John Shaw (Superunion) — Creative Stimuli in Advertising vs. Design
Creative optimism, left-field client briefs, and the differences between advertising and brand agencies.
John Shaw, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at Superunion
John went through the traditional school of strategy aka “account planning”, having started his career at JWT, one of the birthplaces of the discipline. After senior strategic roles in agencies such as Wieden+Kennedy and Ogilvy & Mather, he transitioned from advertising to brand design, joining then Brand Union in 2013. He took on the role of Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer when Brand Union became part of Superunion in 2018.
John has worked across three different continents and with some of the world’s biggest companies including Microsoft, Nike, Coca-Cola, Disney, Amazon, Huawei, Vodafone, Shangri-la and British Airways. He recently published an article on the future of workplaces without traditional office spaces.
As part of the interview series Strategic Minds, we talked about slightly unusual client briefs, finding cultural insights, the differences between brand and advertising agencies, and more.
Please note that this interview is an edited transcript of a conversation John and I had in person earlier this year (before the pandemic).
You’re the Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at Superunion — what does this role entail?
Obviously, people have different definitions of what innovation actually is. One thing I found out is when you put innovation in your job title on LinkedIn, you immediately get a whole load of people selling digital innovation tools of various types.
But I would say my definition of innovation is a bit broader than that. It would be both how we help clients innovate and how we innovate ourselves in our products and what we do for people, and how we work.
The thing about brand agencies is that it’s not necessarily completely defined what you do and what you don’t do. We have a lot of potential to do new things in certain areas. And to some extent, we have to decide what’s more important. There’s various areas, digital experience, voice or sound, communication. Do we develop our verbal identity skills or do more high-level consulting? There’s all sorts of opportunities.
I like to work on real things, not just theory. There isn’t any scope for people who are just purely theoretical these days.
If we look at it from a client perspective, what are some of the challenges that your clients face and turn to you for?
There’s a whole range of things now. Historically, people would come to a brand agency when they had issues around how they organize their brands — brand architecture and things like that. Do we have a single master brand or do we have a series of sub-brands and these kinds of questions at a strategic level, but also at a more executional level.
They might say, “our identity, visually, we’re looking a bit dated” or “we don’t like it” or “it’s not working very well”. Often they come to you because the identity that they developed in the past might not work so well in a mobile context. In a mobile context, we’re dealing with a lot of smaller spaces, or there’s opportunities to animate it more. Those are very classic problems.
But the complexity of the marketing world and globalization also raise a lot of other more left-field questions clients have. Sometimes they come to you with a thought and won’t even know if you do it. We launched an airline [LEVEL] a couple of years ago. I got the initial call and the client said, “well, I’m not sure if this is really what you do, but we have a new airline to launch very quickly. We need everything. We need a name. We need an identity. We need a positioning. We need an idea. We probably need a communication platform. We need a view of what the digital experience and the in-flight experience should be.”
Then you’re really conceiving a brand from the very outset. And that’s obviously great. But you don’t get those very often.
That sounds exciting. What’s another example of these more left-field challenges, when clients identify a problem where there’s not a specific answer to yet?
Sometimes you get these less traditional questions from corporate brands. For example, we worked with Coca-Cola a couple of years ago on how they branded their sustainability plan in Europe.
That wasn’t just Coca-Cola, the brand. It was quite prominent around the bottlers who don’t always commission projects together. But in this case, obviously, it’s a connected problem. If you went back a few years, a sustainability plan would have been something that lived in the corporate communication department. And it would have been a plan. It would have been some Word document or PowerPoint. But now, because it’s so important within their business and their system and their partners and to retailers, and ultimately to consumers. So how do you make that as powerful and alluring and understandable as possible? That was a nice, slightly different project.
Superunion is “built on the spirit of creative optimism”. What does that mean for you personally?
This phrase came about at a point when we’ve got five companies coming together into a new company. We were trying to think, “What is it going to be built on?” At that point, everybody’s searching for the spirit that’s going to unite us. So we sit there, thrashing that around. You try lots of things and people are like, “oh, that’s not quite right”. And then we had a meeting and we were feeling our way towards it. One of the Creative Directors said, “well, maybe it’s kind of creative optimism”. And we all said, “Yeah, that’s it. That feels right.”
Compared with a lot of brand agencies, I’d say, we probably lean a bit into the creative side in that we have a pretty good track record on awards. If you look at it over the years, some of the work’s been really nice and there’s lots of people here who are very good designers.
At a more strategic level, we do believe in and are optimistic about the power of creativity to help with big and small business problems. That it’s not just about execution, it’s not just about what things look like, but that to some extent you have to have creativity.
Creativity has a role inside companies that are trying to deal with quite major issues, topics like sustainability. Finding imaginative solutions to real problems, there’s room for creativity. And it’s our belief there’s a lot that creativity can do in that area. That’s a strong belief within the company.
You wouldn’t come here if you weren’t somewhat excited about the power of creativity. If you just wanted strategy and a consultancy type offering, there’s probably lots of other places you could go to. The people who would come here might want smart people around them, but they would also want to have some sort of application. Something they could be proud of. And to use creativity along with more analytical skills.
They’ll still come to us with bigger business problems but if they don’t value the end product and think there’s some value in presenting yourself well, then they probably won’t come here.
Is it becoming more of a challenge for large organizations to be creative, to bring in creative thinking as opposed to being purely analytical? There seems to be a tendency to focus on metrics and making everything quantifiable.
Yes, that’s interesting and we’re doing a lot of work in this area with some clients as well. There are some organizations like AB InBev or Burger King that fundamentally believe in having a creative culture and building real creativity into the heart of their organization. And others where that perhaps isn’t understood so much.
But one of the things that have changed in the agency world is the fact that so many clients have decided they need creativity within the organization as opposed to buying in from agencies. Many tech companies have Chief Creative Officers now. They might have whole groups of people that come from agencies or other parts of the creative world.
The challenge or opportunity is there are also vast amounts of data that people have access to, often very, very fast. How do you combine the power of data with the power of creativity in a way that’s going to drive the business and make it succeed against what it is trying to achieve? Which, these days, may go beyond business growth, but also into sustainability and so on. Trying to get that balance right is definitely a challenge.
How do you approach that challenge? Are you advocating for more long-term thinking, trusting intuition, or do you bring in research findings on long-term brand building?
Historically, the things that we do are probably somewhat under-measured and under-researched. But that falls partly into the innovation area as well. Trying to understand what the right way is to apply data and research to the type of thing we do is definitely part of it.
There’s a fair amount of intuition in there. But there’s also a lot of drawing inspiration from the visual world. And looking at what’s going to make a compelling story.
When you compare brand agencies with more traditional advertising agencies, what would you say are some of the differences?
That’s a good question. I’ve really only worked for one brand agency so I couldn’t speak for the whole of that. But I think they are quite different. And of course, the ad agency world itself is changing a lot. Some companies wouldn’t even call themselves ad agencies anymore.
When I first started out in advertising, it was very much a retainer business. The clients would be with you potentially for years. And you would be doing ongoing work and trying to think long-term. You’re not particularly worried about how you allocate your time because there’s a big retainer that’s covering whatever is important, whereas brand agencies tended to be more project-based businesses anyway. So they probably operate in a slightly leaner way anyway. But, of course, the ad agency model is moving a little bit towards that, as they know some of those big retainers are things of the past. That’s one difference.
The other difference would be, often we will do a certain number of projects here that are more or less strategy only. Perhaps a few more than an ad agency would traditionally do. Without exaggerating or stereotyping too much, but still almost right from the get-go, in ad agencies, you’re thinking, “what’s the creative brief going to look like?” In the past, you’ve probably even been thinking about “what is the TV ad going to look like?” Whereas in a brand agency, you probably often get projects where there’s a fairly big chunk of strategy to do right upfront that doesn’t necessarily have that sort of outcome.
And then there’s style differences as well. It’s different working with designers than it is working with classic creative people in an ad agency, just slightly different types of people.
And there’s also a difference in strategy and a difference in the emphasis in strategy as well — I mean, some of these things have changed over the years and the stereotypes aren’t always true. But nevertheless, classically, as a planner in an ad agency, you used to be described as the voice of the consumer in some agencies. You’re definitely putting a lot of effort into understanding consumers and the consumer world and a certain amount into understanding the client’s business and so on.
In a brand agency, typically the balances may be slightly the other way. You spend a lot of time understanding the client’s business and what they’re trying to achieve and what some of their business issues are. You do need to understand the consumer world as well. And in both cases, you also try to understand the competition and the market context. But there’s a slight difference in balance or emphasis.
There is actually a lot of opportunity for a strategy function in a brand agency or an ad agency to combine all the elements in a powerful way so that you understand business, the competition, the consumer. You understand culture as well, because that’s often considered very important in some ad agencies and probably isn’t typically quite so much top of mind in a brand agency. But it can be very powerful. They all matter and if you can combine them all, then great. And data.
How do you make this connection to a certain culture, how do you bring that in here?
We’re often creating things that are supposed to last for quite a long time. So they might not necessarily tap into something kind of ephemeral. Having said that, if I’m thinking about the airline [LEVEL], we were launching everything. You do need to make the moment arrive. It just needs to feel like it’s hit some kind of nerve, that it’s fresh and that it taps into things that are going on.
Obviously, you can study a lot about culture by looking at online behavior and what people are talking about and what people are reading and what people are viewing and what they’re saying in forums, but also getting out into the real world and seeing where people shop or hang out.
You might interview a researcher who spent an awful lot of time with a particular audience and talk to them about what they saw going on, trends with that particular audience.
We have our own global network, but on certain projects, we might tap into strategists around the world from other WPP agencies to get a take on, “what’s the local context for this and where might this fit in with local culture?” If you’re working with Nestlé, for example, they’ve got a lot of brands that are quite decentralized. They do a lot of local things. And you need to understand local culture to make these things happen.
How do you make sure that what you’re creating is alive in the internal organizational culture, and in how the company communicates?
The internal culture is interesting because there is a job to make sure it translates. If you went back a couple of decades, you could almost see the brand as being separate from the internal culture. Internal culture was one thing and the brand was almost a piece of marketing that lived outside that.
Now, anybody can go onto things like Glassdoor and see what a company is like. It may not be a completely accurate representation of what that company is like, but you can at least see what people are saying about it. There are all sorts of other ways in which the insides of companies and the outside are now blurred into one. It’s all very connected and transparent.
So it’s important that the brand, as it’s presented externally, also makes sense in some way for the people inside the organization. Working out what the story is, the brand story, if you like, is pretty important. If somebody says, “well, why is your brand this way?”, then we would hope the employees of a company would be able to say something sensible and interesting and compelling about that and not just say, “oh, well, that’s just a bit of marketing.”
Historically, a lot of brands were built by heavy way of advertising. People might be seeing lots of short films about the brand, which were going to give meaning to the brand in a real-life classic sort of storytelling way. There’s not that many brands that are able to do that anymore because of media fragmentation and because it’s often an expensive way to do so. People might not be getting the meaning of a brand so much from TV advertising anymore but they’ll still pick up the meaning of the brand from any interaction they can have with it. Part of our job is to make sure that even when they just get a little piece of the brand and it’s very instantaneous, we want that to mean something.
If it’s on mobile, for example, it might be pretty small, it might be quite fleeting. There’s interesting questions about getting everything to hang together and tell a story quickly. And so you have a debate, “How much of a story can a logo tell? Is it ridiculous?” Or the name — does a brand name work? Some people might argue that a brand name or a company name doesn’t matter because who knows what Persil means. But then other people would say, “well, but actually, if you can have a name that means something and connects to the rest of the brand, that’s a good thing”. If you’re starting from scratch, you probably want it all to hang together in some way that’s fairly easy to understand.
What shifts do you see in the industry landscape overall?
It’s a fluid industry. It’s always been a bit like that in terms of who does what. Some of the ad agencies have started consulting divisions and obviously, you’ve also seen many famous ad agencies joining consultancies. And you’ve seen the demand for creative thinking within client companies.
It’s interesting the big consultancies are buying creative companies. You’re thinking, “well, why are they doing that?” They’re probably not doing it because they want to be in the business of making ads. They’re wanting to bring in a different type of thinking into their organization. So they combine it with what they have historically been good at and try to provide something compelling for clients.
Our argument would be, whereas they’re trying to bolt those bits together, that’s the world we’ve been living in for years. We’ve always been offering clients some blend of rigor and creativity within a much smaller organization. So it’s not like a bunch of different people have to talk to each other and assemble a team. We do that intrinsically.
You mentioned the differences between designers and ad agency creatives. Of course, there’s a large overlap between design and creativity but what would you say are the differences?
Well, one obvious difference is that you don’t normally have hundreds of copywriters knocking around here. Whereas in a classic ad agency structure — again, it changes — but classically, as a planner, you are probably briefing a team that’s a copywriter and an art director. Here, we are a bit careful about terminology. We don’t necessarily say “creatives”, the designers are predominantly “designers”. And quite a lot of writing is done by strategists. That all said, there will be projects where you do need a copywriter. But in brand agencies, if you’re writing chunks of copy for guidelines, then you end up potentially doing a lot of writing as a strategist, which is nice if you like to write.
Designers here will be incredibly good at the visual side. You’ll get different types of designers, as always. But with quite a few of them, you have an interesting conversation about what they’ll ask you. Lots of questions about what the design is trying to do, which can touch on some pretty big issues so that’s interesting.
One of the things you learn over time is sometimes, you’re standing just a little bit further away from the creative world than you might be in advertising. In advertising, a planner historically might look at a TV script and you can have a debate about that. And you’re kind of speaking the same language, you and the copywriters. From the outset, you are talking about the script and reviewing it as a script and that’s fine.
You have to work out what’s going to be useful to designers. I have little anecdote related to that. I was very lucky, years ago, I got to work with David Carson, who’s the legendary designer who started Ray Gun magazine and was one of the world’s top surfers.
He was working on a project for Microsoft and the creative director said “write something for him, write something about work”. And so I wrote this thing about the future of work and left it under his door — it was probably in an office on Friday night. And on Monday morning he came in and he said, “well, I really, really like that thing you wrote. Some of it was really fascinating. And I have no idea what to do with it whatsoever.” So while it was interesting to him, it wasn’t particularly useful, he didn’t know what to do with it in design terms because there probably wasn’t much of a clue. It was probably too conceptual. And then you realize that maybe this stimulus you might need to give to a designer would be different than what you might have given to someone who’s going to write ads because they might have found something about that and might have gone off. That project did actually lead to amazing work but I don’t think it was because of the thing we started with.
Thank you for this story and all the insights, John!
A few interesting things John recently came across:
- #artistsupportpledge to support artists in these tough times.
- A lovely photography book about living on the waterways, ‘An Uneasy Paradise’ by Sebastien & Louise.
- And I’m belatedly enjoying ‘Wilding’, by Isabella Tree.
If you enjoyed reading this, have a look at some other interviews in the series Strategic Minds: Conversations with strategists across different disciplines.
I’m also launching a new project: Some Sense — an online magazine about finding and shaping meaning.
