I may be wrong but I think with AI and data driven creativity clients today may believe they are moving closer and closer to what they’ve always wanted.

 

The ability to accurately analyze and measure creativity.I remember years ago a creative director explaining to me the Proctor & Gamble ad approval process (this was before the inspired leadership of A.G. Lafley and Jim Stengel.)

 

He said “Bob, it’s like they take a frog and they dissect it. Then they put it back together again, ever so carefully, exactly as it was, but they are surprised it doesn’t jump anymore.”

 

My fear is clients and science may be taking us to a world where frogs don’t jump anymore because they underestimate a simple fact; it’s human emotion that causes us to act, not computer created analytics or AI generated reason.

 

I’m writing this in a bar in New York’s West Village because it’s in places like this when I was an upcoming art director my writer and I would have some of our best ideas in the afternoons and evenings.

 

This was a common way of working then in Australia and London, the places where I built my career. Maybe not in the U.S. I don’t know.

What I do know working in environments like this encouraged play and play encourages creativity.

 

I am the only child of two people who should never have been together. They fought constantly and to shut it out I closed the door of my bedroom and with nothing else to do in there (no TV or anything) I drew my comic book heroes or sometimes wrote my own comics.

 

Eventually when I was 11 my Mother did what she’d threatened up till then and left home.

 

At 13 I left school. I had no idea what to do. At one point I’d thought of being a cartoonist but when I told that to a tough boy at school a kick in the balls sorted me out.

 

So for no reason I became an apprenticed motor mechanic and hated it.

2 years later I got into art school and it changed my life.

 

From that moment on I knew what I wanted to do. I also knew given my background I would need to be very good at it.

 

I think this is the benefit of constraints. When you don’t have a lot of opportunities in life it helps you focus.

 

Give me the freedom of a tight brief is a line I’ve heard.

 

It’s the same as poets who in order to push their creativity give themselves tight briefs such as sonnets or haiku’s.

 

In order to be good I decided I needed to go where the good were so when I graduated art school I went to London, because the greats were either there or in New York back then.

 

If you want to be the best work with those who already are. Work for them, alongside them, with them, and with everyone who touches your work, photographers, illustrators and directors.

 

I started in London as a graphic designer and one day I got a brief no one else wanted, a campaign to advertise pig food to pig farmers.

 

It was this that opened me up to the power of words against visuals where they each could say one thing but together they could make a third. Like the billboard I did for the matt black Parker pen. Only Parker can make a pen this dull.

 

Or the American Billboard I’d seen to convince young men to join the priesthood that showed a picture of Christ nailed to the cross. Blood running from his hands and down his face from a crown of thorns. 6 words only, the line was. “Dare be a priest like me.”

 

I wanted to do work like that. I wanted to do it on Billboards, in magazines and papers and on TV. So I quit my designer job and started working at home on a portfolio of ads I recreated from magazines where I thought they’d missed a good fact.

 

This time out meant selling my car, in fact selling everything I could and putting myself on a starvation diet which eventually put me in hospital, but 4 months later I got a job in the first agency I applied to. Y&R.

 

There I was working with Rosemary Oxley a brilliant art director who ran the best group in the agency. I did some posters ‘Be a Cadbury fruit & nut case” that today are in the Victoria & Albert museum.

 

After only a year though Rosemary left and I was promoted to Creative Group Head at the age of 23, the youngest in the company’s history.

 

And here’s a word of warning: Don’t get promoted too early. Don’t get into a leadership role when you’re still trying to build your own career and are unable to focus fully on the career of others.

 

I was out of my depth and I spent my weekends working with a young writer called Tim Delaney on a portfolio to get us both out of there.

Tim got out ahead of me.

 

Eventually I ended up in what was the best agency in England at the time and arguably the best in the world back then, Collett Dickenson Pearce, or CDP, headed by Frank Lowe.

 

Frank had an intimidating presence, he’d often walk the corridors carrying a cricket bat.

 

Your first challenge working there was to get something to work on because everything was an opportunity to be famous, so every team jockeyed for a brief.

 

That was the power of Frank.

 

Everything had to be approved by him. You’d give your idea or script to production who’d leave it outside his office to wait for his approval.

Sometimes you’d get called down where he’d say “I can sell this ad easily and I will if you want me to, but it’s not a challenge. Why don’t you have a couple of days to think about it and if you’re still convinced I’ll sell it for you.”

 

No one ever went back with the same ad, they always took him up on a challenge.

 

I remember once I got called down to Frank’s office, it was for the first ads ever in the Stella Artois campaign where we’d used the expensive price as the selling benefit.

 

Frank said “I really like these ads, who are you going to get to photograph them?”

 

I said the name of a top British photographer. Frank asked “Is he the best in the world?”

 

I said “No, but he’s really good.” To which Frank replied “But I don’t understand, don’t you want this campaign to be the best in the world? Then why wouldn’t you work with the worlds’ best photographer?

 

Along similar lines Frank would only let us work with 5 film directors. Ridley and Tony Scott, Alan Parker, Hugh Hudson  and Adrian Lyon.

 

By the time I left to go back to Australia to start the Campaign Palace Sydney I was amongst the top 10 most awarded art directors of all time according to the British Designers & Art Directors Association. (D&AD)

Thinking back to my first year at art school I had day school and night school.

 

The night school was to pass the English exams that I never got to when I left school at 13.

 

I had no financial support from my parents, and I’d left home at 16 anyway, so I did many jobs to get me through.

 

One was an early morning start around 4.00am unloading trucks at the vegetable market.

 

If you didn’t get there early enough though, or no one needed help, I’d have to hang around until they were packing up, then for my lunch and dinner I could collect from the ground what they didn’t want.

 

So I can honestly say I’ve eaten out of the gutter.

 

I can also say I’ve dined in a Popes library in the Vatican.

 

I’ve stood alone on the Great Wall of China, and I’ve sat alone in the Sistine chapel.

 

I’ve whirled with Dervishes in Istanbul, and felt spirituality sailing alone on an ocean.

 

All of these gifts have come from a creative career.

 

When I was very young all of my school reports were consistent.

 

“Robert needs to pay more attention” “Robert is a dreamer.”

 

 

“Robert needs to spend less time looking out the window.”

 

But I discovered there was a big world outside that window.

 

A world that would pay me to be a dreamer.

 

I hope if you’re reading this you’re a dreamer too.

 

I hope you work hard to make your dreams real.

 

And I hope you have a life as wonderful as mine.

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This first appeared as a post I wrote for LinkedIn.

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My creative advertising friends and I thought we would be fairly safe from redundancy by AI but we were wrong. It has come for the creative industries first. Today many of my freelance creative friends have not worked for over a year and most won’t work in their field again. In contrast a writer friend has started a company that manufactures, markets and distributes a unique product that I think will make her a billionaire. She has a small team working for her. Joey on dev, Chandler on research and data, Rachel on customer experience, Ross on legal, Monica on operations, and Phoebe on marketing and creative. You may have noticed that they're FRIENDS characters. That's because she built them all. They are all AI. When she needs something done, she can ask the cast, they discuss among themselves and then they come back with recommendations and a point of view. This is an example of how creative can survive in the world of AI. 

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Apart from Posting I will continue though to write this blog without the help of AI. Although I am far from the writer I would like to be, these stories are mine and I feel it is more honest this way because I have lived them.