5 Minutes with… Peter Bray
Peter Bray is the founder and executive creative director of Bray & Co, an integrated creative and media agency that specialises in the launch and relaunch of brands, products, and services. He opened the New York agency in 2019 and current clients include Tide and Brooklyn Brewery.
Peter launched his first agency, Clear Blue Day, in his native Australia at the age of 26 and sold it when he was 32. He went on to serve as CEO of WPP’s The Brand Shop and head of digital for Saatchi & Saatchi globally. He was the managing director of Molio - the first YouTube commerce agency - and created iconic campaigns for Poo-Pourri, Wilson and beauty and skincare line Alba Botanica.
He was named one of the “40 Most Influential” in Australia by Condé Nast, is a guest lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and contributes to Forbes. He’s also a four-time delegate to the United Nations Social Innovation Summit, where global leaders, company decision-makers, and key research organisations from all over the world meet annually to tackle the most pressing challenges of an ever-changing world.
LBB’s Addison Capper was pleased to get the chance to pick his brains. He spoke to Peter about how the use of AI will lead to more ‘zombie creative’, why he doesn’t understand that digital agencies exist, and the ‘Tokification’ of creativity.
LBB> Your agency was founded on three core beliefs - what kind of experiences inspired them and how do they inform the work that you do?
Peter> I’ve always believed the main reason that clients want to work with an agency, and stay with that agency, is due to the people. Clients may initially go to an agency because of the shingle hanging on the front door, but they stay because of the people. The people are even more important than the work. And with that, the work should also place consumers at the centre of everything, then we build a brand narrative around actual humans. With that in mind, we created and continue to evolve our StoryBuilding offering. Essentially, as an industry we need to move away from fads and the Tokification of creative, and get back to memorable creative that goes beyond the quick dopamine hit driven work that has little lasting benefit.
LBB> Looking at your career, it seems that you carved out a bit of a niche in digital in the early 2010s. What led to you specialising in digital?
Peter> It was more the late 1990s but who’s counting?! I was an early adopter of something called Gopher (before the internet had images) due to working on my PhD, and I could see that having the greatest ever source of knowledge known to humanity may become a ‘thing’. Unfortunately a lot of digital was and continues to be tactic driven, which is a mistake. I was also one of the first people to go from leading a digital agency to leading a brand agency, which used to be rare.
LBB> How does that experience inform the work that you do at Bray & Co?
Peter> We aren’t a digital agency, I don’t quite understand why digital agencies exist to be honest. That’s kind of like saying humans are ‘air-breathing’. It is redundant. Web dev, SEO agencies sure, but calling an agency a digital agency doesn’t make sense. Bray & Co is full service, but we are a proud advertising agency that happens to be strong in digital. I think most agencies have a good grasp of digital these days, but there is still a lot of smoke and mirrors, which is unfortunate.
LBB> You've launched your own agency twice, either side of your time at WPP, Saatchi & Saatchi and Molio. What does being an entrepreneur offer that working for an agency doesn't?
Peter> I was lucky in that my first agency grew nicely. We sold to a holding company, and then I was on the holding company side so I saw how the sausage is made. Leading an agency you spend a lot of your time reporting rather than doing the work. I can’t stand that sort of bureaucracy. Holding companies by design are not creative friendly, and I would argue they aren’t as client friendly either. Indies are allowed to have more of a personality, and are allowed to exercise more judgement and really be an ally of our clients. We aren’t bound to assigning resources based on a spreadsheet. I think we are more human, and more empathetic.
LBB> What did you do differently when launching Bray & Co - and with over five years more experience plus operating in a different market - versus when you launched Clear Blue Day?
Peter> That’s a great question. Basically everything has been different. Though we have been one of the fastest growing agencies in the US, I’ve been very conscious of making sure that we only take on clients that we can service really well - we are spin free so there is no expectation gap. This has meant we have almost zero client churn, which I’m really proud of.
A challenge has been that I don’t have the same organic network that I did in Australia, so there is less word of mouth. At the same time, I do think the scale at which you can operate in the US means there is plenty of opportunity.
LBB> What was the vision for Bray & Co? Why did you want to launch an agency again and what gap in the market did you identify?
Peter> I wanted to create a sustainable agency that was profitable, employed high level thinkers and was an ally of clients rather than the often adversarial pose I have seen in the past. I hadn’t seen an ad agency that specialised in launch and relaunch, so Bray & Co was created to fill that gap. There are a lot of ‘performance agencies’ (I hate that term) that talk about 10-times revenue and growth to the moon, but we are not that. We create campaigns for clients that help them grow their brand, product or service over time, but we do it in a consumer-psychology-driven way.
More importantly, I thought it would be creatively fulfilling, and it certainly has been.
LBB> Which piece of work from Bray & Co do you feel really well represents the type of work you do best?
Peter> I love the campaign we created for ReTold Recycling, where we flipped unboxing videos so they became about putting something in rather than taking something out. This was a great example of a campaign that didn’t look like traditional advertising, which is often our own internal brief. With all the talk about attention, we need to stretch ourselves beyond traditional advertising thinking, and I think it embodies the quality of Bray & Co’s thinking.
LBB> The agency seems to offer a very integrated approach - why is that a suitable model in 2023 and how does it work in practice at Bray & Co?
Peter> Media and creative work better when they live together. Creative is media, and media is creative.
LBB> How are you and your team interacting with new technologies such as AI, and what implications do you believe they could have for our industry?
Peter> Does the A in AI stand for average? I ask because so far I haven’t seen anything mind blowing. Production wise AI is useful, but that has been around for years, and it isn’t deep thinking. My opinion is that AI will make real creative thinking even more precious, because originality will become rarer. The printing press didn’t kill painting. All I see is that AI will mean a prevalence of what I call ‘zombie creative’.
LBB> How did you wind up working in advertising in the first place?
Peter> I fell into it fortunately while I was still at college. My studies were in film and psychology, so advertising has been the perfect career. Both my parents were career creatives outside advertising as performers in the arts, so communicating narratives is perhaps in my blood.
LBB> Who or what is your biggest inspiration in business right now?
Peter> Right now it’s our team members. Our CSO is a consumer psychologist and the insights he uncovers are powerful. I see people step up all the time and care about clients, so that really does inspire me every day. Also with the recession we are in I see a lot of opportunity given the impending turmoil, so that keeps me on my toes.
