Terry Crews has enjoyed a fruitful 30-year career, first as an NFL player and then an actor. But all this time he really wanted to be behind the scenes—bringing ideas to life with the creativity that’s come naturally to him since he was a kid.

“A lot of people don’t know this, but I had an art scholarship before I had a football scholarship,” Crews told Ad Age in an interview this week. “Even when I was in the NFL, I would go in the locker room and ask the players if they wanted their portraits painted.”

When his playing career ended, Crews almost got a job at NFL Properties as a designer, and later got his drawing portfolio into Disney, DreamWorks and Hanna-Barbera. But with the rise of Pixar in the mid-’90s, hand-drawn animation jobs largely dried up, and Crews fell into acting.

Still, his desire to be a creative never wavered. And now, after years of bouncing between entertainment and advertising, he’s merging the two by starting his own agency, Super Serious, with two longtime ad veterans—creative director Matt O’Rourke and producer Paul Sutton.

O’Rourke and Crews have been working together for the better part of a year. (Sutton came aboard a few months ago.) They were behind a well-received stunt at South by Southwest this year, where Crews revived his Camacho character from the movie “Idiocracy.” But their splashy advertising debut will come this weekend, when a mini-musical they’ve made for Impossible Foods will air during the Tony Awards.

The Impossible project is a reunion of sorts. O’Rourke worked at McCann in the early 2000s with Peter McGuinness and Leslie Sims, both of whom joined the plant-based meat company in 2022—as CEO and chief marketing officer, respectively. 

Directed by Jake Scott, the 90-second spot is a free-wheeling, tongue-in-cheek journey through the history of meat—presenting plant-based Impossible not as something you have to be guilted into eating to help the environment, but as the next evolution of great-tasting protein (with saving the world as a side dish).

In format and execution, “Making Meat History” embodies the Super Serious philosophy at its core, the founders said—that if it’s not entertaining, it’s not worth it. This is second nature to Crews, with his Hollywood background; O’Rourke and Sutton have long prioritized entertainment in their work, too. Sutton was a producer on Burger King’s famed O.G. internet campaign “Subservient Chicken,” and O’Rourke worked on Old Spice at Wieden+Kennedy for years, where he and Crews did the “Muscle Music” campaign together. (O’Rourke and Sutton teamed up for a time at Crispin Porter + Bogusky as well.)

“Every single thing is a chance to entertain,” said O’Rourke, who most recently was chief creative officer of Atlanta-based agency 22Squared. “We operate with an understanding that if we entertain people, everything else falls into place.”

“Old Spice was viewed as entertainment for years—people would watch those commercials for a half hour straight,” said Crews. “At the time, no big actors wanted to do it. Ten years later, every major star has to have a campaign. I like to think Matt and I had a hand in that—in changing the way people thought about what entertainment could be. And we see no limit.”

Look back: Terry Crews illustrated Ad Age’s cover (from 2017)

Among the Super Serious projects currently in development are two unscripted series, a short-format game show, the ongoing Camacho project (in which “Idiocracy” director Mike Judge is now involved) and two go-to-market consumer products. Impossible Foods is currently the agency’s only advertising client.

It’s an ambitious mix of content formats—and for Sutton, most recently chief operating officer of Circus Maximus, a refreshing step outside the norm.

“I love never doing the same thing twice,” he said. “Looking at game shows and series developments and fictional characters’ presidential campaigns [the Camacho stunt]—it’s a way of taking the skills I learned in the agency world and broadening it to a wider market. I appreciate that we’re not doing a bunch of pitches, we’re not talking to a million agency consultants. We’re doing projects we want to do.”

Play is at the heart of it all. Even the Super Serious name reflects this—a winking way to suggest they’re not overly serious at all.

“I’ve worked for giant agencies, and for the best independent in the world, and I’ve found the best work comes from people who don’t take themselves seriously,” said O’Rourke. “Also, Terry has this great observation. When someone’s doing standup and the audience leans in to see where the joke is going, they’re always dead serious. So, it was those two things—we don’t take ourselves too seriously, and you’re always super serious right before your biggest moments.”

Inspired by Maximum Effort

Entertainment-driven agencies are having a moment. The Super Serious founders said they’re inspired in particular by Maximum Effort, founded by Ryan Reynolds and agency veteran George Dewey. Reynolds is well known for loving advertising as a creative vehicle, and the agency’s lightning-fast productions skillfully riff on pop culture, selling through entertaining—much as Crews likes to do.

Super Serious has actually partnered with Maximum Effort on an upcoming campaign—a sequel to a 2022 effort where Reynolds and his Wrexham A.F.C. compatriot Rob McElhenney filmed their colonoscopies to raise awareness of colon cancer. Crews-as-Camacho will star in this year’s version.

“I did ‘Deadpool 2’ with Ryan—Ryan gets it,” Crews said. “It’s almost like Ryan gets me. I’ve been doing this [mix of advertising and entertainment] since I was pulling cheeseburgers out of my pants in ‘The Longest Yard.’ Those were actual McDonald’s Quarter Pounders. We didn’t see a problem with that. Other actors would have been like, ‘I’m endorsing a product.’ I was like, ‘No, I’m entertaining the world.’ That was our mindset. Ryan thinks the same way.”

Super Serious wants to mirror Maximum Effort’s speed of production—and it helps that Crews has built his own studio in Los Angeles, where they can shoot smaller-scale things. But they want their model to be different, too. Whereas Maximum Effort has a full staff (even if the creatives tend to serve as their own account directors), Super Serious is planning, for now, to remain just three employees. They’ll staff up with freelancers for every project they take on.

“I thought you had to pay through the nose for the best freelancers if that was your model,” said O’Rourke. “What I’ve found is, if the project is good, you can work with just about anybody at a very fair rate. There are a lot of very talented creators out there who’ve been sitting in agencies working on the same three things for years. Being out in the world, trying different things—it’s really helped us.”

The agency also bills by the project, not by the hour, and it plans to limit its projects to just a handful per year. In fact, Super Serious offered not to work on other branded projects—and didn’t—while this one was being made.

“I can’t say we’ll always do it that way, but we can’t fragment our thinking,” O’Rourke said. “I do think we will always severely limit the number of clients willing to work with. We don’t want to be an AOR for anyone. We’re doing project work only. If you work on one thing for a long time, you get dull. Being able to move around a little more is good for everyone.” 

The exclusivity with Impossible has led to a second campaign, a handful of spots in which beef burgers engage in amusing passive-aggressive banter with Impossible burgers. 

As branded projects go, O’Rourke and Crews said the Impossible campaign—both the mini-musical and the absurdist shorts—was a dream. And they’d like it to be a model for the kind of flexibility and immediacy that comes with small, senior teams working together.

“I’ve known Leslie since she came up with the Staples button 20 years ago. We were able to be fluid with every aspect of the creative process,” O’Rourke said. “They were in every Google Doc, every script. We heard over and over, ‘Our last agency didn’t let us do this.’ But they couldn’t. It’s not built that way. It’s just the three of us, and creativity’s the only point. It actually really worked.”

“Matt and I worked together years ago, so it was an easy shorthand to dig in together, and Terry was fantastic to work with as a creative behind the scenes,” Sims said. “The team's iterative process in both developing and producing new work throughout the summer was definitely a strong sell point. We feel lucky to be their first client—we had their full attention, and we could feel that.”

Crews, as well, said he was thrilled with how this first project went—that it felt like improv, in the best way.

“We just kept adding and adding. It was almost to the point where we had to stop,” he said. “It is like improv. You say yes, and things build and build. We were improvving with each other. We had this grill—Smoky the grill—that we anthropomorphized during the [musical] shoot. It wasn’t planned, but everyone was like, ‘Wow, this is really working.’ So Smoky became our little R2-D2. It’s a very small example of when you’re open to trying thing and an idea starts to just blossom. That’s what creativity is all about.”