karl desmond johnson

SVP, Creative Director
Area 23

Karl doesn’t belong in advertising. Growing up in Brooklyn, he admired the work of local legends like Cellino and Barnes over global giants like Coca-Cola. He spent his childhood absorbed in literature, film, and video games, learning how to create worlds with words alone. He hated the inauthenticity of the average ad and never considered studying it when he went to NYU. Instead, he received his bachelor’s degree in psychology and creative writing, and spent the next 8 years working in the healthcare industry, writing short stories, and honing his skills with a camera.

Karl wasn’t supposed to be a creative director. His entrée to agency life was an accident, a classic case of being in the right place at the right time with the right—seemingly random—assortment of skills. He wasn’t supposed to last long, thrown to the biggest clients in healthcare with little more than raw creativity and determination. And he was an “other,” a Black face in an industry that ain’t.

But Karl knows how to get in your head. His innate ability to understand the motivations that drive behavior, as well as his desire for deeply felt human connections, have made him a creative and strategic powerhouse. It’s helped him build corporate identities and branding for cutting-edge biotech clients. It’s also helped him build entire brands—and careers—from the ground up. For many, his meteoric rise in advertising came as no surprise: after helping some friends relaunch a creative agency, he returned to Area 23 as an SVP, Creative Director.

Karl hasn’t been banned from the advertising industry yet, but until that happens, he’ll continue to be a contrarian, promoting diverse, weird, and outsider ideas in an industry that’s been insular and exclusive for far too long.