Ted Malenfant | Next Creative Leaders
By Laurel Stark Akman on Feb 15, 2024
Now in its ninth year, Next Creative Leaders is growing, expanding, and showing the world what advertising and design can be when you lift up every voice on your creative team. In the future, Next Creative Leaders hopes to continue to uplift women, trans, non-binary and gender expansive creatives as well as focus on growing the diversity of voices we honor. Below, co-founder, Laurel Stark, introduces some of the Next Creative Leaders to keep an eye on.
Ted Malenfant
Copywriter, Wieden+Kennedy Portland
Pronouns:
he/him/they/them
Based:
Portland, United States
Hometown:
Nantucket, United States
How did your upbringing, family, or culture shape you as a creative?
Nantucket screwed me up!
It is beautiful and weird. It’s filled with insane people. Friends who take teeth out of dead seals and make them into necklaces. Old lesbians who helped raise me, taught me how to fiberglass and who saved my life by introducing me to the L word. Then there’s Linda Zola, my teacher of ten years, who didn’t have chairs in her classrooms, only books and no math (which is illegal now and maybe was then?). Ice storms that strand you. Hundreds of empty houses on an island desperately in need of housing. And then for three months the 1% show up and you’re faced with the highest level of privilege. It almost feels like yours. And you may benefit from it. But it never is yours. And on the other side of that there are all the people from all over the world who make it happen. Being surrounded by all of that made me sensitive to the way the world works and thankful for the ladies at the bakery who saved ‘the tomboy’ a chicken patty in the morning.
My answers won’t all be this long.
What is your “breaking into advertising” story?
I’m not sure if Lauren Ranke will remember this, but when I was 22 I got an informational interview at WK. I had no experience, and a really useless excerpt from a thesis on ‘Androgyny in Postmodern Literature’. No surprise here, Lauren said ‘I don’t think you’re cut out for this’.
Sometimes I think if she hadn’t said that I’d be a bored but rich lawyer somewhere and I curse her name. Because cut to my competitive ass four years later crying like a baby when she called me with the WK internship. Lauren, if by any chance you read this, with all my love, fuck you!
What made you apply for Next Creative Leaders?
Ashley Veltre forcibly made me apply. No way in this world I would have thought to do this.
I’m putting her on blast here because her forcing me to do this is sort of the purpose of this whole thing embodied: she sees my worth in a way I don’t, made space for me, and lifted me up. If I wasn’t on testosterone I’d probably cry, but it shrinks your tear ducts.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned this past year?
Who raised you as an advertising baby matters. Thank you Matt Sorrell, Jason Kreher, Ashley Davis-Marshall, and a lot of other great people for letting me be a completely insolent, emotional, brat, and listening when I spoke my mind anyway.
I am in awe of senior level creatives who have made it despite not having someone who found the time for them. Time to give feedback. To explain why you didn’t nail it, and show you what it takes to nail it. To go to bat for you. If you don’t have that. I don’t mean to be dramatic, but run. Even if your boss has a million awards, if you don’t mesh, run, or at least walk quickly in the direction of your nearest compassionate human.
What’s the piece of NCL winning work you’re most proud of and why?
The Nike 'What the Football' work we created for the World Cup is definitely a piece I am currently still freaking out over. I grew up playing soccer. I still play. To be able to make ads for women's sport in a fun, irreverent way, that didn’t talk about the struggles of “women’s sport” and instead embodied the same type of playful energy Nike treated Michael and The Ice Man and Tiger with? Just super rewarding and meaningful and a full circle moment.
You were a lacrosse coach before you worked in advertising. What are the most transferable skills?
Know your team. As a coach you don’t/shouldn’t have to be friends with your team. But you have to know them. Know what they need. What makes them tick. How to utilize them so they have a meaningful impact regardless of whether or not they are your star or your bench player. That’s how you win.
I’m scared that in this industry right now not enough leaders know their team because they are busy scrambling to win in a game that’s changing. But you don’t win when the coach is the one trying to do the winning. Instead you get ads with Ice Cube in them.
What does leadership mean to you?
This isn’t what leadership means, but it is what I think a leader should do:
- Give people purpose.
- Give them agency.
- Find the time for feedback.
- Tell them the truth.
- Don’t revert back to the team that’s easiest because they think like you.
- Understand that there are people who don’t feel comfortable with you because they are not like you, and if you do the work, they hold the key to the best work you’ll ever make.
- Learn to craft that work.
- Grow your people without ego.
- Give them more than you had.
- Prepare them to take your job.
- Prepare them to be better at your job than you ever could have been.
Don’t get lost, the people make the work.
Sometimes it’s like driving a bus. People might talk shit about you behind your back. But your purpose is to keep them safe and get them where they need to go.
"I'm scared that in this industry right now not enough leaders know their team because they are busy scrambling to win a game that's changing. But you don't win when the coach is the one trying to do the winning."
What is your secret creative super power and how do you flex it?
I wish I was a savant. But I’m not.
I’m a reader. Of books. Of people. Of strategy. Of client's faces.
Of brand executive’s husband’s LinkedIns.
I overthink. I overwrite….as evidenced here.
I will never wake up one day, rip a bong and say, ‘We Have The Meats’.
But I might login to JSTOR using my college email and read a thesis on the history of soap.
And get to an Old Spice idea. And that’s just how it is.
How are you leaving the work and the workplace better than you found it?
I want to make really good work that feels like it’s never been seen before, and then I want to help other people do that too.
It takes a lot to make that happen. I’ll mention one part. Throughout my career I felt like I was neither fuckable nor did I remind my bosses of themselves. I had to find bosses who would see me and deal with me. I really hope I make space for people to feel more seen and to not feel like they are slipping through the cracks. And not because I'm altruistic, but because I know those people have the good ideas.
Who is inspiring you right now and why?
My sister. Anything remotely cool I do or say I likely stole from her: @madelinemalenfant. (and to be clear I’m not someone who blindly supports my family).
If you could go back in time, what would you say to yourself, on your first day as a professional creative?
I’d say don’t be so competitive.
It’s going to feel bad.
It’s going to feel like people are taking more than they are giving. They are.
It’s going to feel like that one dude who’s making double your salary is looking at the work on your desk and other people’s desks in the morning and selling them as his own.
He is.
Who cares? He doesn’t have ideas you do.
The more open you are with your ideas the bigger they will get.
The more you give your ideas away the more you will realize you are full of ideas.
Full of promise.
Then young me would say ‘Screw you, buy me a coffee I’m broke’.
What type of story do you feel born to tell?
That’s in progress. **Watch This Space**
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