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John Hegarty is one of the world’s most awarded and respected admen. Over six decades he has been at the forefront of the creative advertising industry from the early days of Saatchi and Saatchi to Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH), the global company he runs today (Hegarty on Advertising 2015).
“Creativity isn’t an occupation, it’s a pre-occupation”
He mentioned that there are two types of creativity:
- Pure creativity: coming up with the ideas
- Applied creativity: adding to a creative idea, formatting results
And in my opinion in order to achieve or at least survive in the advertising world you must have at least one of these skills. He then went on about how “creativity must have a philosophy- an idea or a message behind your idea”. “Advertising is like an iceberg- the bit at the top is the advert and the bit at the bottom is the creative idea and all the work that goes into it”. For someone who underestimated creativity now understands the importance of it, without it, it is simply an advert. The principles do not change, practices do, “it was a daring business strategy to have a principle of ‘no creative pitches’- some would say dangerous. In fact, great numbers of fellow advertising experts described it as business suicide.” In order to succeed in an advertising agency Hegarty enlightened us with some pointers to make us stand out and be different, they are as followed:
- More interesting
- Challenging
- Attention grabber
"Simplicity is also a tool that is needed. It is key; power of reduction, complexity destroys ideas."
“Most creative careers only last 10 years- today’s idea will not be tomorrow’s idea”
I also remembered something Hegarty said that stuck to me like glue and made me really think. He mentioned that “creative people transmit their idea, so whatever goes in comes out as an idea”. Thus, if you exclude yourself from being exposed to the world and its creativity, you will have a closed mind with limited originality forever. With today’s society and its continuous use of technology, it dawns on me that we will soon run out of creativity as social robots becomes the norm. Speaking of which, there was a #Lookup campaign that created a buzz on social media about how technology has created a virtual world and how if we don’t look up then we’ll miss our opportunities. Although this is slightly off topic, it was clever how Gary Turk, the creator of this campaign used social media that was the cause of the campaign to raise awareness, please see blog 'Marketing comms in the age of technology' for a similar case study.
“All this technology we have, it’s just an illusion, of community, companionship, a sense of inclusion yet when you step away from this device of delusion, you awaken to see, a world of confusion. A world where we’re slaves to the technology we mastered, where our information gets sold by some rich greedy b****d. A world of self-interest, self-image, self-promotion, where we share all our best bits, but leave out the emotion.”
#LookUp campaign, Turk G 2014
In fact, in a recent article, Hegarty warned that the advertising industry is losing its courage amid dwinding creativity and tighter executive control. “Advertising seems to be pursuing a strategy of making a product worse to be more effective, which I find very confusing”
“we’ve lost the power and courage of creativity to drive our business forward”
Hegarty told delegates that on the whole the advertising industry has a “phenomenal” future but that businesses should be careful not to become obsessed with technological change and remember the creative product is where the focus should remain.
“In our industry we’ve become obsessed with technology, in doing so, it has lost faith a little bit in the value of that big idea and outing it on TV, the value of broadcast” (Haggerty , A 2014)
For more about this article, please follow the link: http://www.thedrum.com/news/2014/07/03/our-industry-has-lost-its-courage-bbh-co-founder-sir-john-hegarty-deeply-upset-state
Also, for an interview with John Hegarty about data and creativity please follow the link: http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/news/1315732/
“Data has never created wealth, but creativity has and does all the time”