Ad Astra: Sir John Hegarty on Creativity as an Act of Defiance

In an age where collaboration is king, Sir John Hegarty wonders if creativity’s cutting edge has been blunted. He reflects on a recent David Hockney show where the celebrated artist opines ‘collaboration is compromise’, dulling and diffusing that singular artistic vision. Certainly, if the point of creativity is to change something, that corporate urge to compromise to maintain the status quo and keep the peace is the very opposite of change.

The grit, tension and spirit of defiance that’s fueled many of our greatest works of culture, from the anger behind Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ to the rivalry that spurred on Lennon and McCartney is what makes creativity such a potent change agent – and it’s also what makes it hard to embrace in a marketing environment that prizes frictionlessness, worthiness and predictability.

And that’s bad news for the business world. After all, John argues, the core of business is creativity. “A business is a creative idea,” says John. “You have to have an idea of what you’re going to do, then you have to decide what it is you’re going to be represented by. Is it a product or service? What are we going to call it? What’s it going to look like? All these things are creative decisions. So the very essence of a business is a creative act.”

Many organisations are overlooking creativity’s commercial advantage, a realisation that led John and his team to launch the Business of Creativity course. These days, this pioneering creative entrepreneur is spending a lot of time helping business leaders and marketers to reacquaint themselves with – or indeed confront for the first time – creativity’s profound transformative power and helping them bring creativity to the centre of their thinking and culture. 

He describes his Business of Creativity programme with an appropriately inventive analogy. “If I said to you, ‘I’ve got the latest Lamborghini outside, nought to 60 in about 2.4 seconds. Here is the key – go for a drive!’ If you couldn’t drive, you wouldn’t go anywhere near the car, would you? If you could drive, you’d go, ‘I might not be able to drive very well, but I’ll give it a go.’ The more people understand creativity in an organisation, the less resistance you’ll have to it, the more you’ll be able to do and it will be the competitive advantage that creates continuing success.” 

Of course, it’s a metaphorical Lambo that John has been tearing about in since the ‘60s. As a young working-class son of Irish immigrants, he was kicking up against the stultifying, posh advertising establishment, which rankled at Americanisms like the word ‘kids’ and couldn’t even countenance the thought of doing anything so gauche as trying to relate to ordinary people.

Even before he entered the industry, John felt like an outsider in London. As a child, he was struck by the differences between his Irish family and his English friends. That, he says, made him an observer and it’s a core part of his creativity. At the London College of Printing, as a graphic design student, he found himself drawn to ideas and problem solving more than the fiddly minutiae of typography. He recalls an assignment to redesign a tax form – his peers focused on making the type more legible while John, keenly aware that people didn’t like filling in tax forms at all, used cartoons to make the whole experience a bit less boring. “Nobody ever went to war over Baskerville Old Face, they went to war over ‘power to the people’,” he says. As a student the advertising coming out of New York – agencies like DDB – packed with taught, engaging contradictions, lit a touch paper within him. He describes their work as ‘like a window into the future’. 

When John landed in his first agency, Benton Bowles, it was a world (and several decades) away from the happening New York ‘Mad Men’ scene. Surrounded by Sloaney secretaries who viewed him as ‘a social experiment’, upper-class account men and failed artists and writers with no passion for advertising, that outsider status came into his own. Rather than put him off advertising, it fired him up even more.

“It was lovely, that sense of ‘us against them’, trying to make a change. It was a great time. You always have to be wary of nostalgia, rose-tinted glasses. But we did sense that we were part of a big change, that we actually had a real vision for where we should go, as opposed to the people who were around us, who were established.”

Together with his copywriter partner, a certain Charles Saatchi, they had a clear view of what was wrong with advertising and how to bring it swinging into line with the creative explosion happening all over the rest of culture in the 1960s. 

“What I loved about the ‘60s revolution in creativity was that it was, for the first time, ground up… Up till then, it had always been top-down because it was controlled by wealthy people… the bright young things were commissioned by the king or whoever. But advertising, because it was controlled by large organisations, was about 10 years behind. So, although we were pushing it and trying to make it happen as we got into the industry, it didn’t really happen till the ‘70s.”

That feeling that he was pushing against something was a powerful motivator and it wasn’t long until John was leaving the establishment behind. First, he headed to Cramer Saatchi (which would later become Saatchi and Saatchi), though he soon found something else to kick against (“rapidly at Saatchis I realised it was morphing into what Charles wanted. And he wanted to be the biggest agency in the UK and I kind of went, well, I’d like to be the best.”). In 1973, John helped set up the London office of TBWA, where he met Nigel Bogle and John Bartle. And by the time they’d built the agency up to become Campaign’s ‘Agency of the Year’ and had bagged a Cannes Grand Prix (“when there was only one Grand Prix. Not like today, they're fucking falling out the sky, like a rain shower”). But the structure of the agency wasn’t quite right and in 1982, with Nigel and John, he set up BBH.

If the transition to leadership made John more aware of the pressures and realities of business, and what it would mean to lose or gain a client, it didn’t shake his single-minded commitment to brilliant work. He refused to buckle to worry.

“I think you have to have great faith in not compromising what you believe in – again that awful word compromise. I mean, yes we all compromise, but at what point is this too much? I think that the ability not to worry about that is important and the belief that ‘if I can make this work really outstanding it’s going to drive future growth and future business’. That’s what I can control. Whereas if I compromise, it’s going to undermine my future. It might work short term, but long term it won’t.”

Finally able to shape an agency as he’d like, John was determined to invert the structure that saw a small leadership cohort wield enormous power over a broad base of creative peons. Instead, leaders should work to support and empower the creatives. “Actually, all the power is with those creative people at the top because they could have an idea that could transform the agency, transform a client. My job is to make sure nothing gets in the way of that, and creating a culture where they feel their idea will be listened to. It may not be right, but it will be listened to – when you do that you liberate people.”

John says he was inspired by his old creative partner in the way he approached enabling people. “I always say this about Charles Saatchi, Charles was brilliant – lots of flaws – but he was brilliant at making people feel they could do better and this was the place you could do it. There was no barrier, there were no gatekeepers. I learned that from Charles. What you do is you create an opportunity and let people know that they are the most important people in the agency.”

That’s not to say he wouldn’t push people, and he’d use his understanding of the creative appetite for defiance as a useful lever. He recalls giving feedback on a Levi’s campaign, where he told the creative team that he liked the idea but thought the ads looked a bit boring. He could see the anger flare up inside the art director. After three hours battling to prove John wrong, the work came back looking fantastic.

“It’s a lovely example of challenging people but in a way that’s positive, not telling them they’re idiots. Creating an atmosphere where people feel their ideas are going to be listened to and given a fair chance is fundamentally important,” says John, who says that this approach creates a virtuous cycle as empowered creatives make brilliant work that attracts brilliant clients. Tellingly, the saying internally at BBH was ‘all roads lead to the work’.

People who worked at BBH in the ‘80s and ‘90s often remark upon that flat structure and the extraordinary community of creatives it fostered. What the creatives will also note is John’s clarity of vision, though he’s not sure where that singular good taste and decision making comes from.

“I always remember John Bartle saying to me once, ‘You get to a decision about an idea so fast and you’re often so right’. That’s a skill, I suppose. Some people can dance. Some people can sing – well, we can all sing but some can really do it well – but I’ve always had a very acute aesthetic sense which helps me, as well as a kind of philosophical sense,” says John. It may be an innate sensibility, but it has sharpened over the years – John says that he can get to the nub of a problem much faster these days. These days at his company Garage Soho, he uses that experience to work with entrepreneurs to crack crunchy business problems and to help them identify their creative core. 

That’s not to say he always gets it right, as John’s the first to admit. But even his approach to fucking up reflects a certain elegant clarity. “I’ve made huge mistakes, don’t worry about it!” he laughs. “Don’t worry about your mistakes, just move forward. People say, ‘Do you learn from your mistakes’ and I say ‘Absolutely not. They are a complete waste of time.’ Never dwell on them,” he says. After all, every new creative challenge is different and requires different thinking and execution anyway. The next brief isn’t a do-over.

He’s well aware that this insouciance and the lightness and speed with which he can identify and develop ideas is the product of decades of experience. With his Business of Creativity programme, he’s working with a range of organisations, cultures and personalities. And with that variety comes a range of comfort and enthusiasm for creativity, which John is empathetic to. As intimidating as being coached by the Sir John Hegarty might sound, his mindset is one of meeting people where they are.

“You do get people who kind of resist, who feel that creativity is losing control. I say, ‘Data informs, creativity inspires’. There are people who are super cautious, that’s the way they lead their life. You have to recognise that in how you lead these people forward. Somebody once said to me, ‘If you’re leading somebody through the jungle, John, you’ve got to be 10 feet in front of them, not 100 feet.’ You’ve got to take people with you.’

By and large, he reflects, despite everything that has changed in the marketing world, he finds the questions that he gets from marketers he works with are much the same as the conversations he’d have had in the past. How to grow brands without a big budget, how to engage with diverse audiences… But he does note that one common theme is a jitteriness around social media and the voracious online outrage machine. But, again, the feeling of risk that comes with the social media landscape can be reframed as a motivator.

“Humour is a great way of bringing people together and getting people behind you because you’ve made them laugh and smile. That acts as a wall of resistance to the social media groups who are waiting for someone to jump on and get enraged about. You stand up for something, have a point of view and make people laugh. There are bigger problems in the world. I think advertising communication has forgotten how to make people smile,” he says. “And when people are smiling, they’re feeling good and are more likely to defend what you do.”

This reticence and cautiously dampened humour, John notes, is somewhat unique to advertising and marketing. It’s certainly not reflective of what ordinary people are getting up to on TikTok, which overflows with slapstick humour, sketch comedy, and emotionally open songwriters. Just as John tried to get the language of ordinary, working-class people into advertising in the 1960s, creatives and brands should be looking to their audiences for cues and clues.

John also finds that in wider creative culture, there are still inspiring creative voices who aren’t afraid to take a strong, unconventional stance. He admires Jonathan Glazer’s ‘Zone of Interest’ and while he didn’t particularly like ‘Poor Things’, he can see in Yorgos Lanthimos a creator willing to use humour and make wild decisions in the face of more sensible naysayers. It’s a thrawn single-mindedness which served the movie well in terms of buzz and award success. Similarly, Elon Musk is a figure that John doesn’t really care for on a personal level, but love him or hate him, there’s no denying his strong point of view and big swings have driven his success.

“You’ve got to kick against something,” he says. “If you don’t do that and you’re petrified of offending somebody, then you’ll never do anything. I think great businesses have to get up and go ‘I don’t care’. The trouble is that they’re run by people who’ve got no vision, no imagination.”

If all this sounds a bit, well, scary, John thinks we too often frame creativity, and strong decisions as risky. Talking up risk in a business context may make for sexy-sounding macho posturing, but it’s not terribly appealing, even for someone who has embraced creativity for decades. “I don’t like risk. I don’t get up in the morning and go, ‘Wow, I’m going to have a risky day that starts with a risky breakfast and drive a risky car’... It’s just nonsense.” Ever the adman, he’d rather rebrand the conversation as ‘exciting’, using positive and energising words to motivate people. And in any case, if you’re at a business that’s serious about growth, the risky thing is to ignore the transformative power of creativity and to refuse to make a stand.

“Progress is about challenging the status quo,” says John. “The only way you progress is you challenge what’s out there.”