Ad Astra: Malcolm Poynton Sails the Seas of Change

On the ocean, nothing stays still for long. The tides, the waves, the winds move constantly and a sailor must always be alive to that, shifting their weight and tilting sails to catch a gust or avoid capsizing. And there’s never, ever a moment for slouching complacency.

That Malcolm Poynton is a keen yachtsman – he became the youngest member of the New Zealand yachting team in his teens - explains a lot. In his career, he’s embraced rather than resisted the choppy waters of change. As chief creative officer of Cheil Worldwide, he’s as engaged and poised as he would be racing through the spray.

“You’re dealing with tide, you’re dealing with wind, you’re dealing with temperatures, waves, everything is moving and changing the entire time. And you’re dealing with competitors, the entire time, everything is changing and shifting, nothing is stable, and nothing is given. The objective is to be the first one around the next marker buoy and that’s how we operate as a business,” he says.

In sailing you need a boat, a body of water and a set of sails - the rest is up to you. And, similarly, in the world of marketing, aside from a product to sell and a consumer, Malcolm sees no reason to be bound to old ways of doing things. “Who’s to say that we need to use all these legacy models that were developed by people who were around before the digital age, and were in a time when culture did not move at the pace it moves today? Nor did it have the nodes of engagement that consumers have, whether those are mobile devices, social platforms or anything else commerce-related or digital… it just didn’t exist before. So why would we use old methodologies?”

As a global advertising network founded in the 21st century, Malcolm says that Cheil isn’t beholden to outdated ideas around how the industry should work or a client behave. But neither is Malcolm. 

Human beings are usually creatures of habit - pattern-seekers who gravitate towards predictability. But for Malcolm, who grew up on top of an active volcano, unpredictability has always been the norm. Little Malc lived on the shores of the stunning Lake Taupo, the largest freshwater lake in the Southern Hemisphere, which sits in a giant crater. He recalls huddling around geothermal steam vents in the school playground for warmth in the middle of winter (hardy Kiwi kids were expected to wear shorts in all weather). Chasms would suddenly open up, swallowing livestock into the guts of the earth. At five, when his parents were out of town, he remembers seeing the volcano across the lake erupt in a mushroom cloud, sending a thick black shockwave towards him. Later, by the time he was working in Australian adland, his brother was skiing on Mount Ruapehu when it went off. Thankfully the lava flowed away from the ski slopes that day, and he was safe.

That crucible forged a reverence for nature but not, curiously, a fear. It was all so normal.

Looking back Malcolm reflects that he made sense of these awesome forces through the Māori stories that surrounded him.

“Growing up in Aotearoa, or New Zealand, with the Maori community and the understanding of the polytheistic gods - there are gods of mountains, gods of fire, gods of water, all the elements - I guess we had a slightly different introduction to the forces at play conceptually, as kids,” he says. “We had these fantastic Maori legends about Aotearoa being fished up from the ocean by Maui and his brothers and about how these forces of nature came into play. So it probably also, in these formative years, demystified and took away any of those kinds of threats that may have been forming, because there was a story.

“There are two things that coincide here. One is, growing up in that environment, you are acutely aware of the elements. It’s a very visceral thing. The water, the sulphur , the rocks, the lava, all of these things. On the other hand, through Maori legends, there’s immense creativity. These stories, the legends are wonderfully creative. So from a very young age, without even realising it, I think we’re introduced to this incredible lens on creativity through Māori culture, which isn’t often spoken about. But I do think it’s an incredible aspect of Aotearoa’s culture.”

So creativity was always there in the background, even if Malcolm joined the advertising industry somewhat accidentally. As an architecture student he got a summer job at an agency where his friend was working. Up until that point he’d not had much exposure to the industry, though some key campaigns had made an impression. Notably, 1975’s chaotic epic The Great Crunchie Train Robbery for the Cadbury bar had dazzled him as a kid - turning the neighbouring Desert Road into a Wild West frontier, complete with a steamtrain hurtling down the tracks, packed with a cast of ‘Western-style’ oddballs and stock cowboy film characters, resolving with military tanks and a fighter jet blowing the whole thingup, it looked like a mini-movie. Then, in 1984, during a trip to the Los Angeles Olympic Games, he had seen the skyline dominated by Nike billboards. Athletes like Carl Lewis were jumping free from the confines of the ad, with heads and legs protruding at the sides, showing sporting giants taking over the city. Nike hadn’t even been a sponsor of the games and walked away the most remembered brand of the summer games. 

As he moved to Australia, he started to build a reputation for award-winning work at agencies like OMON and the fondly-remembered Campaign Palace. He was drawn to the UK, where he’d started to see advertising that really was having a wider impact on society, particularly with work tackling the AIDS crisis. Arriving at M&C Saatchi, he got his hands on big accounts like British Airways, NatWest Bank and Sky, helping the agency win its first ever Gold Cannes Lions. After being tapped to restore the fortunes of Saatchi & Saatchi Australia, within just two years he’d lead the agency to become the first to win TV Agency of the Year, Retail Agency of the Year, Digital Agency of the Year and The Caxton Awards Print Agency of the Year all at once. He returned to London as the ECD of Ogilvy UK, launching iconic campaigns like Dove’s Campaign For Real Beauty and, through award-winning work like Ford Ka’s Evil Twin viral campaign and Cancer Research’s Smoke Is Poison ‘toxic’ tanker and ‘Still Here’ bench helped make the Ogilvy UK WPP’s single most awarded agency.

His move to join the newly assembled SapientNitro as EMEA CCO in 2010 is a perfect example of Malcolm’s ethos of flexibility. He had, he says, grown frustrated at traditional agencies’ lethargy around adopting the fast-growing world of digital. He recalls the internal challenges around launching the Dove campaign in the early 2000s with the world’s first advertising line as URL, CampaignForRealBeauty.com. Similarly he describes launching the world’s first interactive billboard in Times Square, whereby passersby could SMS their responses, as ‘wading through treacle’.

“It seemed to me the consumer was becoming super agile. And the consumer was, all of a sudden, texting, SMS-ing, jumping on websites and into online forums. Websites and apps were starting to be developed… and it just seemed like… ‘Well, hurry up! We have to keep up!’,” he recalls. “It seemed like there was inertia and it wasn’t going to be easy.”

And so he chose to leap into technology - much to the bemusement of some of his friends and colleagues who felt he was tapping out of advertising completely. However, with the depth and breadth of skills at his disposal, he had found a whole new creative canvas.

“A lot of people said to me, ‘you’ve checked out, you’re just going into that world of tech’. And I guess, to some extent, maybe that was true. But on the other hand, I found it really liberating to be able to do things that other people couldn’t do, to connect brands with consumers in a more interesting and exciting way,” he says.

Which takes us to Cheil. With Samsung as a key client, the creative network has technology and innovation necessarily at its core. That, in turn, forces the network to be more responsive and front-footed. Take artificial intelligence. “The amusing thing to me is that the industry is tying itself in knots over AI. I kind of look at it and go, well, we’ve been doing ground-breaking AI projects for the past five years,” says Malcolm. There’s Samsung’s Voice Forever which launched in India back in 2018. It used AI to preserve the voice of a young girl’s mother who was losing the ability to speak through motor neurone disease. Over time, that tech has become more sophisticated; this year Cheil Spain launched Unfear, an app that helps people with autism by suppressing overwhelming sounds from their surroundings, helping them to enjoy events and busy environments without fear of anxiety attacks.

“For us it’s been second nature for a while and I kind of sit here slightly amused that the industry is now all of a sudden obsessing over AI,” he says. “We’re way upstream in terms of what technology is doing, particularly in the mobile realm because of our relationship with Samsung and because of their products and the ways in which we’re helping them take them to market.”

That never-ending fluidity doesn’t just relate to how Malcolm and Cheil engage with technology - it also relates to the way Malcolm approaches his role as a global chief creative officer. He sees his role as nurturing “active connections” between teams. He doesn’t need a creative council that functions as an award show review process, he doesn’t want it to be a club reserved for those who’ve been around longest. He wants to connect specialisms and markets, and use the creative council to mentor ECDs, building up the network’s creative capabilities. 

“Guided by the creative vision of ‘Ideas that Move’, It’s a very dynamic thing; it changes complexion over time because what we do changes over time and the needs of different markets change over time. I guess, for me, the whole raison d'etre around this is making our work more consistently potent and to do that you have to be involved, you can’t sit back and wait for people to bring it back and go ‘hey, well done, let me put my name on your work’. I’ve experienced that approach elsewhere and it’s really counterproductive. Instead, we have a really high cadence of connection,” explains Malcolm. “We have very iterative reviews of work from ideation to execution and it works in that very dynamic fashion. And it works no matter what the time zone or where things are, and when we know things are becoming more challenging in one market than another, we can address it in different ways.”

That idea of creative potency is key to understanding Malcolm’s values as a creative. Throughout his career, he’s been moved by and aspired to work that has a meaningful impact on the world. Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty is one such project in its mission to change narratives around beauty and to build up self esteem. Nearly 20 years later, that platform is going strong and Malcolm has followed its evolution with pride.

“I love being surprised by what comes next. I love the fact that so many different creative minds continue to contribute to this, to ensure that it keeps going. I think it’s had its ups and downs. I think actually, right now it’s finding a new language which is connecting to a new audience, and that is through less media and more genuinely social channels, which is where consumers are. I still feel a degree of excitement today when I see it, because I know that it’s making a positive contribution.”

‘Does it matter?’ is an important lens for Malcolm. That intent to make a positive impact is the one common thread that weaves through Cheil work from across the globe, whether it’s the Indian team using haptic feedback on mobile phones to help the deaf blind community to communicate, or the teams in China and Hong Kong collaborating on a gaming project that leverages in-game currency to discourage abusive behaviours, or the Korean team revolutionising the way victims of domestic violence can discreetly contact the police. 

Indeed, Malcolm has strong views about the roles and responsibilities that brands carry within society. “Certainly when I got to the UK it became crystal clear to me that brands are citizens. They’re not just corporations. They’re citizens and they have as big a part to play in society as you, me or any elected body,” he says.

That quest for meaning and impact also relates to Malcolm’s overall philosophy on technology. A lover of nature with a keen sense of the fragility of planet earth, one might expect there to be a tension between this Malcolm and the future-facing technologist. But technology at its best, from  Malcolm’s point of view, is not about humanity’s conquest of nature.

“I probably would talk more about augmenting and complementing what we learn from nature, rather than conquering nature. I think that technology is an amazing enabler for us to amplify some of what we have in our human capabilities,” he says. He cites artist Neil Harbisson, who was born colour blind and who has created a sensor that allows him to ‘hear’ colour. Malcolm ponders how technology might help us to emulate senses found in the animal kingdom, such as the ability to detect north or ‘see’ UV light.

“I think this is really interesting when we start to look at what technology can do beyond just letting us scroll on our phones and make slow-mo videos or, for that matter, to shop on our phones,” he says. “There is an incredible amount of power in terms of what we can do to enable people, whether they are suffering from autism in the way that Unfear addresses, or whether we’re detecting dyslexia in a game experience or whether we’re helping people with ALS be able to control their environment and things like that. For me that’s where it becomes interesting.”

That’s one thing about a conversation with Malcolm - it’s strewn with references to art, science, mythology, the natural world, architecture… He’s amassed thousands and thousands of dots just waiting to be joined. Watch him speak and you’ll come away with a notebook full of cardboard buildings and ceramicists and books to look up.

“I am constantly reading and finding different reference points. I guess for me, my observation is that there’s a tendency of many people to get stuck in one lane,” he says. While craft, obsessively honed, is something that Malcolm values greatly, he also thinks that seeking inspiration outside of one’s immediate profession allows for a much broader perspective. He cites his own admiration for Muhammad Ali as much as Yayoi Kusama.

And in the creative realm, this diversity of interests is fundamental. “Actually, on a different level, for me, I find it really necessary and stimulating, given the environment I’m working in, where cultures, the challenges for clients and even categories that I’m working in are so different to each other. So these reference points become 100% necessary to be able to stimulate different thinking and different outcomes. I’m always encouraging our creative leaders in the same vein,” he says. “For me, our industry and creativity in the broader sense are about connecting dots that other people aren’t connecting. If you haven’t got those reference points, it’s hard to connect them.”

This endless appetite for inspiration and seemingly disconnected information fuels his ability to sail the changing tides. But he knows that some waves are too imposing to skim lightly or to tackle solo. He’s passionate and serious about the climate emergency and the threat to the environment - how couldn’t he be? But, having grown up surrounded by environmental peril and creativity, and having seen the very real impact of innovative thinking, he avoids being washed away by negativity.

“In a broader sense, I would say there's a lot of opportunities in areas where, if we connect dots differently, we'll get much more interesting answers and progress. And I guess some of those relate to the kind of global situation that we're all conscious of around the fragility of this pale blue dot we all live on and call home.”