Ad Astra: Chris Beresford-Hill Is Only Thinking Big
It’s 1988, and the American toy giant FAO Schwartz is on the verge of a historic marketing triumph. The company’s newest hire, the dazzlingly energetic Josh Baskin, has wowed the hierarchy with an unerring passion and knowledge of the brand’s products, and has spoken truth to power by declaring its latest toy “not fun”. Josh is direct, creative, impassioned and, crucially, he knows exactly what the consumer wants.
Fans of ‘Big’, the seminal ‘80s fantasy-comedy starring a fresh-faced Tom Hanks will know why that was. Due to some never-fully-explained mystic powers, Hanks’ character is in fact a thirteen-year-old boy living in the body of a grown man, one who accidentally lands a job in a big city marketing team. In the film, there are warmly hilarious consequences. But there are consequences, too, for another small boy; this one sitting on the other side of the screen. ‘Big’ was the moment that Chris Beresford-Hill, the multi-award winning worldwide chief creative officer at BBDO, realised he wanted to work in advertising. Ever since then, he’s been doing it by thinking big.
“As a kid I was always drawing a comic book, writing a play, or daydreaming. I very much spent my formative years inside my own head, which, as it turns out, is a great help in advertising,” says Chris. “When ‘Big’ came out, I saw that Tom Hanks was better at his job because he was childlike. As a boy who was grasping around for what he might do when he grew up, I was hooked. I was very conscious of advertising as a career from that point, and it always felt exciting to me.”
And so Chris pursued a career in advertising with a hyperfocus that would go on to be a hallmark of his career. Having that goal in mind was helpful to him at a young age, not least in having something to show to his father – an “ambitious” educator who travelled continents to teach at international schools. “The worst thing you can do as the child of a teacher is be a terrible student, so naturally that’s exactly what I was,” Chris laments. “It’s very distressing for a man who loves and believes in education to have a son who, despite seemingly having nothing wrong with him, cannot pass a test!”
Partly as a result of that distress, Chris was sent to the Johnson O’Connor Research Foundation to, in his words, “figure out what the hell I was good at”. Happily for Chris, the researchers did indeed find it.
“It turned out I had a bunch of undiagnosed learning disabilities, but I placed in the 98th percentile for the ability to generate ideas,” he recalls. “The report said the number one career I should consider was advertising.”
In a way, it was a foreshadowing of the industry’s future: a great, instinctive, and pre-existing idea only given legitimacy thanks to a data-powered insight. But for Chris that was all, quite literally, academic. What mattered was that he had seen his future and he was set on it. So, just a few years later, he was knocking on the door of a local agency and demanding an internship. Through sheer determination, he got one.
Whatever It Takes
Simply walking up to the door of an agency and asking for a job was, for a kid of the ‘80s, a delightfully direct way to make an impression. But it wasn’t exactly a glamorous start. “My internship was literally just getting coffee until someone was kind enough to let me write headlines,” recalls Chris. “That lack of structure suited me because I had to figure things out on my own, which is a big part of this business.”
For young creatives trying to get noticed today, the path would likely look very different. “I wouldn’t do the same thing today – not least because internships themselves are much more formal and highly curated,” he notes. “If I were starting today, I’d probably have to schmooze on LinkedIn, find clients disappointed in their own kids and convince them to put me forward for an internship instead!”
That’s a difference in the structure of the agency world now, and quite possibly the result of progress. The bigger picture, however, is whether the young Chris Beresford-Hill would even be captivated enough to want to work in an agency in 2025. “Back in 2000, walking into an ad agency meant you had a good shot at getting an idea out into the world – there just weren’t many other options,” he says. “Today, if you have a phone, you can become a celebrity or an actor. The democratisation of creative tools has changed everything. I don’t know if I would have walked into an ad agency today – I might have just started writing my own crazy stuff.”
In the past, Chris has spoken about feeling a sense of awe and prestige when he put together his first ad for the back page of a magazine. This was in the 2000s when the print industry was alive and well. But in the 2020s, is that same feeling of prestige still available for creatives? And if so, what’s replaced it?
“Oh, I’ve no doubt that it can be,” he affirms. “You can see your ideas take on lives of their own and become part of culture in a way that’s massive, bigger than a kid in the 2000s could ever have imagined. It’s just that the idea needs to be much more interesting. You can’t just buy some space and expect results anymore. Success means more, because you have to earn it.”
On this, Chris is speaking from experience. To pick a random example out of the countless from his career, the ‘Michael CeraVe’ Super Bowl spot from his time as North America CCO at Ogilvy in 2024, and the online reaction to it, makes for the perfect illustration of how creativity can set culture on fire on a global scale.
Fittingly enough, Chris and I are speaking the day after the Big Game in 2025. So did he see any ads this year that followed the same blueprint?
“I have to say that I don’t think this year was the best Super Bowl – and I was a little surprised to see us move away from the idea of a Super Bowl ‘ecosystem’ that has been so positive in recent years,” he says. “What I mean by that is that I think we’ve seen – not just with the CeraVe thing but also ‘DoorDash All The Ads’ as another example – that Super Bowl advertising really isn’t about getting the best 30 seconds anymore. It’s about drawing your ad out into something bigger that your audience wants to be part of and creating your own ecosystem on the day of the game.”
This fits into a wider observation that Chris holds about the state of modern creativity and the industry: specifically that “what we do is about everything in the wide, open space between brand and consumer.” And that, on Super Bowl Sunday, there’s a vanishingly rare opportunity to occupy that vast expanse of space in a fundamentally big, ambitious way. “It’s not the battle of the ads, it’s the battle of the ecosystems. So I was surprised to see this year’s ads feeling a lot more traditional,” he surmises. “But I think that is a blip, and we’ll see more big, ambitious ideas come to the fore next time out.”
Rational Irrationality
These are principles that have been both demonstrated and hard-earned by Chris over the course of his career to date. In it, he’s seen the creative world change in shape and scope. At one point in our interview, I ask Chris if he feels any differences in the creative cultures between New York and San Francisco, having worked for agencies in both.
“I think if our industry had stayed the same for the past 20 years I might have a proper answer for that,” he reflects. “But in reality, the changes have been so seismic that they’ve outpaced any cultural nuance that may or may not have existed.”
Chris has never really been one to gaze aimlessly out of the window and get lost in thought. He recounts how, one year into his stint in San Francisco with Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, he was visited by a friend. “We took a walk around the city. That was when I realised I had never even seen the Golden Gate Bridge, despite living two blocks away,” he laughs. “I had thrown myself completely into the work at Goodby and the social life around it, but I never took the time to visit the city’s most iconic landmark.”
These days, he reassures me, he’s loosened up a bit. But he’s still got that relentless hyperfocus on the power of creativity, and what the word even means in the context of boardrooms and business decisions.
“Creativity is probably too easy to talk about, and too hard to actually do,” he suggests. “Even the most conservative clients will say they value creativity – because they think that simply talking about it means they’re doing it. But there’s a real difference between talking about creativity, and actually investing in it. That’s something I feel very strongly about.”
To illustrate his point, he recalls an anecdote from Alex Bogusky (one of the founders of the iconic agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky). “He talked about how clients would choose CPB in competitive reviews because it was the brave, creative choice. But once those clients actually started working with the agency, they’d demand the same kind of work they could get from any agency,” he says. “That’s the issue; too many people talk about creativity, but too few truly believe in it to the point of investing in it.”
Part of the trouble, he believes, is competing definitions of the word itself. “It’s hard, because creativity is not an output, or product,” he posits. “Creativity is the ‘how’. How novel, or interesting, or ambitious, or how audacious you want to be, versus how tried and true, and how safe. Obviously the bigger reward comes from the bigger swing. If you want big results, you have to want creativity.”
It’s helpful, he continues, to take a moment to forget about the word. Rather than talk about ‘creativity’, it’s useful to think of what the industry does as the act of simply connecting brands to consumers. “That space between a brand and its audience includes everything – traditional media, experiential activations, trend-jacking, internet hacks, even messages on hot air balloons,” he says. “But the key is: to stand out, be memorable, and build real relationships with your audience, you have to be profound, provocative, and interesting.”
That, unfortunately, is too often a difficult sell in a modern ecosystem that obsesses over data and measurability, and prefers to predict rather than provoke. “But if you blindly follow data, every ad will start to look the same,” contests Chris. “If you want to truly connect with people, you have to push boundaries, take risks, and sometimes be a little irrational.”
And on that point, there is some good news. Roughly one year ago, Chris started the role of global chief creative officer at BBDO, an agency which is providing him the perfect space in which to be rationally irrational.
Taking The Big Swings
“One thing that I have learned is the way agencies market themselves truly does matter,” says Chris, as he reflects on what he’s learned after one year at BBDO.
“When I was at TBWA, both the clients and the agency talked about creativity, but what clients really expected was a disruptive idea. At Ogilvy, of course creativity was discussed a lot, but clients ultimately demanded a smart strategy with creativity stretched across multiple capabilities,” he explains. “But at BBDO, clients expect our best creative ideas every single time. I haven’t felt that same expectation at any other agency I’ve worked at. That’s both a gift, and a huge advantage.”
It’s something he takes great pride in reminding his longer-standing colleagues at the agency. “When you’ve been in an environment for a long time, you might not realise that our clients genuinely expect us to blow the barn doors off creatively,” he says.
So it’s very much in his interest to ensure that clients do not fall into that old trap identified by Alex Bogusky. That when they come to BBDO seeking creativity, they always get it.
In order to achieve that, he’s been working on a new blueprint. “I think we spend a lot of time – agencies and clients together – chasing blue-sky ideas, but when it comes down to brass tacks, the deliverable list shrinks and the ambition diminishes,” he says. “Everyone is afraid to limit creativity, but I believe we need to restrict it so that it has a smaller box to operate in, allowing it to be more brilliant.”
But don’t mistake that realism for a lack of ambition. After all, it’s invariably better to start small and end big than to start with something big that gets compressed and deflated by reality along the way.
“By setting constraints at the beginning, idea development becomes about growth rather than reduction,” as he puts it. “We should play for the big reality rather than spending excessive time in the big dream.”
And, in what’s becoming a recurring theme, he wants to ensure that the agency’s ideas always come sprinkled with a healthy dose of irrationality. “I’m frustrated by how functional and rational advertising messaging has become,” he states. “There’s a common misconception that humans are highly rational beings – we overestimate our rationality simply because we’re more rational than other animals. But we’re still fundamentally emotional creatures. I once saw a brilliant meme that said, ‘why are you asking me to be rational? I’m just a pile of meat with electricity going through it.’ This, to me, sums up the problem.”
Recently, Ogilvy vice chair Rory Sutherland caught Chris’ eye with a statement about how AI could help the advertising industry grow in productivity and quality, but not in the way you might expect. “Why are we happy to obey decisions for which the reasoning is entirely opaque when those decisions are made by computers, but we're massively uncomfortable about such a thing when it emerges from a human being? So here's my proposal for making advertising more efficient: you get a really good creative team to solve the problem, and then you pretend the problem was arrived at by AI,” suggested Sutherland.
In all seriousness, Chris agrees that AI can potentially help creatives: not by outsourcing the generation of ideas, but in better illustrating why they are good ideas to the decision-makers that matter.
“This pervasive reliance on rationality is constraining creative choices. However, an opportunity exists for AI to predict why ideas will work, just as we use data to inform strategy. If we can close this loop, we’ll be able to sell big ideas more effectively and efficiently,” he argues. “Right now, data dominates every decision, and that needs to change. Applying data to validate creative expression will make it easier for agencies to champion bold ideas, ultimately getting the gears of the industry moving in a much-needed direction.”
One of the most striking things about Chris is his infectious confidence that creativity can have a huge impact – to unlock growth for businesses, and joy for the rest of us. In an industry which can be prone to the occasional bout of anxiety and self-flagellation, it’s refreshing. “I’m not afraid to say that I’m an expert, and I know what works,” as Chris puts it.
That’s a perspective which is underlined through his partnership with Nancy Reyes, BBDO’s global CEO and president, and former CEO of TBWA during Chris’ time there. “Nancy makes the point that it’s always been so common to hear creative leaders talk about the death of advertising”, he says. “It’s like we’re the most insecure people, and it’s a pervasive narrative that’s been going on forever. I agree with her – and it seems to be heating up again right now.”
And yet, like Nancy, Chris firmly rejects that downbeat reading of the industry’s health and prosperity.
“I feel like, if I’d been reading an interview like this 20 years ago, I’d have been reading about Dan Wieden musing on the mysterious power of creativity from the basement of a smoky jazz bar. It would have been about how it’s an unknowable force that moves the world – he’d have been right, and it’s what I would have wanted to read,” he says. “But today, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying creativity is not mysterious; it’s a known force, it generates billions of dollars for businesses every single year. There is an absolute, inarguable value in what we do. And by the way, we’re the experts. We know exactly what the fuck we’re doing!”
Thinking back to the young Chris watching Tom Hanks in ‘Big’, one wonders if he’s now working in exactly the kind of career he dreamed of. Like Josh Baskin, he’s winning billions of dollars in growth for businesses with a no-holds-barred embrace of creativity and creative thinking.
But there’s one crucial way in which he isn’t like Josh, the child comically scaled up into an adult’s body: he knows exactly what the fuck he’s doing. And perhaps, with enough confidence and self-worth, the rest of us might admit that we do, too.
