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TOKYO: London creative Steve Henry traveled to Tokyo last week as Grand Jury President at ADFEST from 20th -23rd July.
Henry has a reputation for being a creative who loves to break rules. In its heyday, his agency HHCL created irreverent, hilarious campaigns that made the agency famous. In 2000, HHCL was named Campaign’s Agency of the Decade.
ADFESTbuzz caught up with Henry to ask how start-up agencies nearly killed the entire industry by focusing on profits, not creativity…
What are your impressions of Asian creativity after judging ADFEST last week?
It’s been a difficult time for creativity generally for various reasons, certainly in London there seems to be low morale at the moment. But here in Asia it feels better, there seems to be more confidence and experimentation. There’s some real innovation, some great fresh thinking going on.
You told the ADFEST Jury that the most valuable thing creatives do for their clients is curate ideas. What did you mean?
Curating ideas – as opposed to just coming up with them – is a trend we’re going to see more of. We already have crowdsourcing, and I think selecting and editing ideas is going to become a much more valuable skill set.
This raises another issue, a very thorny issue, which is analyzing why agencies seem to have lost a lot of the power in making decisions. I heard Frank Lowe speaking recently talking about the early days of Collett Dickenson Pearce, which was the best agency that ever existed in London. CDP charged very high fees and Frank Lowe felt that what their clients deserved in return was the agency taking responsibility for picking the right work.
Why don’t clients trust agencies with decision-making anymore?
These days, marketing is seen as much, much more important than it was back in the ’80s, when nobody really understood how potentially crucial having the right marketing is. Ironically, one of the results of this is that clients have lost confidence in their agency’s ability to make decisions for them, so they’re either making the decision themselves and/or using research.
What’s wrong with research?
I don’t think research has ever been the right way to choose creative work. Research will always lead to average ideas: 6 out of 10 ideas, 5 out of 10 ideas. Research is not the answer.
How did research companies become more influential than agencies?
It’s a hypothesis, but I believe clients lost their faith in advertising agencies primarily because traditional agencies didn’t come to grips with the digital age quickly enough. So when clients were asking, ‘What do we do online?’ agencies were saying, ‘I don’t know.’
So clients said, ‘Well, shit – I’m going to have to look after this myself’. Therefore, the decision-making crept back across to clients.
Is there a solution?
I think it will become apparent in the next 2 or 3 years that the current system we have doesn’t produce the best creative work. So I think we’ll see lots of smaller shops opening up that are focused on creativity and have high creative standards: shops like Droga5, Mother and Crispin – they have those standards.
I think we’ve gone through a generation where the creative focus has dissipated, and it’s almost been the death of advertising as an industry. In London, we’ve had 10 years of people starting agencies really to make money, not to be creative, and that’s damaged our industry beyond repair.
HHCL was Campaign’s Agency of the Decade in 2000. What was your vision when you launched the agency in 1987?
We just decided to break the rules whenever we could. The essence of creativity is to understand how your competitors do it, and then break the right rules. In order to do that you essentially need two skill sets: first, the courage to break the rules, and secondly, clearly it requires a certain amount of intelligence to break the right rules and not the wrong rules. That was our vision and it was very successful for about 15 years.
For Part 2 of this interview, don’t miss the next issue of ADFESTbuzz
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