Ad Astra: Ben Williams is Bridging Creative Worlds

Ben Williams has a theory about creatives – a theory that comes with disclaimers and an admission that it’s a massive generalisation, but a valid theory nonetheless. 

And it’s this: that in advertising in 2024 creatives come in two rough flavours. There’s the narrative-driven creative, the storyteller who is compelled to razzle and dazzle, showmen and women that have to work hard to sell their ideas, persuade advertisers and audiences alike. And then there’s the experience-focused creative, the listener and empath who uses their systematic brains to design products and services and content that becomes just the thing clients and consumers need.

The more traditional style of creative tends to extraversion, in part because with fewer direct selling and proof points, they need the confidence to sell. And the experience creatives, which is what Ben considers himself to be, are introverts.

Now, leading the creative practice for TBWA globally, it’s Ben’s mission to bring those two tribes together, to align them and make room for them to spark and to raise each other up. To be fair, the clue is in the job title. Unusually, Ben is TBWA’s global chief creative experience officer. He’s been in the role since 2021 and is seeing this alchemy shape the work that’s coming out of TBWA offices around the world.

“It's a mouthful of a title, and people ask me about it all the time, but it is a weird one. It's by design as a nod to the industry, but also to who I am, and also what we're doing at TBWA to bring those two worlds together,” says Ben, who is full of praise for Troy Ruhanen, then CEO of TBWA\Worldwide, now CEO of Omnicom Advertising Group (OAG), who had the foresight to support Ben in his title and mission. (Speaking of OAG, Ben’s excited to see what tools and capabilities this newly-created grouping of Omnicom creative agencies will unlock: “I see it as just another way to take the best of what we have at Omnicom and connect the dots a little bit more”.)

Experience has been part of Ben’s journey since before experience design was even part of his vocabulary. A design student in the ‘90s, he decided to focus on digital design, then a niche and nerdy area… and just so happened to graduate as the dotcom boom was in its pomp and studios were ‘throwing money around’. 

“After the dotcom boom, it was the dotcom crash.” The good times swiftly came to an end and the studio Ben was working at swiftly fell from 300 to five people in just three months. Ben hung on until it collapsed. With no other option and a ready-made list of clients still looking for someone to design their websites and make stuff for MySpace. Looking back, Ben’s kind of impressed with his younger self’s ability to just pick himself up, blithely set up a business, and keep going. He puts it down to youthful naivety.

The new studio had a bunch of well-known clients, including major agencies like JWT and George Patterson Y&R Melbourne. Among the clients inherited from his old work was travelling music festival Big Day Out. As well as indulging his diverse music tastes, this was also the client that opened his eyes to design’s power to build holistic experiences.

“It just showcased and exposed me to all the elements that design could be applied to even for just one thing, like a music festival,” he reflects. “I didn't realise it at the time, but it gave me a foundation of knowing that there's more to design than just a beautiful poster, there's ticketing and content and a whole bunch of stuff.”

That wasn’t the only foundation stone Ben laid in this period. Setting up and running his own business at such an early point in his career also sharpened his appreciation for the commercial side of creativity.

“It taught me two things. One was just the business side of things, and understanding our clients’ business, my own business, and the money side of creativity, and then there was a humbling or grounding aspect,” he says. “No job was too small, you know? You can't say, ‘I'm the owner, and so I'm not going to do this thing’. Everyone just rolls their sleeves up and gets stuff done. So if the trash cans needed emptying and the floors needed sweeping, or the doorbell was ringing at the studio, you do it.”

This experience also helped Ben when he came across the opportunity to leave Australia for a job at AKQA in New York. It felt like destiny; as a child Ben had visited New York with his family and he confidently told his mum that he would live there one day. Thankfully, noticing his grown-up business savvy, initiative and design flair, AKQA was happy to make that prediction come true.

However, once he got to the States, Ben found himself a little lost as a roll-your-sleeves-up, bit-of-everything digital creative in a maze of ultra niche specialism. As a designer who dabbled in front-end code and had a few UX skills, he found that he confused the American market. In the end, on the advice of a friend, he simply called himself a designer. It was also 2008, another financial crash and Ben couldn’t help but feel uneasy as TV talking heads blasted immigrants ‘taking’ American jobs. “I was like, ‘well, what a time to sell everything in Australia!’. But it all worked out,” he says.

These days, says Ben, the boundaries between these strictly siloed specialisms in the United States have softened. People with more than one skill or discipline are becoming desirable. Ben reckons the knock-on effect is a positive one.

“I think the process probably lends itself to that, because you end up having these handoffs,” he says. “The old way was: strategy would do their thing, and then they would hand it off to a creative director. Creative director would think up something, and then they would brief a designer, and the designer would brief an experience designer. You had all these places where things could go wrong, whereas I think people are seeing the benefits of people that can smooth the edges, if you will, from strategy to visual design to experience design. I think it just lends to a better process and a better outcome.”

From AKQA, Ben skipped over to R/GA, where he was instrumental in industry-shaping experience-led projects Nike+ and Nike Fuelband. Eventually he became R/GA’s chief experience officer, working alongside CCO Tiffany Rolfe.

And now, of course, he’s bringing those worlds together, which has definitely been a journey in itself. “It's tough and it's hard work. If it was easy, all the agencies would have built it. It’s because you're bringing fundamental differences of people together – not just disciplines and not just craft, but extraverts and introverts, which is always a tricky thing, or, systematic thinkers versus narrative-driven thinkers. You put them in a room together, and nine times out of 10, they're just going to look at each other like… you know… weirdos.”

The philosophy that he wants to share is the idea that ultimately, whether someone happens to express their creativity as a beautifully art directed image, an innovative prototype, a TV spot or a useful new product, they’re all all creatives. Ben sees his role as helping to bridge the gap between those different flavours of creativity and personality types.

He also believes that, to an extent, the siloed nature of agencies reflected client structures – but now marketers are also taking on broader responsibilities, agencies need to be able to go there with their clients.

“In the past five, six to seven years in the US, but also globally, I think the role of the CMO has expanded to include what might have been a CXO or a chief information or a chief client officer or a chief product officer, even sometimes, the marketing has expanded,” he says. “You're finding people that are coming up through the classic CMO model that are not ill equipped as such, but it's just a whole lot that they need to cover, and they're trying to figure it out. So I think that's where agencies can really be that creative partner to help them kind of navigate that combination of worlds.”

The proof of the pudding is in the eating, or experiencing. And Ben’s super excited to see the work flowing forth and also connections being made within the TBWA\Worldwide creative communities.

“I think the highlight is when I see that realisation of people seeing the value of the other side in the room, whether it's experienced thinkers seeing the value of telling the story in a really beautiful, simple way, or it's a narrative-driven, traditional advertising creative, seeing the value of experienced thinkers in the room and how the idea kind of is just a bit more full,” he says.

In terms of the work he’s really excited to see the impact on major clients like adidas. While 2024 has certainly been a summer of sport, with the football World Cup in adidas’ home of Germany, plus the Olympics and Paralympics in France, there are some major events to look forward to and the team are making sure that adidas shows up in a big way.

“We're on a journey to reshape and reboot adidas, in terms of a new creative platform that we're excited about. And so the 2024 work this year, that I'm really proud of, is the first step into a three-year journey in repositioning the brand and showing the brand to the world, especially as we look towards the World Cup here in the US and North America, and also the Olympics here in two years, in 2028,” he says.

McDonald’s is another major client that’s exciting Ben. The ‘No Smiles’ work out of TBWA\Hakuhodo, that managed to increase job applications to McDonald’s by 115% and grow brand love among gen Z by 150% is an example of the boldness he’s seeing from client and creative. The campaign tackled head on the tension between McDonald Japan’s ‘Smile: 0 Yen’ catchphrase and gen Z’s strong boundaries around their mental health and resistance to fakery and additional emotional labour.

“They're just a really brave client,” says Ben. “They put creativity at the centre… They're looking for new and interesting types and shapes of work beyond just traditional campaigns.”

Oh and there’s the small question of an Emmy, which last year’s Apple holiday ad ‘Fuzzy Feelings’ from TBWA\MAL happened to pick up – an ad that proves that good old-fashioned storytelling and craft can create as powerful an experience as a service or a product. “It's just great storytelling, great craft, great attention to detail, just that sort of flipping from stop motion to live footage. And just, yeah, it just is really, really smart.”

One thing that’s curious about Ben is that although he’s historically come from the digital space and is known for boundary-pushing innovation, he’s not a slave to technology. He’s immersed in it, keeps up with developments and is always on the lookout, but he’s developed a pretty robust intuition for sorting the puffs of hype from the really meaty, impactful stuff.

“I remember when everyone was talking about the metaverse I was just like, ‘that's not a thing’,” he laughs. It was just social gaming and connected experiences with a fancy new name, and four years on from the pandemic we’re still not sitting having our board meetings in Decentraland.

Generative AI, on the other hand, captured his attention even back when the tech still felt shonky and the output even shonkier. He could see the speed at which it was evolving and the openness of access and knew it was worth keeping an eye on.

That’s not to say Ben sees himself as some sort of prophet. “I'm not a savant, I'm not a visionary, necessarily. I just sort of go by what I've seen in the past, and there are patterns too,” he says, recalling the very similar concerns around job impact and ethics that arose during the advent of Photoshop. “It's sort of like the same conversation from 25 or 30 years ago, is now just applied to AI. So I just see these kind of waves or patterns that reemerge.”

And again, as much as he is excited about AI, he’s keenly aware of its drawbacks – ever the systematic thinker, it’s simply about applying the correct tool in the right context. And, as TBWA\Worldwide is the network that has styled itself around being disruptive, he is aware that AI has its limitations.

“At TWBA we're trying to do the new and the different, the never been done before. That's not the power of AI. The power of AI is taking a whole bunch of stuff that's been done before and averaging it out, and pulling out highlights and whatever,” says Ben. “At the end of the day, it'll be familiar, or there'll be something about it that's recognisable. And so that's the trap, or the potential trap. And so, on the TBWA side, we're building something that pushes against that.”

On a personal level, Ben pushes against the familiar too, and he’s not content to sit back in his comfort zone. Nowhere is that better represented than in his side hustle, sportswear brand Omorpho. It’s a weighted apparel brand dreamed up over a couple of bottles of wine with Ben’s former Nike client. It turns out the pair fit Ben’s creative theory perfectly. 

“Our brains work really well together, because he's that sort of extroverted and I'm that sort of introverted, systematic thinker, and so the two of us just found a groove over the years,” he says.

These days, Ben’s role in the business is less front and centre, but he’s finding that he’s learning so much from Omorpho that informs his day job. Just as running his own design studio helped elevate his early career, being ‘the client’ of his own brand also keeps him fresh. As an example, he talks about trying performance marketing and finding it something of a money sink, while investing in influencer marketing has really taken off.

“It gives me some signals and feedback in terms of what the market's doing. How brands can leverage certain types of influencers versus performance marketing, versus traditional marketing, and the power of all of it,” he says. “It's teaching me that startup versus established brands are very, very different worlds. Like, if you're an adidas, it's a very different proposition, and a very different set of challenges that you're facing, as opposed to a startup that no one's ever heard of.”

It also goes back to who Ben is as a creative. As curious and open as the young student who took a punt on digital design, and a listener who seeks to understand the very experience of being a client just as he sought to understand the experience of festival goers back in the late ‘90s.

“It probably ties back to my core part of my being, I guess, as a creative. I'm always just curious and wanting to learn stuff. I think when I get bored or if I don't feel I'm learning I start questioning what I'm doing,” he says.

“That's where I’ve found a great home with TBWA, because I get a bit of both. I've got clients that have got some really interesting business challenges and I love to lean into the business side of things and understand their challenges and needs and opportunities. And then at the same time, if I look within TBWA, there's an amazing collective of 11,000 people that are all very different. How do we align them? How do we share perspectives? How do I hear from the collective? And then how do I share my perspective with the collective? 

“And so it's all always just like a fun, interesting challenge each day. But yeah, I feel like I'm growing.”