It’s a tad ironic that one of the great creative minds in modern advertising, Sir John Hegarty, thinks the clues to the next creative revolution are found with influencers and individual creators – a new creative class spawned by the tech-social platforms that are deeply linked to the societal unrest and divisiveness he posits is blowing-up “left-brain dominated” business, media and marketing as we know it.

Hegarty, knighted in 2007 for his creative work, was in Australia this week to talk and meet with Australian signatories to his Val Morgan-backed Business of Creativity program – 3,000 people worldwide have so far completed the eight-part road map on reigniting creative cultures in business at large. 

The communications and marketing sectors are at a “cross roads” and a “moment of crisis” but Hegarty laments most of its practitioners are stuck in a psychological state called “group default”. 

CMOs and marketing leads, for instance, should rebadge their titles to “entertainment directors” because they “need attention before engagement”. Influencers and the creator economy, Hegarty says, are a clue to what the hippies and creative types triggered in the 1960s cultural revolution. For good measure, Telstra’s CMO Brent Smart and Publicis Groupe Chief Media Officer Imogen Hewitt were in solidarity on the demise of creativity although were less convinced about a creative revolution if it meant the return of the hippies’ “terrible clothes”.

Burning issue

“I’ve never read a business book that has said to succeed you must make a worse product. But it seems to me our industry is making a worse product. We are genuinely losing support. And the issue is why do we struggle to adopt change? Why do we not, in a sense, embrace the situation that we’re in?” per Hegarty. 

“Psychologists call it group default. There’s a test that’s been done where you put somebody in a room, smoke starts to come into the room and they get out very, very fast. If there are 20 people in the room, they will sit there. We think, oh, it’s all right because everybody else is sitting here, rather than saying ‘get the fuck out, it’s on fire’.”

As an industry, Hegarty says “we seem to be sort of constantly investing in things that don’t work”. 

The rise of data, he argues, is important to inform but is still illusionary for genuine innovation, creativity and connection with customers and audiences but “not consumers”. Henry Ford, Apple’s no data iPhone breakthrough, Nokia’s fatal obsession with data and Taylor Swift are all instructive tales for today. 

“Absolutely no data went into the creation of this product, none at all,” Hegarty said, pointing to his Apple iPhone. “Absolutely none. However, Nokia had lots of data, and the data said, make it smaller. And they were doing that and what happened? They made it so small they disappeared. Because they listened only to the data. They didn’t imagine something.”

Chief entertainment officer?

Taylor Swift’s global takeover with her Eras Tour was precisely what marketing and business needs to ape – entertain and land attention before thinking about engagement.

“We’re in the entertainment age. People like Netflix, look at what cinema is doing, how we spend time in those kind of worlds has grown and grown and grown. Is it time for a rebrand of job titles? Those job titles are important. They describe what you do. Should we be calling marketing directors ‘entertainment directors’?”

Hegarty said many will deem it a “daft idea” but pointed to the auto industry – car and mechanical engineers are now software engineers. “Should our industry do that?”.

Influencer revolution

In a wide-ranging articulation of his worldview on creativity and business, Hegarty leans to hippies, influencers and the individual creator economy as a pointer to what might be part of the next “creative revolution” which “has got to happen”, he says. 

“That creative revolution will come out of something that’s happening in society. The last great revolution we had was in the 60s. It came out of a dissatisfaction with the way people were being spoken to, the over reliance on science, the over reliance on logic. And out of that kind of period, in the 50s, the atomic bomb, people became disillusioned with science, and at the end of it, we saw the extreme version of that… the hippies, who, by and large, were mostly right about most things, apart from their clothes, which we’re truly terrible.

“So I think we have got to have another creative revolution. I think that’s got to happen, and it’s got to come from something within society, something that is happening that people are saying, ‘I’m disillusioned with the way things are’. It may be about being stalked [online]. It may be that brands aren’t delivering value. We’re not talking the Kardashians, God forbid, but I think influencers could be a big, big change. It’s a very, very interesting time and a very interesting place. And I think influences could be a big, big change.”

Creative capability build

In a panel discussion after Hegarty’s keynote, Telstra CMO Brent Smart backed Hegarty’s views and said marketers were primarily responsible for driving the role of creativity in their organisations. “Marketers get the work they deserve,” he said. At Telstra, Smart said the business had to “build creative capability” and it wasn’t found in a “magic black box”. 

He said Telstra spent tens of millions of dollars on media and because it was such a large investment “and that’s where most of the money goes, we spend a lot of time measuring it.”

The same went for marketing technology at Telstra. “If I look at my leadership team at Telstra, look at the capabilities, we’ve got immediate capability on martech, all this capability across different areas and then there’s creative – it’s like ‘the agency does that’.”

Wrong, said Smart.

“You’ve got to treat creativity like a capability. We should be training marketers, coaching marketers, teaching what great looks like. The creative capability is the most important capability in any marketing department. But we don’t treat it as such, and I think that’s part of the problem.”

De-risk delusion

Smart said another problem in corporate environments is “we spend all our time trying to de-risk things. The creative act is inherently risky. For creativity to thrive, you need people to stick their neck out. I think it’s totally on marketers, not agencies”.

Smart said a two year initiative at Telstra around creative excellence had polarised the team but the overall creative capability was being measured and is on the rise.

“We can see a tangible lift. Where we’re really seeing the lift is in the smaller things that are really easy to walk by in the marketing department. If you really mean what you say about creativity, then you’ve got to care about everything.”

Perhaps surprisingly, even a top media agency executive is backing the creative mantra.

“You spend lots and lots of money on media but if you put great ideas into great media, you can spend less,” Publicis Groupe Chief Media Officer Imogen Hewitt said on the panel. She backed Smart’s point on risk. 

“We are trained to be very risk averse and so it’s more difficult to sell in great leaps of faith, an interesting idea, than it is to sell in things where we have got so sophisticated that we can pretty effectively predict what will be the outcome of a media campaign. It’s very difficult to do that with a creative campaign. The question for me is, there’s so much evidence that great creativity drives more efficient media – but we still don’t do it as often as we should. That’s the thing for me that I don’t fully understand.”

Which led right back to the British Knight, who quipped. “Group think, group default. We need more creative people leading companies.”