Danny Altman
Founder and Creative Director
Altman was born in Coney Island in the middle of the last century. He grew up in Flatbush in the shadow of Ebbets Field, and was relocated to the suburbs of New Jersey, where he relived the Second World War, building models of aircraft carriers and fighter planes and reading every general's memoir he could get his hands on. Then one day, he picked up Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo, and the next thing he knew he was picketing on Hiroshima Day in Passaic, New Jersey.
Under the cover of studying Romance Languages and Literature at Princeton, he started "The Experimental College" to teach forbidden courses, brought in underground luminaries like the Kuchar Brothers and Humphrey Osmond, headed the anti-eating club movement, and in his spare time organized the overthrow of the student government. After a brief stint at Columbia Architecture School ("I failed calculus.") he taught fourth grade on the Lower East Side of Manhattan through a series of teachers' strikes. He then decided it was time to settle down.
Altman learned to write copy at the feet of Jim Symon, a transplanted British copywriter who came to New York in the late sixties to shake up American advertising. Jim worked for Jack Tinker & Partners, where every creative team had its own suite at the Drake Hotel, and then started his own shop. His formula for writing copy was very simple: imagine that you are sitting at a bar having a conversation with a friend.
Altman worked as a copywriter at a number of New York agencies and then started his own firm. His partner was Bob Manley, an illustrator and sculptor who grew up in a fundamentalist family and watched his first movie at age 18. They opened an avant garde agency in Boston which grew to 35 people and did many groundbreaking projects, including the first TV campaign for Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream. Altman & Manley convinced Erroll Morris to do his first TV commercial, lured photographers like Arnold Newman and Elliott Erwitt into commercial work, discovered unknown painters in East Village galleries and put them to work on client projects. "We had no fear, our clients loved us, and our friends at other agencies would always ask us, "How do you get your clients to buy work like that?"
Altman moved to San Francisco in 1989 to run the west coast office of the agency. After Manley died following a long bout with cancer, Altman started A Hundred Monkeys, and decided to focus on the crucial early days of a brand, when the mistakes could be fatal and the right decisions could really help it take off.
“This is a true life adventure story,” Altman says. “I get to play a lot of roles. Sometimes I’m a therapist, sometimes a strategist, sometimes a creative director. I get to go wherever the problem and my instincts take me. The work is always personal. Take away the relationship with the client and it means nothing.”
A Hundred Monkeys operates out of a former auto repair shop in Mill Valley, which is fifteen minutes north of the Golden Gate Bridge. |
