In-House Insights Podcast
I joined Chris and Abby on the In-House Insights podcast.
Chris and Abby run In-house Agency Council (IHAC), a community for in-house creative professionals in Australia. They're good at this and the conversation dug deep.
Here's what we covered.
What is what3words?
Geolocation is a $4 billion industry. Every address lookup, every delivery, every time someone puts a postcode into a checkout box, someone charges for that. Google sells a lot of maps.
what3words simplified it. We divided the planet into 57 trillion three-metre squares and gave each one a unique three-word address. The insight is human, not technical: words are easier to remember than numbers, and harder to get catastrophically wrong. One digit off a 16-digit GPS code and you're 1000 kilometres away. Three words don't do that. Emergency services use it. So does Glastonbury.
How I ended up here
I wanted to be a cartoonist. That didn't work out. I went to design school, became an art director in Johannesburg, got picked up by Ogilvy, worked in Toronto, then London on Dove as global creative director, then adam&eveDDB. Good agencies. Good work, but I slowly fell out of love with it.
The moment that crystallises it: I was put on an 18-month senior leadership programme at Ogilvy. Forty people in a room. I was the only one from a creative department. In an agency that sold creativity! That told me most of what I needed to know.
I started Truth & Spectacle to help organisations tell their own story. what3words came in as a client and over the years I became their Chief Creative Officer.
Why the client matters more than the agency
I went through the Cannes archive and tallied the numbers. Awards track with marketing directors, not agencies. The same person moves from Dove to Burger King to Airbnb and the work follows them. It tracks with their willingness to back ideas and give them scale. Almost nothing to do with which agency they hired.
If you want better creative work, make better clients.
How to build a creative culture
Three things that have worked for me.
Think of yourself as a creative leader in a business, not in a studio. Finance is everyone's problem. Brand story should be too. The moment you stop protecting your patch and start coaching others to think creatively, things shift.
Drop the defensiveness. Creative people are almost defined by their self-esteem issues. We are practitioners. We have methodology. Our job is to coach, not to gate keep.
Pose strategies as questions. A good question triggers divergent thinking. That's just how brains work. If you understand how to harness that, you're already doing creative leadership.
