Steve Henry on being Grand Jury President at AdFest (plus a few other observations)
Londoncreative legend Steve Henry travelled to Tokyo last week as Grand JuryPresident at AdFest. Barbara Messer caught up with Henry to ask him whyhe believes the last generation of up-start agencies nearly killed theentire industry by focusing on profits, not creativity…
What are your impressions of Asian creativity after judging AdFest last week?
It’sbeen a difficult time for creativity generally for various reasons,certainly in London there seems to be low morale at the moment. Buthere in Asia it feels better, there seems to be more confidence andexperimentation. There’s some real innovation, some great freshthinking going on.
You told the AdFest Jury that the most valuable thing creatives do for their clients is curate ideas. What did you mean?
Curatingideas – as opposed to just coming up with them – is a trend we’re goingto see more of. We already have crowdsourcing, and I think selectingand 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.
Why did the agency you founded close?
The partners fell out and were fighting amongst ourselves, which is always the first sign of trouble. We also sold the agency, which is always a bad idea because it puts money ahead of creativity. I think to really be a true creative agency you’ve got to be able to part ways with clients if it’s not working. We sold to a PR group, but then the PR group sold us to WPP when they fell into financial trouble, and that didn’t work.
I think for me the essence of a creative hotshop is you have to have independence. You have to be in a position to say, ‘It’s not working with this client. Let’s find another one’. Which is what we did for 15 years.
What are you working on now?
I’m working with a digital agency called Albion in London, I work with Current TV, which is owned by Al Gore, and I lecture, write books, I do lots of freelance, just keep very busy really in the spirit of doing new things. Anything that breaks down the status quo is a good idea. Advertising is a criminal waste of money. It’s absolutely diabolically an inefficient industry. Huge sums of money are spent, 95% of which is wasted, so the industry should really be exploring, experimenting – but it doesn’t. It’s got stuck and it’s got scared.
You were on the Jury at AdFest’s 1st festival in Chiang Mai. How does it feel to be back 13 years later?
Great, actually. The judging system is done very well so it’s good to be back. It’s my first time in Tokyo. When Jimmy Lam (AdFest President) rang me and said, ‘You’re going to be in Tokyo,’ I was very pleased.
Any highlights?
I always enjoy judging because you get to see fresh work, you get to meet new people, you see really interesting experimenting going on. In the democratic process of judging, the most interesting, spiky stuff doesn’t always get through. I love that. That’s not a criticism of the judging process, it always happens at every awards show.
For me, it’s a hugely competitive industry and I’ve never liked that element of advertising. So it’s always nice to get people coming together and as much as possible putting that competitiveness away and just celebrating good work.
