Isobar’s Nick Bailey Hails Code As The Creative Craft Of Our Times

Nick Bailey kicked off The Cannes Lions European Festival, Eurobest, with a call to view digital creativity, specifically code, as integral to the creative process.

Isobar’s newly promoted CCO for EMEA was first up on the coveted Inspiration Stage, following a heartfelt address by Philip Heylen, the Vice Mayor of Antwerp, about the burgeoning start-up and creative culture within the city.

Drawing upon artists, writers and music production, Bailey's talk, 'In Service Of The Truth’ argued that the depth, range and complexity of creativity has grown massively, while coding and technology have evolved to become creative crafts themselves. Rather than the idea determining the craft, the craft is forming the idea once more. 

He shared his ambitions for creativity – to create ideas that resonate with people, that catch fire. Ideas that have a big impact on culture. He pressed that continual iteration and commitment has always been part of the process, but that developments in technology has allowed us to exploit the boundaries of creativity further. 

Kylie Minogue’s hit single 'I should be so lucky' was his case in point. Kylie’s management team wrote the song in twenty minutes after realising that Kylie was en route to their party and they were ill- prepared. When people in the industry found out, they criticised her team for belittling the music production process, to which the team argued that actually the song came as a result of over 50 years combined experience. Nick explained that although the song developed at pace, it has a clearly defined purpose which lead to its success. Nick urged the Eurobest audience to "do more" with purpose, concluding "You can’t do extraordinary things without making".

He agreed that despite more purposeful creativity is happening then than ever before in agencies, that it’s not as visible. He explained:

"Code is the clay of the 21st century. The stuff we can mould at will to create anything we can imagine” but he questioned why it’s feared and derided as "not creative."

Which begs the question, how are agencies responding to this development? Is our team make-up changing? The relationship between the craft and the idea is often talked about in Fine Art, but not in our industry. Why?