Where patterns are broken, new worlds can emerge.

A life beyond advertising.

I have a love-hate relationship with Commercial Creativity.

By Commercial Creativity I mean the loosely defined name given to a group of activities from the marketing function in a business, to those who help those marketers do what they need to do, the advertising, media and branding agencies and everything in between.

I was for a long time of this world: Chief Strategy Officer of EMEA, Global EXCO, Global Creative Council for the then named Y&R - VMLY&R (and now VML) and then Chief Marketing Officer for the United Nations World Food Programme.

I did lots of things in those roles, some of those are still part of my life, but they are no longer all of my life.

This is a short exploration of the lessons I have learned at the coal face working first with myself and then others as they chose to stay or leave that space.

Staying in your lane: the good, the bad and the ugly.

When Commercial Creativity is at its best, it is the best of things: smart, creative people, pushing boundaries, often at the forefront of technology.

It can be the most invigorating kind of job. It is a wonderful mix of art and science. Its skills are transferable across geographies and cultures, you can travel the world.

There are many things I miss, but many that I don’t: For agencies in particular, there are the late nights and cancelled plans. There are pitches that can go on for years, where there is an extreme level of resource and sacrifice and often no reward for those who have lost.

Despite significant efforts, it’s still not the best industry at looking after its people, at adapting to the evolving needs of those who work in it, not really, not overall.

Careers also tend to be quite linear and often discipline specific. When you get a little longer in the tooth, there are few places to go, and unless you are near the top, it can be a strange place.

Even though there are attempts to change the balance of those entering the industry, wherever you are in the world, it still feels pretty homogenous in terms of the kinds of people working in it. This is both ethically challenging, but it is also functionally dangerous, because there is a lot of evidence for how much better heterogeneous networks are at creativity.

Whether Commercial Creativity likes it or not, much of it is also deeply rooted in the way capitalism worked in the past, with what worked then. It is an industry that finds it hard to change, because it is bound to a different way of being.

But it’s also an industry that is able to change minds and behaviours like few others, it can and should be the engine of getting us out of this climate mess, but only if it can change its own mind.

This is a new era of demand switching and fueling the transition to cleaner alternatives. Commercial Creativity can and should at the front of that change, but right here, right now, it is not.

This is a struggle a lot of us feel, it’s a difficult balance between exploiting how to make money now, whilst exploring how it can sustainably make money tomorrow.

There is one other big challenge and it is a very personal one.

There is a lot of sameness in the work. I don’t mean the outputs, I mean in the inputs, in the making. The same things comes up time and time again. The subject may change, the year, the focus, the budget but there can be an unsettling sense of déjà vu. People get bored.

Some can weather this storm, some never feel it, many can’t and many do.

This is not industry specific, far from it, but it is something that causes many to ask - Is this it? Isn’t there more?

Seek the metas, the bridges out.

So what’s to be done if you are bored, frustrated? Where can you go? What can you do? For that you need to explore those gifts that the industry and its people share:

They can have ideas on demand, often under great pressure with limited resources. They can help get businesses out of a tight spot with clever thinking and bold action. They can set up business to create future demand unlike most other industries.

Because they are often category agnostic, they come to the party without the pre conceived conventions, without institutional knowledge of a specific sector, they can see things others don't, because they don’t know what they are supposed to see.

It is culturally adept. It understands cultures because it is often either a mirror of those cultures or, when it is really good, a driver of them.

It is very good at persuasion and the pitch. It can tell compelling stories, it can get people to lean in and stay in.

It is scrappy, it has hutzpah. This is an industry that can be unreasonable in the pursuit of results. It can balance risk and reward. Because of this it consistently gets interesting things done. It is very good at finding what my Oxford colleague Paulo Savaget calls a ‘Workaround’ (his ‘The Four Workarounds’ is as smart as it is insightful, as unique as it is useful, I can’t recommend it enough), which is ‘…a creative, flexible, imperfection loving problem solving approach’.

It can do this because it is also a place of diplomacy, where different agendas somehow find their place. Done well it can do something very difficult - compromising enough to get stuff made, without losing what makes it worth making.

‘Where patterns are broken, new worlds can emerge.’ Tolkien

These are skills that can be used in lots of different places beyond the industry, they are valuable, they powerful, but they have their limits.

Those edges are perhaps best defined by an idea that is called: ‘Going upstream’.

I know where it comes from: it is commercially interesting: for agencies there are different, bigger pots of money if you can help in a broader, bigger way. For agencies and marketers alike it is also technically interesting, these are very different kinds of problems that are much deeper in the business and challenging in their scope.

This is a world where those meta skills, whilst useful, can only get you so far. It’s like peering up the river, seeing the destination, but only having a rubber dingy, a small paddle and knowing you probably need a motorboat.

It is here I found my limits, it is here you find my decision to go back to school.

When I did, I realised there were questions I wouldn't have got anywhere near asking, and who’s answers I couldn’t have even begun to approach.

Stuff like this…

How do markets form? How do they die? How do you think about commercial logic when you are about supply push vs demand pull? In a nascent space, full of ambiguity and nuance, how do you claim, demarcate and then control it?

(It has always struck me as a little odd how little marketing actually looks at markets themselves).

How should we think about what an entrepreneur is? Should we see them more as system builders who reconfigure value constellations and networks?

How should organisations think about knowledge brokering cycles? Where even if organisations are good at finding ideas, most of them aren’t great at reusing them in other places, in other ways?

How do you find genuinely radical business ideas? How are they different from the much common incremental ones? As start ups seeking to break markets and create new ones? As incumbents trying to challenge themselves before someone, or something inevitably does it for them?

It’s only because I have explored different areas, asked different kinds of questions, found new ways to think and do, that when I return to Commercial Creativity, which I often do, I am not only much better at it, but also I am much more interested in it.

I see it differently now, I see its real potential. I feel like the fire has been lit again.

My ambitions and limitations they presented were difficult to accept, it has been a challenging journey, but my god it has been worth it.