The Sanest Mad Man

Zak Mroueh won’t audition for work, defying the “absurdities” he says plague the ad industry.

- Bo Burlingham

You know you’ve entered a different world as soon as you step through the front door of a Toronto-based advertising agency that goes by the name Zulu Alpha Kilo. On one wall, there’s an exit sign that actually says “Elvis,” and on another there’s a crossed-out stick figure that resembles an alien but is meant to suggest no big heads allowed. There’s also a video of people painting a mural that plays constantly on a white screen next to the reception desk.

The agency’s founder, Zak Mroueh, started the mural project in 2008 by putting up a blank canvas and inviting everyone who passed by to pick up a brush and paint. He also installed a stop-motion video camera to record each contribution. The project continued for seven years. The resulting mural was described by AdAge’s Creativity Online as “a masterpiece.” But in 2015, Mroueh decided to paint it over with white paint and use it as a screen to display the seven years of video. “It was just one of my crazy ideas,” he says.

Perhaps his craziest idea is the battle he has been waging against “spec work”—the hours of unpaid creative work that prospective clients have traditionally demanded of agencies that want to win their business. Mroueh had long questioned the practice, which struck him as unfair, wasteful and borderline unethical, and Zulu finally stopped doing it after losing a bid in 2011 because it didn’t have an office in Montreal— even though it had invested $120,000 (USD) to create a spec campaign that the client admitted was superior to the others submitted.