Creatives Now: Ryan Kutscher

If he had chosen differently before enrolling in Miami Ad School a few years back, Crispin Porter + Bogusky associate creative director Ryan Kutscher could have ended up in a kitchen instead of a Boulder meeting room. "It was a 50/50 choice about whether I was going to go to ad school or to culinary school," the 28 year old says. "I feel like I could always cook as a hobby, but what happened is I now really just enjoy going to restaurants. When someone else does all that hard work, it's really easier to appreciate it."

Of course, there hasn't been a shortage of hard work on Kutscher's end since he chose advertising and joined Crispin in 2004 as a copywriting intern, working his way up to ACD via his contributions to One Show, Clio and Andy's gold-winning work for Burger King as well as Cannes Grand Prix-awarded campaigns for Method and Volkswagen.

Currently, he's riding high on the Punk'd-styled "Whopper Freakout" campaign that's had sustained play on TV and has garnered plenty of attention on the web. Shot last summer in a BK location in Las Vegas, the ad features several unsuspecting, highly perturbed customers who are denied their request for the fast food chain's most celebrated product. "For some reason, it's had that appeal that people just talked about it," Kutscher says. "It's one of the few things that non-advertising people were really interested in. We knew we had the Whopper—this iconic sandwich which was, technically speaking, through marketing research, considered America's favorite burger. The gut reaction was that well, we better not give it to people. It was just a very organic prank which then developed and people just loved watching it."

"We're just always trying to make some noise," says Kutscher, who is currently working on more BK projects, along with product design initiatives for clients he cannot yet reveal. "To get a reaction from people is one of the marks of the work that I like to do. You might get people to hate you or love you, but you just really want them to react. Finding yourself in the middle ground is a really big no-no. The work courts controversy and I think that's important."