Why Max Maclean Can't Say No to Saying Yes

Max Maclean is the creative lead at Wellcom, based in Sydney, Australia.

Officially, Max’s creative career started in 2012, but it really started in 1995 when he was banned from an under-8s writing competition because -- according to one judge -- his story "was obviously written by an adult."

Max has been writing stories ever since, for clients like Philips, Koala, and Mercedes-Benz, at Ogilvy, Deloitte Digital, The Royals, and other agencies.

Outside of work, Max has made an award-winning musical and spoken at SXSW. He loves eating spicy food and regularly practices martial arts. Just in case he ever comes across an under-8s writing competition judge.

LBB> Person: What kind of creative person are you?

Max> This was not the feedback I’d been hoping for… but it’s 100% accurate. I’m competitive and argumentative, and I fight tooth and nail for ideas I believe in. Luckily for my career, I’m also enthusiastic, collaborative, and happy to admit I’m wrong. Like a golden retriever that hasn’t been spayed. Barky, but fundamentally friendly.

I think that everybody has creativity within them. But people who are happy fucking up are naturally more creative.

I believe deeply that, given enough free time and fast broadband, just about anyone can do just about anything.

This belief, combined with a tendency to get bored easily, means that I say ‘yes’ to just about everything. So I usually have two or three side projects on the go.

After saying ‘yes’ to Hackathons, I ended up working with startups and tech firms as a creative consultant for 10 years. After saying yes to helping a friend’s ailing events firm, I ended up running a series of hybrid-reality warehouse raves, held half in VR and half IRL.

Possibly the weirdest ‘yes’ chain ended with me editing and co-producing 'The Marvellous Elephant Man the Musical' -- a very funny and deeply inaccurate musical which turned the tragic tale of Joseph Merrick into a preposterous love story.

The show ran for over 50 nights, eventually appearing in the Sydney Spiegeltent as a headliner of the 2023 Sydney Fringe. Given I’m medically tone deaf and despise musicals, it was a weird turn of events. But given I can’t say ‘no’ to saying ‘yes,’ I expect the weirdest is yet to come.

LBB> Product: How do you judge the creativity of a piece of work?

Max> I don’t think it’s possible to judge the creativity of a piece of work in isolation. Ideas don’t exist within a vacuum. With that in mind, only one criteria really matters: Can idea A outcompete ideas B, C, and D?

An OG Mad Man ,Howard Luck Gossage, summarised this perspective beautifully: “Nobody reads ads. People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.” Howard lived in an age where his ads only had to outcompete magazine articles. But nowadays, an ad has to outcompete 'White Lotus', TikTok and OnlyFans. The idea that an idea is only as good as the ideas it outcompetes might sound reductive.

Most of my industry’s output is a response to media plans and brand guidelines, not to the question that really matters: “Is this work interesting enough to survive?”

For me, the gold standard of creativity - of outcompeting other ideas - is ‘St George’, the 1997 Blackcurrant Tango advert by HHCL.​

What I love about this advert is that the agency really understood the product and market. ‘90s British TV audiences didn’t want to hear about Blackcurrant Tango, they wanted to watch 'Match Of The Day'.

HHCL knew that, so they made something more interesting than 'Match Of The Day': an obscenely expensive film where the CEO of Tango challenges a French exchange student -- who dared insult ‘BCT’ -- to a boxing match on the White Cliffs of Dover.

LBB> Process: Tell us about how you like to make creative work.

Max> Every creative I’ve ever met is an intellectual magpie.

Hoarders of cultural lore, urban myths, esoteric skill sets and weirdly-specific statistics. Can they do basic maths? Absolutely fucking not!

But they can weave you a tapestry while explaining CRISPR in iambic pentameter. My old dean, Marc Lewis, calls this ostensibly useless habit ‘dot collecting.’ And it’s very useful. Because the more dots you collect… the more dots you can connect. As Mark Twain said, “There’s no such thing as a new idea. We simply take a lot of old ideas, give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations.”

With this in mind, every creative makes creative work the same way. They take their collection of ideas and (re)connect things in surprising but coherent ways.

For me, the thing that supercharges the creative process is collaboration. Channelling the improv comedian and adopting a ‘yes, and’ mindset helps. Especially with other people’s ideas. With your own ideas, it’s different.

My creative director, OIi Hammerton, has good guidance on that front, having said, "Don’t ask people 'do you like it?' Say, 'How would you fix it?" All truly great ideas are unexpected, emotional, and have zero ‘fat’ on them. And feedback is the best way to trim the fat and simplify.

But the biggest killer of great ideas is death by a thousand cuts.

LBB> Press: What external factors have shaped you and what can make or break a creative project?

Max> I grew up surrounded by books and colour.

Every wall was adorned with obnoxious wallpaper, lairy paint or dog-eared paperbacks. This loud, wordy environment probably played a part in my loud, wordy personality. After childhood, the external factors which shaped me most were negative experiences. The most formative of all was experiencing just how difficult it is to make creative work. I’m not talking about pack-your-bags-we ’re-going-to-Cannes creative work. I mean any creative work that’s even vaguely interesting. Full stop.

It took me two years to make my first campaign.

Initially, this made me cynical and despondent, but I quickly learned whining was pointless. Before concluding that, if I wanted to do great work, I had to make my own opportunities. That negative experience is the reason that I can’t say ‘no’ to saying ‘yes.’ It’s also the reason I’ve come to value the importance of everything around the big idea. From the calibre of the account people to the culture of the agency.

Without great suits, great ideas never stop being conceptual.

Without a strong agency culture , where resilience is encouraged, creativity is lionised and proactivity is prioritised, it’s not just hard to make great work, it’s nearly impossible.

Adland creativity suffered when agencies stopped hitting the pub every Thursday. Now, don’t get me wrong, drinking with colleagues has serious downsides. I have stories. But there’s no faster way to foster real friendships, deep loyalties and shared passions. The kind that turns agencies into collectives who go above and beyond for each other.