important, if not more important, than the original idea, just not as glamorous.”

How does he combine the art and craft of advertising? “Read everything, then ignore it,” Kemeny says. “There are a lot of smart people out there, but if you’re really going to shine in this business, you have to do things your own way.”