My Biggest Lesson: Jeff Bowerman

Jeff Bowerman is the executive creative director at DEPT®, where he leads pioneering work for brand such as eBay, Just Eat Takeaway and Amazon Prime Video. A Cannes Lions and D&AD award-wining creative director, he start his career in digital, and has worked the last 20 years in both agencies and client side creative roles.

Can I let you all into a little secret? 

I’m very lazy.

Don’t get me wrong, I work hard, put in long hours at times, and give a lot of fucks about the team I work with and the work we do - but like most people, I yearn for that sweet spot of busyness and nothingness.

I’ve always felt validated by Bill Gates’s attitude to laziness - I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.”. Yes, I feel seen by this.

This was always the appeal of computers + art, it meant doing more with less. 

A pivotal moment for me was back in 1996, it was my A-level art finals and the school had to call the exam board to check if I could do the work on a computer - feels ridiculous now, but back then it was considered radical and, well.. cheating. No one had asked before.

The following summer I'm temp-ing at a provincial pension company before university. A tedious task of writing templated letters to people based on certain criteria. Not the dream job. So I ended up writing a script that automated a six-week stint into half a day’s work. 

Now, Google, before you snap me up, essentially it was a mail merge, but it kinda set me on my way to how I'd like to work for the next 20 yrs and served me well in a career as a digital creative.

I gave it a week before I couldn't continue pretending to be doing the work manually, I think they were more embarrassed and sceptical than impressed that it could be done that way, which Is a similar feeling in many agencies when it comes to things like AI and automation.

It will take our jobs …

I don’t get to hand craft 203434 assets…

Great - that means we can focus on more creative things - like having big ideas and having fun along the way. 

The world of digital and creative is the laziness sweet spot - do more with less, make once and iterate, bring in the audience & creators, use data, use AI, use automation … all this to me is smartlaziness® 

But I’m way too lazy to register that trademark.