PART 2
As we dive into the second part of this fascinating conversation, we continue to challenge the norms of research, strategy, and the evolving role of creativity in advertising. Delving deeper into how much emphasis agencies place on research to shape brand strategies, Gareth raises thought-provoking points about the over-reliance on traditional methodologies and the rise of independent thinking in today’s marketing landscape. What happens when we strip it all back and burn the old rulebook? Read on to explore bold ideas on how to navigate the future of advertising in an AI-driven world.
So we, as an agency, spend a lot of time on research and strategy, and it’s important for us because it gets us to not just understand the actual brand, but we get to understand their audience or their ideal audience better. Do you not think it’s as important anymore? Or how do you view research and strategy?
There are some things that don’t need a strategy, and it’s pretty simple to know what you need to f***ing say, and then you need to go a different route, and sometimes, I’m saying we apply too much of methodology. We’ve lost a lot of independent thinking and no disrespect to data, which recently has been proven to be a lot of bots, which leads to research, which leads to strategic decisions.
Strategy, I think, has always been part of advertising. I think we just gave it a different name and split the roles, but I think really back in the old days, when there weren’t strategists and they were just sort of your account managers and your creative director, and then I think they were performing some form of strategy. We just made it its own role in the science and then did what we always do, and over-analysed it and got to a point where most of it, as you’re reading out the slides, you know you’re talking bullshit. You’re either talking bullshit or you’re talking about redundant things. Of course, there are things we all know we’re just vomiting over to our clients, and a lot of strategy is just going and repeating and repeating and repeating, and again.
That’s why I think there are too many people screaming, making noise, rather than people doing the core of what we started out doing, which was making brands stand out.
But how do you do that without research and strategy? How do you make them stand out? What would be your process? If you’re not doing the research and not doing the strategy, how do you get that result?
I’ll give you an answer, but you probably can’t use this answer in your interview, and I’d probably appreciate it if you don’t because this is IP…
[bleeeeeeeeeeepppppp]
…I f***ing promise you now that’ll work.
I’m upskilling and going very heavily into AI. I really think about what I want to contribute because I really don’t want to get stuck back in one of the big agencies again, making work, selling plants, leaving work at the end of the day, feeling like you’re conning people. I don’t want to be a contributor to the big machine that I don’t believe is working.
I encourage everybody to watch a movie called Art and Copy on YouTube. It’s about the history of advertising from the beginning of DDB. The beginning of DDB is basically where it all started getting cool because they left those big old traditional agencies and they started something new.
And that’s where the Volkswagen campaigns in the 60s came from, all the way to the modern era, just before digital. And those are the original principles. And those original principles of marketing have not changed.
Take me as either A, jaded, or B, antagonistic of the big agencies, how they’re doing it. I just sincerely, in my heart, believe it’s time for something new. Radically new. I don’t think I’m about to embrace AI quickly enough.
We need to be listening and at the edge of the new things that are happening. If you go onto YouTube now, or TikTok, or anywhere like that, and watch “how to make a successful Instagram channel”, or “how to make a successful YouTube channel” or whatever, you’re gonna get a bunch of feedback from people, right? And you’re gonna get a whole bunch of tutorials, a lot of statistics and feedback on how to do it. But most of them are talking to other people like them; one person at home who wants to make media that stands out, and therefore they make recommendations like nine by 16 is best, you have to go vertical. Now, our eyes aren’t vertical, my eyes don’t work like that. It’s that simple.
Okay. But for these guys, who are making videos with their phones, who are designing videos for these specific channels, yes, it’s very, very good advice. But now what we’ve got is marketers and big buildings and things like that watching these videos on how to make YouTube. And then they’re telling these people how to do it. And everybody’s an expert.
The world is in the biggest stage of the Dunning-Kruger effect that it has ever been in, where everyone you speak to is an expert on absolutely everything. And we’re forgetting the core principles. And nobody’s going, let’s work through this together. Maybe let’s fall down once or twice, let’s maybe do the wrong thing. Let’s do this. Or let’s try it a different way.
Maybe there are different things to do. I mean, there are a lot of interesting things that have happened in marketing. There’s the Blue Ocean Strategy, which I know you guys know about. And there are a lot of very interesting principles that have happened that have opened up that make things very cool. I think there are still a lot of feet stuck in the mud of the old world. And what I’m saying is that I’d like to encourage people to rethink the entire thing.
So stop for a few seconds, and think about the whole thing. And think, where do I fit into all of this? How does my client fit into this? How can I help my client’s lives better? And it may not be the traditional way. And when they ask us to put price tags on things and how much this is going to cost… it’s hours, guys. Whether you’re paying for the hours on data, or you’re paying for the hours, or you’re paying for data. It’s the same thing. It’s conversations and moving forward together.
But I think there’s a lot more ‘together’ that needs to happen, a lot more partnership, and a lot more of remembering the old principles that have been there since the 1800s. And are going to be there, still moving forward, and have not changed through radio or any of the other mediums. And we need to, A, stop panicking. Because I think 90% of the advertising world is in a massive panic.
Well, digital technology is changing so rapidly. I mean, it’s hard to keep up. And we’re the ones that have to keep up. We’re supposed to. We’re supposed to know what we’re doing and where we’re going.
It’s literally impossible. We are all already redundant. Right now, we are redundant because of our thinking. Of the way we’re approaching things. AI can do it better than what you can do it. AI can do conceptualising better than what I can do conceptualising. And AI can do layouts and design better than Lynette can. The thing is that it’s happened. Skynet one, the robo apocalypse came in. The robots have taken over. They’re here. They’re doing it. How do we use that to move our clients forward? How do we help our clients? How does that become something that becomes a benefit to our clients? And how do we show our clients how to use that, teach them to use that, following all the principles? That’s the new world.
So, again, you say the world has changed so much. Mine is, it’s still essentially the same. We have a tendency to overcomplicate.
You make valid comments. We’ve discussed it in-house as well. How do we move with what’s happening now instead of trying to fight it or panic about it?
Yeah. At the core, literally burn everything. Burn it all. Burn all. “We need to do strategies”. “We need to do this”. “We need to do that”. There is no need to do anything. Everything we’ve been taught, everything you went through at Capstone, all of the stuff that we’ve accumulated over the years, there’s good stuff in there that we can take forward. But I encourage, burn all the old thinking. There are 20-year-olds without our luggage. And they are going to take everything and do everything because we’re holding on to our luggage and our systems. The younger generation is thinking completely differently.
Have you guys heard about the… I’m sorry, it’s done in a very misogynistic way… but they call it the “different phases of men”. They talk about an employment world. First of all, you had the company man. He was going to join one company in his twenties, just after school, and he was going to work his way up. And so he got as high as he possibly could in that same company without jumping. Hopefully, he’d then get a watch and retire one day. That was the company.
The next generation weren’t company men. They were career men. And the career man was all “I’m going to do my skill, but who I do it for will change depending on who’s willing to pay me the most.”
The new generation doesn’t think like that at all. They don’t think “careers”. They don’t think about jobs. They think about projects. If you speak to really, really young guys, they think I’m going to do this for a few years. And then I’m going to go do that. And then I’m going to do this for a while. They’re constantly learning. They’re constantly adapting.
We’ve got so much baggage and change and systems in our head of the way things have been. I have a certificate in Flash. It’s completely redundant. It doesn’t work. And we’ve realised that a lot with technology. You’ve been very good at realising that with technology. And like you say, you’ve been very, very good at your team moving forward, thinking about how you can do things in the new way.
Burn the thinking process. Burn the process process is what I’m saying. Your strongest writer, your strongest assets in your agency at the moment, are probably no longer your designers. Your strongest visual assets in your agency are probably the writers who can write most like J.R. Tolkien, you know, like very visually. If they can write very visually and they’re very good at expressing themselves with visuals of words, they’re probably a better asset than a designer sitting next to them. We have to think about the entire structure. What I’m saying to you guys is not that it’s changing. It’s changed. It’s happened. It’s done.
So take away. Don’t panic. Burn everything. That’s going to be the headline.
Don’t panic. Burn it all. And all the ways you thought. Make yourself 20 again.
We are those same hungry 20-year-olds that we were. I don’t know about the two of you, but I’ve never thought of “Gareth as the 16-year-old”, “Gareth as the 20-year-old”, “Gareth as the 30-year-old”. I’ve always just been Gareth, always just existing. So it’s very easy to go back to the mentality of “it’s all very exciting, and there’s a whole new world of change, and I can do better than the guy next to me”. If you can free your mind up to that point, then maybe we don’t need to do ads as ads were, or we don’t need offices, or whatever the new ways of working are.
There are so many new ways of thinking and I don’t think enough of us older guys know how limited we are by the amount of systems and shit that we’ve heard over the years. I mean what science is there that Lynette’s going to be taken more seriously in a meeting if she wears a jacket? But we’ve been told that meeting is jacket time.
But maybe the most effective meetings happen where we’re all wearing comfy sweaters or sitting on couches or uncomfortable. Let’s rethink the way we do things is what I’m saying.
In Mozambique, I actually went to a meeting and they offered to lend me a jacket because I didn’t have a jacket. They said the company policy is you have to cover your shoulders.
Exactly, there are places with these systems.
We’re really free, there’s a lot that can be done, there’s a lot of possibility. South Africa economically is starting to look good for the first time in like quite a while; it’s quite exciting. I’m quite into sustainability, and I just got back to the country, and I was looking at what’s happening. We’re at the forefront of drone farming. There’s so much awesome stuff happening here. This country has so much potential, and that’s going to be new business, and there’s going to be new ways of communicating.
If you guys want to go look at a mess, go look at the fintech market as a communications market. That is a crowd of people screaming because there are a thousand startups every day. They’re all over the place, they’re all these high-energy places, no one knows what they’re saying, it’s bright, it’s colourful, it’s the hardest thing to understand in the entire world. But these are the new clients, that’s what I’m saying.
How are we going to sell those new businesses? The world is evolving at a rapid rate. What are we going to do with all the unemployed people? Are there new ways to do recruitment? Are there new ways to do things better than what’s happening at the moment? And I just encourage anyone with creativity, especially people who are lucky enough to be surrounded by other creatives to just go, what happens if we set it all on fire? There are no systems, there are no different ways of doing anything, how would it work? Try that.
I think the way things are moving, is obviously very much in the direction of AI. But AI is just everybody’s way of thinking. The whole world’s put together and summarised. Same with design, it’s always pieces of everybody else’s designs put into one.
So the best way to think about AI is like this. AI is very simple. There was a 16-year-old guy who posted three episodes on YouTube on how he can do research, data, and analysis on anything for free, that is a higher grade than what people are paying 300k for on reports.
And the comments are all “I’m a scientist and you’ve done this wrong and you’ve got that wrong and you didn’t do this and you didn’t do that right” and the last comment is the dude who posted the videos and he’s saying “thanks to everybody for your comments, I’m going to implement them into the new system and the AI will function more effectively from tomorrow”.
Last week, they had a problem where AI was generating a lot of images that were dark, and we’ve had problems with generating the fingers on the hand. It’s all been solved. You can now set up your own personalisation of the way you generate images, which means you can set up CIs. So any problem you mention is solved tomorrow. You’re probably not the first to think of it.
Final question. What advice would you give aspiring creative directors… if they’re going to exist in the future? How would they make their mark in the industry?
I think a good creative director is somebody who wants to teach and learn and run things and do something. Because, to be completely honest, it’s very, very different from the skill set that we learn the whole way up. It’s actually bizarre if you think about it.
They go, junior writer, writer, senior writer, head of writing. You’re a creative director and you’re like, oh, you don’t know what to do. What do I know about art? We’re all locked in these situations. Even the concept of a creative director is kind of flawed. Why do I have more authority to tell somebody to do something than somebody else?
I would just create these creative directors, whether they’re just starting, whether they’re all men who are 60. We all have access to the same stuff. And the world is changing, and it’s happening at a rate. Just rethink what’s possible. And go back to that young, hungry, I’ve just left college. There’s this whole open world. Not this, I’m 30, 40. There’s this system we have to work in. Get out of that.
Move with the times, yeah. Okay, and very, very last question. What advice would you give your younger self? Career advice.
There’s a lot. I’m not sure you want to get into that question, but I’d probably say my younger advice is, but I was in a very different situation.
As I said, it’s just a job. It’s just a job, like everything else, it’s a job. Make sure you’re enjoying life. Make sure you’re going out there on the weekends. Make sure you’re celebrating your family. You’re everything else. You’re not curing cancer. You’re not saving babies. You’re not Superman. Your name will be forgotten. You’re not Van Gogh. Can anybody actually name any of the big madmen?
You’re not important. So, balance life with everything else and don’t chase fame is what I would tell my younger self.
AI is saving babies now, apparently. There’s a new AI-only hospital in China.
They’re performing operations now. It’s crazy.
The operations that they’re performing are surgically more precise and have less chance of failure. If you go and you look back at how many misdiagnoses and sh*t, just last week AI beat doctors at the medical exams and was more accurate in treating patients than the doctors were.
There are a lot of things that’ve come and gone, and there’s the bad. You guys know there was that one court case where the guy won a court case because AI had done its research and researched a fictional court case that wasn’t real. He presented it in court as if it was real.
He won the case, and the whole world was like, okay, that happened. There are limits. The truth is, this here is going to change absolutely everything. What are you doing with it?
Exactly.
Even if it’s not AI, it may change its name to something tomorrow. There’s going to be another thing. There are neuro transcripts and shit they’re talking about at the moment.
Maybe learning AI is not the right thing to do. What I’m saying is to change your outlook. The way it’s being done today is moving at such a forward rate that you have to get into the mindset that even though you may have achieved success yesterday through route A, it might not work today.
Yeah, approach every project with a new way of thinking, I guess.
Always a new way of everything.
