5 Minutes with... Dan Cullen-Shute

Dan> I've long been in firm denial that I’m anything to do with ‘advertising Twitter,’ because I was back on Twitter when it was just Twitter. And I try to spend more time talking about food and sport and those things than advertising. There's enough advertising in my life without it taking over there too. 

I find it odd how desperate people are to compartmentalise Twitter. I get that there are corners where conversations happen, but it's people who self-identify as being part of 'advertising Twitter', really? You come on here to find advertising people and talk to them about advertising. Is that not what your real life is? I find it slightly strange. It's one of those weird ways in which we as an industry lock ourselves up in a box when there's a whole world just out there. And it's really nice. And it's full of people that we're supposed to sell to. 'Advertising Twitter' is a lovely encapsulation of us banging on at each other about each other rather than the real world.

Dan> We exist in the Netherlands now, which is mad. It was a mad six to nine months. In September 2021 we celebrated 10 years of Creature. We thought that was an eventful decade – Brexit, all sorts of political turbulence and as any independent will tell you, we had a lot of that to deal with. We had a really lovely celebration of those 10 years. It felt like we'd dealt with covid quite well, came out of that hugely positively, made some really exciting hires, we brought on a bunch of new partners – Hanisha Kotecha became part of the agency ownership team along with Andrew Gibson, our CSO and Sian Welsh, our FD. We had this incredibly exciting plan about kicking on and what the next phase of Creature was going to look like.

Then literally in October, the next month, I got an email from an M&A intermediary type saying they represent a group of Dutch people who were interested in acquiring an agency like ours. The truth is you get a lot of emails like that. Normally they're not that interesting. Early doors, you get very flattered and excited and then you realise that actually, they're sending out thousands of these and they're just landing on the doorstep of everyone who's registered a company at Companies House. I replied, as I always do: "Thanks, that’s flattering, but we’re not interested. If you want to have a coffee, cool, but I don't want to waste your time because we're not looking for that." 

Then two months later, we were signing a preliminary agreement having accepted an offer. Candid came in with something that we just weren't expecting in terms of the structure, the philosophy and the approach. And it was an incredibly exciting thing. So in May [2022] the Candid thing became real. Then suddenly, we had an agency in Amsterdam, and we were part of this thing.

Then we moved offices in September. The world was going through some interesting times in that period as well. We'll never have another year like that again. It can often feel like you're incredibly hectic and a million things are happening to you all at once when you're running a medium-sized agency, but then you look back at it and it was fine. Whereas last year, it was genuinely a roller coaster. And largely an incredibly exciting one, which is all you can hope for. But yeah, it was bonkers.

Dan> Yes, I have. I'm looking out at some very Yorkshire weather right now, conscious of the fact that I've got to get on my bike in about 20 minutes to go and pick up my little boy from school and it's doing that sort of horizontal/upward rain thing that I'm starting to get very used to.

There's two answers to this – the personal life side of things and the professional life. One of the ways we've always tried to run Creature is in a way that both of those can coexist. They're tied together. 

Moving out of London was on the cards and has been for a while. I'm a Welshman, grew up in the middle of nowhere. My partner is Northumbrian by birth, grew up really in the middle of nowhere. We've both lived in London for 20 years and spent the last eight or nine years living just off Coldharbour Lane in Brixton, which was lovely, but it was very London. We always said that the second we turned up Herne Hill Road and our shoulders didn't drop, we'd know it was time to get out. And then when we did get out we'd want to get out properly, not a move from zone two to zone six.

Where I'm incredibly fortunate, but also where hopefully everyone who works at Creature is equally fortunate, is that we have managed to set up the business to run in such a way that you don't need to be on the ground in London five days a week. That was a very deliberate thing.

Dan> One of the things that we did at Creature with covid was look at how we could come out of it better as a business, but also better as an industry. Covid was this weird period. Obviously it goes without saying that it was horrible, scary and stressful, and it was commercially as challenging a period as I've ever seen, perhaps until now. But it also opened a bunch of doors. There were all these things that agencies could never do, like present creative work remotely and run a pitch without meeting the clients. All of a sudden it turned out we could do these things because we had to do these things. And actually doing things that way had a lot of benefits for people. 

A lot of people really enjoyed working from home. I had a little girl born in February 2020. As stressful a period as that was, I saw more of her in the first six months of her life than I probably saw of my son in the first six years of his. But we also all missed being in the office together. We missed that buzz of creativity and excitement. 

One of the few things I think we've been 100% consistent about from the very beginning is wanting to leave the industry better than we found it. We felt both the opportunity but also an obligation to try and work out a better way of doing it and not just be counting down the minutes until we could all get back into the office five days a week. So we decided pretty quickly that some version of hybrid was probably the answer. We thought about going fully flex and decided pretty quickly that whilst that sounds great, it gets problematic really quickly because you have people who are in the office all the time and then the people who are choosing not to be start to worry that maybe they should be. You get cliques forming and the politics happen. And then there's always some guy called Dave, who's in every Monday and people go, "Fucking Dave's in again! Does that mean I have to go in on a Monday?" We didn't want to do that. 

But also we knew the office was important because for every me or Rory Sutherland sitting in a nice room with good internet, there are 100 junior account people who are in a flat share or a house share with people who work for other agencies, people they might be pitching against, who are hiding under the stairs or sitting out in the hallway, trying to join meetings quietly. I know that because I was there 10 years ago. 

We ended up doing what we call a three-two. Every Wednesday and Thursday, we're all in the office together. The office is there the rest of the time, but we're remote-first for Monday, Tuesday, Friday. We call it ‘structured flexibility’. It removes the politics. It allows people, we hope, to get the best of both worlds and we're certainly seeing that. 

Dan> It slightly changes the nature of everyone's relationship with what work is. We very quickly worked out that if we get this right, all of a sudden, you don't have to recruit from people who can get into zone one every day. You can recruit from further afield. You can start to look at people who don't all live in London. Whilst there are excellent agencies in cities like Manchester and Newcastle and Birmingham, advertising is still incredibly London centric in terms of the big players. And in attitude, which is increasingly weird when it's not where most of the clients are. It's certainly not where most of the audience is. I think 85% of the UK population doesn't live in London.

Six years ago decided it would be lovely to put a map up on the wall with pins showing where everyone lives, and we couldn't because the pins were too big and everyone lived in fucking Dalston. 

We've talked about being a London agency, not defined by or limited by London. It's all very well and good for agencies to say we support flexible working, we support working parents and if they need to leave whenever and then log back on later - or not - then that's brilliant. But if leadership just says that and then don't live by it, then very quickly, people start rolling their eyes. You see working parents sneaking out awkwardly. We saw it at Creature years ago. So we decided we needed to do something. We need to leave loudly. ‘Leaving loudly’ has become this watchword for living by the benefits, the standards, the parameters (that's a very unsexy word) that we expect other people to be able to live by. 

I love Creature dearly. I love what we do in the industry. And I'm incredibly proud of what we have achieved and can still achieve, but equally, I do all of that because of the real basis of my life, my family and all the rest of it. We have at Creature been able to create a world where you can have both, where we focus on looking after people, supporting people and giving them an environment in which they're genuinely happy and not just proud; as opposed to an environment in which they'll make brilliant work and that should balance out the fact that they're a bit sad and they never see their friends. We think you don't have to make that choice. This is kind of that. And thus far, rain aside, it's fucking brilliant.

Dan> At 17 I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. And then when it came to applying for university, I did one of the most sensible things I've ever done - absolutely bottled it. I realised I had no idea what being a lawyer actually meant. And the idea of spending four years at university learning to be something I didn't understand scared the shit out of me. So I did languages instead, the idea being that gives me more options rather than fewer. 

At the end of university, I didn't have a fucking clue what I was going to do. I was there, relatively fluent in French, Spanish and English, and no professional qualifications or any vocational aspirations at all. 

I loved books. I would have loved to have worked in publishing. But having done a bit of unpaid work experience at Bloomsbury where I slept on a variety of floors and sofas, managed to weasel my way into the chance of a junior editorial position. And found out the starting salary was about I think about £11,500. And I couldn't live in London. I grew up in Wales. It's not like I could live at home. 

I'd also managed to get some paid working experience at Ogilvy on their summer placement scheme. I had two interviews, one of which was just a chat about me and life, which was brilliant, the other of which they asked me about advertising and I floundered. I was a 22 year old who knew what adverts were, but the idea that there was a thing called advertising confused the hell out of me. 

In perhaps a sign of what I would prove to be good at, I managed to persuade Ogilvy based on the job offer from Bloomsbury that they should hire me. I stumbled onto the grad scheme there, was incredibly lucky. Ogilvy's grad scheme, I think still to this day, is brilliant. I was finding out stuff that I'd learned that I didn't realise I'd learned still five or six years on.

Dan> I had my proper schooling at DLKW, where I went after Ogilvy. Working with brilliant people like Mark Lund, Tom Knox, Richard Warren, Charlie Snow. It was like "I get this now and this is exciting." 

I was there for about six or seven years. I was a bit internet obsessed. Towards the latter end of my time there, I was spending a lot of time on Twitter. I didn't think digital should be as scary a thing as most of the big above-the-line agencies seemed to feel that it was. So I went to glue Isobar for a couple of years where I got to work with brilliant people again.

Dan> I think the absolute joy of the Creature opportunity was that it came in so many ways at totally the wrong time. Because we weren't experienced enough. We didn't have the connections. We didn't have the knowledge. But I think had we had a bit more experience, we might have said, no, we don't know how to do that. Whereas we were just the right level of "Hey, I reckon we probably could, you know!" And gradually over the first period of time - I'll leave that vague - we worked out how to do it. 

I think probably where I'm luckiest is the people that I set the place up with are still my best friends. You go through hard times, you go through stressful times, you go through brilliant times and we all get to do it with people who are genuinely good friends. I don't think we realised initially how rare that is.

Dan> It's funny because this weirdly brings us back full circle to advertising Twitter. One of the issues I have about advertising Twitter is how relentlessly negative it can be. The advertising industry is far from perfect and it's on a journey in so many ways, whether that's flexibility, diversity, the treatment of young people. There's a lot of stuff going on. But I think it's very easy to forget how lucky we all are to work in this industry. Advertising at its best is properly fucking brilliant. Whether it's people from my generation, from my parents generation, everyone has their favourite ads, everyone has ads that they can talk about, everyone has asked that they laughed at. And the opportunity to work in an industry where you make this stuff that pops up in the middle of people's lives, whether they want it to or not, that opportunity is amazing. But it comes with a proper responsibility. 

At Creature we talk a lot about 'intelligent misbehaviour,' which is being smart enough to know the rules and smart enough to know how to break them. But as an ethos, it means we're constantly restless, we're constantly looking at better ways of doing stuff. We talk about making work that real people can't help and care about. We don't ever want to worry about being cool, which ironically, I think makes us quite cool as an agency a lot of the time and there's nothing less cool and trying to be cool. But I think particularly when we do what we do, it really gets in the way of what our job should be about, which is understanding the audience completely, understanding where the brand or business currently sits and making stuff that they don't mind interrupting their lives. 

Whether it is for big mass brands like Dunelm or Moonpig who are buying big TV spots seen by millions of people, or whether it's much smaller, more targeted, more focused stuff like Woodland Trust. It's about making work that people love, that people genuinely engage, that people don't feel hectored by. But also that isn't worried about whether the industry is going to high five itself over it. We know who our audience is and it's not people running other agencies, it's real people out there who will hopefully behave differently, do differently, think differently, spend differently, as a result of what we do.

It's genuinely such a privilege to do what we do. To make things that, if you get it right, become a genuine part of culture and to have working lives where you are on the one hand making a tangible commercial difference to businesses and thus an economy that really fucking needs it at the moment. But you're also having very serious conversations about whether the hat on the seagull puppet that we're using in our Blackpool adverts is too orange or not orange enough. What a wonderful dichotomy that is! 

From a work point of view we think that advertising can be brilliant, and it too often is not. And we think it's our job to make work that whatever the scale might be, is brilliant, and people welcome into their lives. We also think it's our job to try and make the industry a little bit better every day. We talk about wanting to leave the industry better than we found it and that is absolutely about the work, but it's also about how we treat people. It's also about how we learn from things we don't get right. It's also about how we can have ideas and initiatives that are not about generating a headline for us but are about creating things that other agencies can hopefully get envious of and hopefully steal. And it's fun. When you get it right it's such a fun thing to be a part of and there just aren't many other industries that are as important, but also as fun and frivolous as advertising is. We want everyday to feel like that.