Ad Astra: Neil Heymann and the Peace within the Noise

“For about as long as I can remember, I was the kid in my class who could draw. It was associated with my identity very early on.”

Time has a funny way of rippling out. When Neil Heymann was a kid, he dreamed of being a cartoonist for Mad Magazine and the daily newspapers. Far from being a quaint aspiration from a gentler, print-based age, Neil’s love of cartoon humour has set him up well as a creative leader for the 2020s.

“The idea of becoming a newspaper cartoonist was just so appealing to me,” he reflects, before pondering how far the vernacular of the funnies has come to dominate the way we communicate now. “It’s where the world’s gone. The cartoon section of the paper is kind of the internet.”

If you want proof of this connection, look no further than Neil’s cheeky meme-Lord Instagram account. During early covid, he took to ‘writing and meme dumping’ as a form of therapy and the light-hearted silliness stuck as a form of creative escapism. Neil confesses that he doesn’t “really love the LinkedIn thought leadership culture”, and creating pop culture memes is a far more in-character means of personal expression.

“I think there are a lot of parallels - a meme and a single frame cartoon have pretty much the same DNA. I know I’m probably too old to enjoy it, but I really get a kick out of it,” he says.

Neil’s blend of pop culture fandom, meme culture sensibility and a collaborative, low-ego approach to creative leadership is a particular blend whose time has come. 

The first thing to understand is that Neil Heymann is one of us. He digs the twisty-turny reality show ‘The Traitors’. He’s thrilled about The Daniels’ recent Oscar win (https://www.lbbonline.com/news/daniels-ads-and-promos-almost-everything-all-at-once). He digs Bo Burnham. He reckons you can learn everything you need to know about business from ‘Survivor’. His days roll out against a hum of background podcasts and YouTube videos. And as we’ve seen, he is fond of a good meme.

Neil has long outgrown the concept of the ‘guilty pleasure’, and embracing pop culture has stood him in good stead throughout his 12 years at Droga5 and now Accenture Song. He’s been involved in campaigns that have become pop culture hits in their own right. And there have been projects that have gleefully played with IPs like ‘The Simpsons’, ‘Game of Thrones’, ‘Angry Birds’, ‘Back to the Future’, and icons like Jay-Z - and that have given back to fandoms, created content and fun for hungry audiences.

“A lot of our job is about being generous to the audience and knowing what the audience wants. In the context of Accenture Song, the term we use is ‘life-centricity’. It’s basically, how do you show up in people’s lives in a way that acknowledges them as a dimensional person, and is not just trying to haul product, trying to create something more generous in your relationship, where we’re giving them more than we’re asking for,” he says. “That’s most clearly articulated when you’re talking to a fan base.”

Neil talks earnestly about what it’s meant to work directly with enthusiastic fandoms, the sense of responsibility he carries to create ideas that respect and celebrate the love of fans.

As platforms proliferate and tech creates an ever growing onslaught of content, though, one wonders how creative minds can process it all, whether someone like Neil feels the need to disconnect. Not for Neil - the onslaught of culture is less a disorienting blizzard and more a semi-meditative white noise.

“I guess there’s pretty much constant stimulation going on, whether it’s podcasts, or YouTube or Instagram… At a certain point, I stopped beating myself up about having headphones in constantly and constantly listening to music or comedy or whatever,” he says. “I guess somewhere in that noise, there’s peace.”

But it’s not just Neil’s embrace of pop culture (deftly parlayed into creativity that drives pop culture itself) that makes him so easy to identify with as a creative spirit. Neil’s relatability goes much deeper. He’s not someone that leads by mystique. Like many people navigating an industry historically dominated by larger-than-life personas and individual brands, Neil found a disconnect with his own quieter, less archly curated and less showy way of being. Instead, he has quietly, radically forged his own path. 

He’s long realised that authenticity is significantly less draining than putting up a fake front. “Early on in my career, I had plenty of advice to the contrary which was: ‘Show you’re more excited! Dance monkey! Be more of a performer!’. I just never really bought into that performative part,” says Neil, chuckling, “I don’t know if you can tell someone to be more charismatic…”

Eventually, the rest of the world started to catch up to Neil, and so he too has grown more confident that being nothing other than 100% himself has been the right thing to do. “Over time, what was clearly being presented back to me as a weakness evolved. If you stick around long enough, some of these things start working in your favour, I’ve found,” says Neil. “It’s the way that the world has gone. There’s less of that ‘playing a role’. There are fewer places to hide - we’re literally talking to each other in our bedrooms and homes. It’s taken a long time for me to get comfortable with that.”

But while Neil has been consistently true to himself, he’s found that different surroundings and contexts have brought out different aspects of that self. He grew up in South Africa before moving with his parents to Australia in the ‘80s - and that shift to a new country and culture gave him a new perspective on the significance and uniqueness of his South African roots. The same happened 20 years later when he moved to the USA to work at Crispin Porter + Bogusky and he had to assimilate with the American work sensibility. His current role has brought him full circle and all of those past experiences have serendipitously come together.

“Now being in a global role, I can embrace all parts of that. I’m working with the folks in South Africa, which has been a real joy, and connecting with our partners in Australia, The Monkeys. The American part is still relevant. I guess it’s more like bringing your whole self to work - or all three parts yourself to work nationality-wise,” he says.

And it’s not just the various cultural identities and experiences that have come together. Throughout Neil’s career, he’s worked across traditional brand creative and pioneering digital spaces - one of his very first jobs as a designer in Australia saw him create vector animations to market internet games right in the middle of the ‘90s dotcom boom. His first agency jobs were at Amnesia Razorfish and then Tequila\TBWA in Sydney. Now years later, with Accenture Song, he sits at the centre of this intersection between creativity, business, and tech and finds that he’s become a sort of multilingual translator.

“It’s funny how your identity changes based on the context that you’re in. So, you know, in an environment like this, I definitely find myself leaning into the creative side of things and, dare I say it, even the emotional side. But there have been plenty of places in advertising where I was the nerd or a geek. I was the more technically oriented person. I guess over time there’s been a sense of being a translator in my job, which has become much stronger where you have to know what motivates the people you’re speaking to, and try to bridge those gaps between creativity and technology and business,” he says. “I don’t really tend to think about my career in this way, but I can kind of objectively see why this is a good job for me, to bring these worlds together.”

By eschewing pretence and simply being himself, Neil also makes space for others to be more true to themselves in the creative act. As a creative, Neil’s always loved that initial blank page, anything’s-possible ideation phase, and it gives him the most joy to do it in a room sparking off others. Preferring collaboration over playing to the crowd, he hopes that everyone can take part.

“I try, wherever possible, to create an environment where people feel they can contribute and there isn’t that rarified air, where you’re sitting around and feel you can’t say anything because you’re not ‘a creative’. As a creative leader, the job becomes more how you steer that conversation and how you connect the dots,” says Neil.

“It’s funny because even the word ‘creative’ implies that you’re going off and producing this thing of genius that everyone rallies around. I think a lot of the industry was built that way. But creation as a process actually has to be more of a team sport these days and you have to be able to merge all of these lanes of traffic into something that makes sense.”

Fostering creativity in others is foundational to Neil’s approach to leadership, and it’s something that he learned from Droga5 founder and Accenture Song’s CEO, David Droga. Having worked with David since 2009, when Droga5 was a young hotshop of just 60-odd people, Neil feels privileged to have been able to “learn along the way with that amazing group of people”, an experience that has been “career-making, life-changing”, and he notes that David and Droga5’s former CEO Sarah Thompson have been key to helping him realise his own capacity. It’s something that he wants to pass on, in turn, to those under his leadership.

“I feel like I’ve always been given the right amount of responsibility - and maybe a little more than I’m comfortable with, but enough to make things my own. That’s what I’ve tried to do with other people as well. Giving them clear enough direction without being dictatorial with where they’re heading,” he says. “David said something really simple to me early on, which was that everyone is here to try and fulfil their potential.”

This open and nurturing approach doesn’t just help individuals grow into themselves and find their creative voice - it also helps speed things up, getting to the great stuff more quickly. Drawn-out, structured briefing processes, for example, get in the way of creativity that flies at the speed of culture.

“I’m a big believer in accelerating the process. Even during the briefing, there’s a highly structured way of approaching things. First of all, it’s so drawn out and the world doesn’t really have patience for that. But it actually can be a fun process if everyone is entering the room with that mindset.”

That ability to be loose and open comes after many years spent carefully honing his craft. Reflecting on his time at Crispin Porter + Bogusky during its heyday in the mid-2000s, he recalls the serious rigour and discipline that went into making work that was fun and often silly. Neil reflects that most careers have what he jokingly refers to as “potato peeling for a couple of years”. “But ultimately you get to a point where you have to feel like you know enough to be a little looser with it.”

Of course, if Neil’s looking to accelerate the process and get past the old creative potato peeling, then the sudden X-Men level mutation that’s seen artificial intelligence erupt within the creative space is an interesting prospect. 

He approaches the topic with what he describes as ‘conscious optimism’. Using DALL-E for the first time was a moment Neil thinks he’ll always remember, thanks to the sense of magic it evoked - and he thinks there’s something in the idea of the technology as a sort of ‘synthetic collaborator’. “That’s a pretty helpful way to think about it, to have a sounding board and a space to experiment and see how things play out. On some level, maybe it takes care of that creative potato peeling. So much of how I was raised in the industry was like, ‘go off and come up with 100 ideas’, which is useful, but you’re expanding your palate and options.”

We’re speaking just the day after Elon Musk fired out an open letter asking developers to pause the AI arms race to address potential risks to society. Neil has a typically measured and non-dramatic view and talks about having an open mind and ‘the right level of trepidation’.

“It feels like there’s been a steady drum beat of things that are going to threaten our creativity: technology, media changes, data,” says Neil of the worries swirling around the creative industries. “AI is obviously the current one. We’re not really out of the metaverse talk yet. There’s always this threat to the purity of creativity, but in reality, there are ways that each of these things can be used to sharpen the creative process or open up areas that were previously inaccessible.”

Aptly, for someone whose creativity is all about collaboration and generosity, Neil wonders if part of the worry about AI comes from a chronic creative need for recognition. Credit is valuable currency in the agency world, but it becomes harder to hoard when we’re faced with the question of whether we’ve really come up with something or if the computer has. 

“We just have to evolve our definition of creativity,” says Neil. In his view of creativity as a collaborative orchestra rather than an act of rock star godhood, it may well be easier to see a place for AI that enhances the creative rather than bruising egos.

He recalls something that Alan Kelly, Droga5 Dublin’s CCO, said to him about his role being to protect creative ideas, like the kind of people who stop their cars to shepherd a family of ducklings across the road. Often the hardest thing about creativity isn’t coming up with the idea at all, it’s being able to spot the potential of an idea and protecting it while you bring it to life. And that really is a collective responsibility.

“There are so many steps in this process - and even if you have something that is mind-blowingly original, it’s then your responsibility to execute it in a way that honours that idea. Metaphorically, it’s a bit like when you see those old guys on the beach with a metal detector," he says. "Sometimes you have to dig a little deeper.”

Digging out and nurturing those creative nuggets is something that, even in this tech-driven world, takes heart, well-honed instinct and a sense of collaborative generosity. It's something that's been developing in Neil since he was a little boy scribbling cartoons or dreaming of animation, and which has taken shape over the years as he refined his craft and embraced fandom and pop culture. Crucially, he's also emerged as a quietly generous kind of creative leader and looks to how he can help those around him find their creative voice and instincts too. And, within the buzz and noise of the industry, of the tech explosion, of the hyperactive entertainment landscape, perhaps that combination of passionate fandom and a sense of purpose has provided it's own kind of peace. 

"If something interests you, I encourage people to go with it," he says. It's a philosophy that has served him well. "Go where the joy is."