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Since Andrew Irving and Cain Calderón-Leon co-founded Rhubarb 2017, the agency has produced key art and other assets for ABC, CBS, Fox, Hulu, Netflix, Paramount Plus, Peacock, Max, Prime Video and more. No piece looks alike and some of it looks like it would better belong on the hallowed walls of the Metropolitan Museum of Art than in the steamy tunnels of the NYC subway.

‍Spotlight chatted with Rhubarb’s founding partner and chief creative officer Andrew Irving on how he approaches key art, how he works with fine artists to produce elevated entertainment marketing and what makes a good key-art photographer.

‍Spotlight: On Rhubarb’s website, it says, “We were born in the era of streaming entertainment, so we approach projects from a newer perspective, discarding processes that no longer work.” When you say discarding processes that no longer work, what do you mean?

Andrew Irving, chief creative officer, Rhubarb: Because we’re in the streaming era, there is so much more content. And there aren't these siloed networks. There are so many more opportunities for work. In the past, agencies were very cutthroat and competitive, very focused on getting sales and getting jobs. The streaming era allows agencies to be more focused on the creative as opposed to fighting tooth and nail to get jobs. 

Spotlight: I feel like that should be true – that streaming allows for more opportunities. But I've heard both sides, that the business has changed and people feel they can't compete. Do you truly feel there are more opportunities? Or do you feel like it's about positioning yourself correctly to take advantage of those opportunities?

Irving: We're marketers, so we position  Rhubarb in a targeted  way. Part of it is our  embrace of art. We work with a lot of artists. I see that our competitors seem to work  with the same sketch artists, and the same retouchers and are very budget cautious. Rhubarb, in a way, threw caution to the wind in favor of coming up with some good art, especially as we were starting out as  a new agency. I thought, ‘If we do some great work, the money will come.’ That has happened. But it's also about the way we have positioned ourselves. It wasn't extremely deliberate, but we started working a lot with Indian and Latin American and European clients. Because of that, when the writer’s strikes happened, we were working with all these international properties. During that time, I heard a lot of our competitors say that they were hurting. And we weren’t, because we were working internationally where they weren’t striking.

Spotlight: How did you get that work? 

‍Irving: It was all through Amazon and Netflix. Just as a business model, they were bringing in international titles and programming.. Rhubarb's first project ever was Narcos Mexico. Even though that was a property of Netflix that was done for North America, it attracted attention from clients from Mexico and South America. 

‍Spotlight: Do you think because these newer companies – like Amazon, Netflix, Apple – have bigger budgets and are pushing boundaries creatively, that has given you some room to play? 

 Irving: It doesn't depend on the client, per se, because I don't even think of Netflix, for example, as a single client. It's like all of these mini clients within Netflix, and the marketing executives there have such autonomy, and  some of them are willing to take a chance and to put their budget into the art. It does take money to invest in an artist. You can't say to a fine artist, ‘give me 50 ideas.’ For example, for Narcos Mexico season three, we had an incredible fine artist, Gustavo Rimada, do an  epic painting on canvas with acrylic paint. 

The client, Chelsea Cozen [senior manager, global creative marketing] at Netflix, was courageous enough  to say, ‘let's go for this.’ We discussed that there wouldn’t be an opportunity for revisions, since this wasn’t being created digitally. It takes a high level of commitment and courage on the client's part to do that and that is hard to find.

Spotlight: When you're brainstorming ideas for key art, where do you start? What comes first: the key art or the campaign?

‍Irving: It really depends on the client and the project. Sometimes the client has a very specific idea of what they want and our job is to execute it in the most artful and effective way possible. Sometimes they are very wide open and just let us run and play and figure stuff out. I wouldn't be able to tell you where we start, because we're a team of individuals, and each individual has their own process, and I think it depends on the project too. If they have a script or if they have episodes to watch or the film to watch, I love starting there. 

I think it’s so important to absorb everything that you can about the series or the movie, or project. That's a good basis for brainstorming and coming up with ideas.

Spotlight: In the digital era, I think key art is actually more important than ever because it exists in a lot of places. What's your sense of the use of key art and why it is important today?

Irving: Sometimes I think that what we are doing is superfluous. But then I think, this is going to be the identity of this film or series forever.

I worked on Suits for USA Network a million years ago. Then it comes back and becomes a big hit on Netflix. So you never know when it's going to come back. 30 years from now, they're still going to be using that Narcos Mexico art. 

A lot of these entertainment properties are beloved, like The Office and Breaking Bad. People really have heart for these things, and it's a really important part of their lives. So creating the identities of something that is dear to people’s hearts and emotions and memories is, in fact, important. 

Spotlight: What do you think are the elements of good key art?

Irving: I think that simplicity is super duper important. I hate to keep bringing up Narcos Mexico, but all three seasons that we did were very complicated in a way. But there's also a simplicity to it, as far as the color palette, or the style. Some of the art was actually pretty chaotic, but it had a color palette and a style that unified it and made it simple, in a way. Good key art is very direct, it hits you and you get it right away.

‍Spotlight: When I think about key art, I think about photographers, although I recognize that's not always a piece of it. But how often do you include photography in your key art and if it's relatively often, what do you think makes a good key art photographer?

Irving: I love photography, and I have a lot of photographer friends. There are some photographers outside of the world of key art that I love so much and have actually worked with, but they're often not great key art photographers. When you're shooting for key art, you have to be super flexible, and it's difficult to balance your style and ego with providing the needs of the client. You hardly ever encounter a situation where you come up with the idea for key art, and you go ahead and you shoot it, and that's how it ends up. You are always dissecting it, pulling it apart, changing the colors, moving people around, and all of that stuff. There's a mentality of flexibility that is necessary to be able to provide for that.

‍Spotlight: Do you feel like you need somebody that's willing to serve another vision and not necessarily their own? 

Irving: It's a balance because you bring in a photographer for their vision, for their style. 

You want someone that's good and who actually does have ownership of their style. But their ego can’t be so big that it takes over everything, and then they become inflexible. But I see so many posters out in the world, where all that is good about the photographer's work is reduced to something that's pretty generic, and I hate that.

Spotlight: Let's talk about AI. I think the AI conversation is really interesting because it's sort of presented in the media as this giant threat to creativity. But when I speak to actual creatives, I haven't found anyone that sees it that way. What's your sense of AI, and how are you using it?

Irving: AI is just a tool to help you brainstorm, help you create concepts faster, help you present ideas more efficiently. It helps you express your creative vision to a client in a clearer way, and it even helps you define your creative vision. 

I'm a terrible sketch artist, even after taking drawing classes. But now using AI, I can take ideas that I would normally need to sketch up, and I can use AI to help me express them. 

‍Spotlight: What are some of your favorite pieces that Rhubarb has done since opening in 2017? 

‍Irving: Definitely Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. That poster and that campaign really was special, because of the power of its simplicity. 

And then we worked on the next season about the Menendez Brothers and that was a great experience to help direct the shoot, working with legendary photographer Dan Winters, and for our team to create the art. I really love that art as well and I love them together as a suite.

‍Spotlight: As a highly creative person who seems to be living the creative life, what is the coolest creative thing that you've seen lately? 

 Irving: My favorite fashion  brand is Comme des Garçons, which was founded by Japanese designer Rei Kawakubo in 1973. Every season, the collections get progressively more high-concept and often ridiculous, and I can’t get enough of it. 

Spotlight: How much does fashion influence your key art?

Irving: It’s probably more influential to us than any other agency. It's pretty important to Rhubarb, because it's pretty important to me. 

Irving is wearing Comme des Garçons Hommes Plus, and a corsage by Willy Chavarria. Photo by Reese Sherman, shot on location at the International House of Pancakes.