Creative choreography

Technology can help inspire creativity, but it must be steered by human understanding, says TBWA’s Chris Garbutt.

Advertising sits at the intersection of art and commerce, says Chris Garbutt. The global chief creative officer of TBWA\ Worldwide was in Dubai recently to attend the network’s annual meeting of creatives, hosted by regional network TBWA\Raad. That agency’s recent campaigns – many driven by strong cultural insights – made it Agency of the Year at the 2018 Dubai Lynx and the region’s most awarded agency at the Cannes Lions.

Garbutt is keen to emphasise that computers are not coming for the jobs of creatives, and we must be wary of those who see automation as a creative short cut.

“My belief is that with artificial intelligence (AI) and programmatic buying, what’s going to happen is it’s going to create a sea of sameness,” he says. “It’s going to blast out a lot of clutter and rubbish that people don’t want. And that is a huge opportunity for the creatively strong in this industry, because it forces us to be even more creative to cut through that.”

Nor does Garbutt believe AI should be used to churn out versions of ads to fit all tastes.

“I think people will rely on AI to do a lot of versioning, and they will rely on AI a lot in terms of the heavy lifting in terms of making the end product, and I don’t think that’s going to be the useful role of AI,” he says. “I think that human beings with big ideas and lofty platform thinking need to be the choreographers of how that message gets deployed and personalised, in a way. Then AI is the tool to get it out there and customise it, for sure.

Big, relatable ideas still have primacy, says Garbutt: “At the heart of everything it’s really very simply. You’ve got to really understand your audience intimately and you’ve got to come up with an idea, a platform that is modular enough and customisable enough to reach millions of people and at the same time still means something very personal and valuable to the individual.”

That is why TBWA has an “in-house cultural insights studio”, called Backslash, which produces a daily three-minute video about insights or ‘edges’ and is maintained by about 50 ‘spotters’ in offices around the world. Through tracking global trends and local events, it can come up with insights such as those behind the #SheDrives campaign for Nissan in Saudi Arabia that celebrated women being allowed to drive in the kingdom, addressed their fears about how the men in their lives would react, took a stance on women driving and picked up awards around the world.

Backslash can help TBWA spot global trends (Garbutt mentions recycling and survivalism from recent years), and pinpoint how to tap into them. It is not making any creative decisions on its own.

Garbutt compares the use of this technology to the electric guitar. Few know who invented it (and fewer agree on a name), but it is the musicians who made those instruments sing that have shaped popular culture. In other words, it’s not about the technology but what you do with it.

“I think it’s what you do with the data and what you do with the cultural insight and edges that makes all the difference,” he says.

Brands can fall into a trap of navel gazing and self-reference, warns Garbutt. They prefer telling consumers about themselves rather than focusing on how they can help their customers. It’s a fine line of distinction, but a crucial one, as brands today must be able to relate to their customers. Or vice versa.

“Creativity these days is not just about a big idea; it’s about being contextual and understanding, timing and place of the audience, the platform and the moment,” he says.

Today there is a space for brands to take more moral ownership, says Garbutt. In a time when people around the world (pre-Brexit UK and a Trumpian United States might be the most obvious places) are looking away from traditional sources of leadership, brands have potential to provide a bit of a moral compass. If they do it right. “My point of view is if it’s authentic to a brand to have a point of view and they are truly making a change at scale and having a real impact then it’s the right thing to do,” says Garbutt, although he cautions: “If they are just jumping on the bandwagon gratuitously , taking credit for something that they are not really changing and being part of, then that is the fine line.

You can see this shift in the work that is being awarded internationally, he adds. “There was a big shift last year at Cannes from the year before. There was a lot of work that had a moral compass, but brands were associating themselves with a purpose, to last year when brands were getting more ahead of the problem and being part of the

WE AS MARKETERS ARE IN A PRIVILEGED POSITION, SITTING WHERE WE ARE, TO CREATE PURPOSEFUL BRANDS THAT CAN ACTUALLY HELP PEOPLE CHANGE THEIR WORLDS FOR GOOD, BIG OR SMALL.”

solution, and not only encouraging change but also taking part in that change.”

Two years ago at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, Garbutt interviewed the British photographer Platon on stage. Garbutt says: “He turned on the audience and he said, ‘ You have the ability to reach millions at the click of a button in an instance. What are you going to do with that to change the world for the better? And who’s going to be the next Gandhi in the audience? You may laugh at that but the power is in your hands to do that these days.’”

Garbutt agrees with Platon: “I truly believe that we as marketers are in a privileged position, sitting where we are, to create purposeful brands that can actually help people change their worlds for good, big or small.”

TBWA has long billed itself as The Disruption Agency, but in this age of empathy and collaboration, is disruption still relevant?

Garbutt says yes. Disruption at TBWA doesn’t mean upsetting people’s routines; it is about avoiding clichés and perhaps disrupting the way people think about products and services. Disruption and collaboration are not mutually exclusive.

“It’s a methodology for us,” he says. “I think a lot of people misunderstand disruption as something that upsets the market in a negative way, or messes things up and creates havoc. And that’s not what it means at all. It’s pretty simple. We do a convention hunt and find a convention in the market. And then we define the vision of the brand. And then we find a disruptive, business-transformative idea to get to the vision. And that becomes input for the brief that helps us find platform thinking. And when we are really great at that we end up with wonderful, evergreen platforms like Gatorade’s ‘ Win from within’ or Apple ‘ Think different’ that last for 10 or 15 years.”

This process allows the creation of a big idea. Although many are saying that this year will be a more tactical one for the industry, as clients focus on short-term sales over long-term brand-building, those disruptive visions can still provide strategy from which those tactics can flow.

“We decided four years ago to really put the focus back on being the disruption company and owning disruption,” he says. “A lot of people are bandying that around as an expression and appropriating it and using it in other networks.

Disruption, in the TBWA sense, comes from creative human insights. Technology can help creative minds catch and analyse trends and edges, but it can’t make that leap for us. That is a step that only a human – who understands other humans well – can make. And when they make the right step it can make all the difference.