Pat Murphy:
Hi and welcome to The MCA Prodcast, your fix for everything innovative in advertising production. I’m Pat Murphy and I’ve been working in this industry for more than 35 years now. I’ve seen a lot of changes, but know there’s plenty more around the corner. Each week on the podcast, you’ll get to hear from one of the movers and shakers who are shaping the world of advertising and production for the future, and we’ll dive into some of the key challenges facing our sector today and how we’re best placed to overcome them.

Today we’re talking to Nils Leonard, one of the most progressive and provocative creative leaders in the industry. Nils is the co-founder of Uncommon Creative Studio, an agency that’s redefining what it means to build brands in the modern world.

Before Uncommon, he served as Chief Creative Officer and Chairman at Grey LDN, where he helped transform the agency into one of the most awarded and culturally relevant shops globally. Known for his fearless approach to creativity, his belief in the power of purpose and his mission to build brands that people are genuinely glad exist, Nils has built a reputation for pushing boundaries, not just in advertising, but across design, social impact and even product innovation.

Nils, thank you for coming to my humble podcast today.

Nils Leonard:
You can just chill out a bit with that intro!

Pat Murphy:
Does that sound like someone different?

Nils Leonard:
I will take that all day. After that I will be here for five hours. You big me up like that. We are good.

Pat Murphy:
Well, we can kind of split this into two or three parts, can’t we?

Now, I recently saw your billboard campaign for Specsavers, which is one of the reasons I it was a catalyst for me wanting to get you on the podcast. I just thought that was just brilliant advertising and it reminded me why I came into the business. My last creative guru who I had on the podcast was Sir John Hegarty, of course. Uh, do you think there’s a parallel between you and Sir John?

Nils Leonard:
John and I have had a couple of differences of opinion in in a very professional and respectful way. I think there is probably in that we’re both sort of opinionated twats. But I have a lot of time for John. I think he’s a brilliant, brilliant and articulate human, but we we’ve actually sort of bumped heads a little bit along the way, particularly I remember when I was trying to, I guess, really trying to define a new way of doing things at Grey. John famously went ‘yeah, but you can’t be a great tele ad’. And I remember thinking, ‘well, a british comedy award for the Angina Monologues at the Haymarket does beat a tele ad’. And we had this protracted debate. But yeah, I’ve got a lot of time for John. I think John matters and still wants to matter and I think that honestly, in an industry that’s quite cynical, that is still very refreshing and very needed.

Pat Murphy:
I think there is definitely one parallel between you and John in that you both believe in human creativity as opposed to using AI all the time. He definitely believes in the power of storytelling using real humans.

Nils Leonard:
Yeah, totally. I mean, I just think people are amazing. I’m an optimist and I really am. I didn’t know I was until I did a few of these, but I realise that anytime everybody really talks about a crisis or a threat or a frustration, I’m just incredibly buoyed by that, because I think the human race is amazing at getting itself out of shit. I really do. I think that’s when we’re at our best. You know, and I think you know, when advertising got really quite bad and people were like ‘it needs to be good again and then’, all of a sudden, the skip ad button came along and what it did was it forced us to recognise that people want to pay money to avoid our entire industry. I think it made things better. It made us more innovative. I believe AI is doing the same thing.

Pat Murphy:
I completely agree. Now this is going to take a slight leaning this podcast towards production, because it is called The Prodcast after all, and I know that you love producers. I was talking to one of your ex-producers today, James Colville from Grey, when he was working with you, and he said how much you loved the business of producing and you value producers.

Nils Leonard:
I mean, I think it’s huge. We’re incredibly dependent right as an industry. A lot of the time we go ‘I’ve had an amazing idea’ and the very next thing we say is or ‘who can I get to do it for me’? And when you view production in a very different way, if you look at it as a literal distance between the idea you’ve had and reality, and then you say to yourself, ‘well, what is the distance between my idea and it being reality’? And you look at it and you go, that’s production, then it changes your entire view of it.

So I don’t think this studio could be remotely what it is without people like James, without Charlie Gatsky, without Charlie Barmer in New York. You know the people that literally find a way to make this complete nonsense a reality. You know, and you know even the brick box spot we just made. You know I think what I’ve learned as well is that when you drive a difficulty and an endeavour into a project that is almost unachievable, it forces you as a group of people to make things that are newer, and I think the way to do that is to have producers that are capable of doing it and trust you and want to do it and have the energy to do it, and so I think production is a superpower. I think if Uncommon had had one superpower really, it was our ability to actually make. Not necessarily even think, just make.

Pat Murphy:
Well, we’re going to come back onto that a little bit later on. Now, before you joined or kind of formed Uncommon with your other partners, you held the dual roles of Chief Creative Officer and Chairman at Grey London. I’m kind of curious how you navigated the intersection between creative leadership and also that commercial accountability in that role.

Nils Leonard:
I learned a lot from a guy called Tor Mirren who’s now at Apple. He was the Chief Creative Officer in Grey in New York at that time and we differed in opinion on work and types of work and all that. But the one thing Tor taught me was that if you’re the creative leader of a company by proxy, you’re the leader because we’re in the business of creativity. And if you believe that to be true, if you believe what you sell as a company is purely creativity and you happen to be the most senior creative in that job, then you are the leader of the company, or you should assume you are. And I just thought that was an incredibly liberating sentiment, because I think most creatives- we don’t know, we do it but we relegate ourselves to the colouring end department and we have these awful looking back at myself kind of simp-like chats where we’re like ‘I don’t know, talk to the money people’ or ‘I don’t know, talk to the person who really runs it’. What the fuck was I saying? It’s essentially giving over any form of power I might’ve been given. And so I look at it and go – the day you wake up and you say, well, I’m the creative visionary for this company. But I’m not just the creative visionary for this company. I’m the visionary for this company Because all we are is our version of events, of creativity. Then you’re suddenly… I found that incredibly thrilling and I actually Tor taught me this, but I actually just assumed leadership!

So the chairmanship thing was interesting at Gray because Tor was also chairman and I think that that role said to the company and to the world that this is the most important role here and it wasn’t divorced from money, it wasn’t divorced from power, it wasn’t divorced from growth, you know, and it forced us all to be better leaders.

Pat Murphy:
And does your understanding of the business side of the industry, does that influence the kind of creative work you do or not? You just do the stuff you want to do anyway.

Nils Leonard:
No, it does. But what it taught me is there is this massive presumption you have as a creative that there is some huge tome you can’t possibly read and a huge raft of experience you couldn’t possibly learn about running a company, and it’s all bullshit. And ultimately it’s about people, it’s about energy, it’s about trust, it’s about candor, it’s all those other human things really, and I sort of thought the learnings I made at Grey. I learned very, very fast at Grey, made lots of mistakes too, but the moment you realize you are directly attached to the business that walks in the building and actually, as a creative, you are the person they’re paying for, right? So you should be in the fee negotiations, you should have a point of view on those, because there is no one better than you at bringing that client and saying ‘sorry, just so we’re clear if we don’t get to this number, you don’t get me’.

Pat Murphy:
I was listening to one of the other podcasts that you did recently and I laughed, because you have this thing called a ‘faff tax’. And I’m a great believer in making stuff I love making. In fact, I wrote a blog on LBB about the wonderful thing about making. I’d feel completely useless if I wasn’t creating. Well, part of the reason I do this podcast is because I’m not actually creating stuff every day, but I needed some outlet to make something, and you have this faff tax for your clients. Tell me a bit more about that.

Nils Leonard:
When we started Uncommon, one of our biggest fears wasn’t – I mean, somewhat madly if you think about it – one of our biggest fears wasn’t winning business. It would be that we won the wrong sort of business. And we’ve all had accounts like this where you spend a year grinding away in meetings and all you’ve made are decks and you actually haven’t made anything. Now, if you’re a startup, you’re invisible unless you make. You have nothing to talk about dude, and your opinions are only good once. You can only launch with a point of view once. After that, the work is the evidence.

So we were like ‘well, how do we force clients to to do it? How do we enter an agreement with them in meeting one where they understand we are about output’? So we said well, what if, if they haven’t made anything by six months into the relationship, we just charge them more. So we call it faff tax, which is, if you’re faffing around, if we’re larking about, if there’s stakeholders, if you change your mind and we haven’t made anything by six months, we’re going to charge you 25% more.

And of course, we’ve never had to use it once. We mentioned it in meetings and everybody laughs. And then I think there’s this air of ‘yeah, okay, we better fucking do it’. But honestly, what it’s done weirdly is I think it’s defined the type of client now that come to us. We just don’t attract those guys that don’t want to make stuff. We really don’t. We can’t win those bits of business. It just doesn’t work.

Pat Murphy:

So I’m kind of curious about how you win business. Do you participate in pitches or do you kind of operate in the way that BBH used to operate, which was like ‘we don’t take part in pitches. People come to us because they know what they’re going to get’.

Nils Leonard:
Mostly the latter. We’re not arrogant enough to say we don’t take part in pitches. Some clients use them and I think very respectfully use them to go meet a load of people they didn’t know.

What I would say is we don’t take part in anything where people don’t know who we are. So we’ll never just say yes to being on a list. I think a lot of agencies forget to ask people why they came, and it’s telling. The answer is telling because you know if they say, ‘oh, Nils, I read this thing or I saw this podcast, or um, I saw this bit of work for BA and we want a bit. You know, we want something like windows’, then I understand we’re on the same wavelength. You know, if they say, ‘well, mate, you’re on a list and you know we’re quite good’, we tend to walk away. The best clients come to us and they go ‘I’ve seen this, this, this and this. I’ve heard you speak. I know all your stuff. I don’t even need to see your creds. What do you think about X?’ And we have a lot of business like that and touching all the wood in the world that tends to also make the best work.

Pat Murphy:
Do you actually walk away from business?

Nils Leonard:

Yeah, all the time.

Pat Murphy:
Because that’s you know it’s revenue. You know it’s revenue that’s not coming in through the door.

Nils Leonard:
Yeah. But when you look at it like you can have really bad revenue. You can have really foul dependent revenue that doesn’t just waste your time but actually holds you back. Imagine someone pays you for your time. They don’t pay you for your work, they don’t pay you for your output, but they just pay you for your time and they buy up that time. That isn’t just you getting paid for your time and kind of going ‘well, I got some revenue’. They’re actively stopping you doing something else that can change your life. And when you view it like that, you just don’t have fucking time. I don’t have time for those relationships. So I think it’s almost a defence in the studio to walk away from those types of business and to sense them very, very early.

Pat Murphy: 
And I guess, um that that keeps the rest of the team pretty motivated because they’re working on the the kind of clients that that you know really want to be with you.

Nils Leonard:
That’s the spoken deal. You know the deal is – and we purposefully and mechanically tried to be a magnet for talent. And when you think about talent, what talent want most is to make. They don’t actually want money, it’s all a load of shit. They don’t want the best Mac, they don’t want a beanbag, they want to make. And the more they make, the happier they are. And if the spoken deal is, ‘if you come here, you will make great work on great brands and your work will matter and you will be famous’, and that’s the deal. But you’ll work hard. You’ll work really fast. You’ll do things that push you and make you, and push you out of your comfort zone, but the deal is you will make. I think that’s the right arrangement. That’s the arrangement certainly that works at Uncommon.

Pat Murphy:
Where do you find your talent from? Because in our business we find it more hard to find great talent than it is to find great clients. Would that be the same with you?

Nils Leonard:
Yeah, I think that’s true. I actually do think that’s true and I told you before I don’t want to be a cynic, but the one thing I’m fighting cynicism around is, I guess what I’d call the exodus of a real talent in our business. I look back, actually, and I think there’s an entire raft of creative leadership that isn’t here anymore because they were adopted and stolen by the platforms and they just go into the mothership and they disappear. By the way, Tor Mirren being one, I love that guy, but he could have run probably the most successful American startup of his generation. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m sure Apple are recompensing him handsomely for his time, but I look at a lot of people and I just go ‘God, there’s a whole generation of startups and companies that would exist, that don’t now’.

I don’t think the industry is attached to as much money as it used to be, and I think that’s the clues in the money man. I’ve always had a very open and very tactical relationship with money, which is the Gilbert and George quote ‘make the world to believe in you and to pay heavily for the privilege’. I think this industry has forgotten that and, as a result, you know people who want to make life-changing money and want to do those sorts of things just aren’t entering into our game. You know they’re launching their own brands or they’re doing all that other stuff. So I think it’s tough and finding talent, particularly in certain markets. I think the US is a hard market to find genuinely good talent in certain markets.
I think US is a hard market to find genuinely good talent in.

Pat Murphy:
It is. I’m pretty lucky. We’ve just hired a new president of North America, so I’m sure you’ll bump into him at some point.

How do you personally deal with creative fear? If you’re about to pitch or you’re talking to a client, a potential client… is there a creative fear with you or are you just fearless?

Nils Leonard:
We try to remove the concept or try to recognise it for what it really is. Most fear is giving a shit about what someone else thinks. That’s most fear in any context in the world, really. And when you think about it creatively, I told my wife once that I was going to give a talk on creative bravery – fearless thinking or something it was called, and she said ‘fuck off. She said you don’t get to talk about bravery, firemen, get to talk about bravery, you sell cheese’, and I was like, ‘yeah, okay’. I mean and I mean this sincerely we are more scared of not making, and we are more scared of making bad work than we are of anything else. So I think the only fear I would say that I have is not doing our, our thinking justice, not going in that room and articulating it the right way, not making it to the best of our ability. That’s the only thing we’re scared of.

Pat Murphy:
Let’s come back to the production process a little bit, if you don’t mind? I noticed recently and I don’t know how much you get involved in the production process, but I’m seeing creative treatments that come from directors and they are all looking very similar. They all look pretty samey these days because they’re written by you know, they’re written by treatment writers.

Would you prefer to see something that’s written by the actual director? You know maybe what Vaughan and Anthea used to do? They used to send videos in of themselves talking to camera. How would you like to have communication with the director in a way that they can get their ideas across?

Nils Leonard:

Yeah, who doesn’t? I mean, honestly, nothing beats a phone call. You know, I got on a call with the director the other day and they were just like, ‘look all this shit aside, I’ve seen this and this. I think this is actually like an ad from 1997 and that’s what I love about it’ and you know it was it was that candour and uh articulation you get in 60 seconds that no treatment can do. I think treatments have become exercises in repeating the strategy back to clients that nothing to do with real vision, actually, a lot of the time and honestly, man, really, when you talk about people making videos or whatever, what that is energy. That’s someone saying I fucking want this. You know, I work with Kim Garrig on a Sirius spot, Sirius XM spot in the states that I’m immensely proud of, and I remember Kim’s first meeting. She went ‘no, look at this’. She said, ‘look, I could talk to you about a treatment, but I’ve got three dancers you need to look at’. And she just showed these movies and these casting tapes she’d made. I was just like this is fucking done. It’s like we’re in. We’re in production. This isn’t a treatment, we’re making. So I was like that, that’s the fucking arrangement, that’s what you want.

Pat Murphy:

That’s exactly what you want. Fantastic!

Now you’re based in the US at the moment, and you recently won the award for Agency of the Year 2025 by Campaign US. That’s a significant achievement. You’ve only been there 12 months.

Nils Leonard:
Yeah, it’s insane, it is actually batshit. Honestly, mate, it was… Oh, I worry about saying things like this because I think I sound like a twat, but we try to mechanize our success and our progress because most people don’t. So we try to think and fantasize and manifest and we look at the industry and we look outside the industry and we create what we call ‘reference points’. And in my head I was like ‘right, Droga is probably the reference point for a successful agency or studio in the States’. If you’re in design, it’s probably Collins, if you’re in advertising, it’s Droga.

And I was like ‘well, how long did it take him’? And I was like, ‘well, we just have to beat that’. And that was the deal, dude, and that was, was it? And so we have worked and chased and grown and crafted and been noisy and done enough to merit it. You know and I’m sure it’s debatable for some people, I’m sure it is, but, I would argue that when you look at the output and I think this is really based on everything we learned in London first time around we were just like ‘well, actually I can accelerate that. Now I know what the deal is. I don’t need three years to do that, I need one’. If it goes well and thankfully it has. You know it’s not, it’s not been easy, but that’s the deal, yeah, so I’m over the moon.

That team are incredible, man. Sam Shepherd in particular I’ve got to give a shout out to. He’s the creative leader in New York. He’s a phenomenal guy, really good thinker, really great leader, like all best. He’s absolutely lovely, annoyingly, but he’s a rascal, you know. He’s got this sort of mischief and naughtiness to his thinking that I just find so compelling, you know, and I think some of the work he’s made is brilliant.
Pat Murphy:
That means obviously, the 51% acquisition by Havas hasn’t changed your culture.

Nils Leonard:
Absolutely not. But that was the deal.

Pat Murphy:
Have they had much of an influence over the way you run things, or not?

Nils Leonard:
Genuinely, I think the bit that most people miss is – everyone obsesses about the percentages, but no one really asks about the actual deal. And if you look at the deal, we didn’t merge, we haven’t been folded into anywhere, we haven’t changed our name. You know, hire and fire people. Hire and fire our clients. In fact, they didn’t want to mess with it.
They want to be a part of Uncommon’s journey and are happy to support us in any way. We think we need to do that. It’s quite scary actually, dude, because it’s the equivalent of someone saying ‘all right, there you go, here’s all the rope, best of luck’. You know, and we were like, ‘oh shit’.

Pat Murphy:
It’s almost the complete opposite of a private equity deal, because they want to come in and they want to have a mess with what you’re doing, right? But they seem to have left you alone and of course it reconnects you with Vicky again back at Havas. Do you have anything? Do you work together at all?

Nils Leonard:
No, not enough. I love Vix, Havas have us have some really good people, man. To be fair, like we, we’ve done a couple of bits with them, but we’ve not, we’ve really not managed, I think, to do that in a big or massively meaningful way yet. But it wasn’t really that by design. You know, actually the relationship is very different and what Havas do is very different to Uncommon. I think if we were very similar, it would be slightly weird deal to have made. But there are some places we come together.

We’re also learning a lot from, you know, their relationship on the entertainment side of the business, with Canal and all those places, and Yannick in particular, in particular, by the way, I don’t know if you’ve met Yannick? He’s a really impressive and very real person. He’s a very simple talker which I can’t overstate enough, you know, and I think he loves creativity. You know the first chat we had, man, we’re on this roof somewhere in London and he talked for about, honestly, about 20 minutes, about a case study, for a bit of work, and I just thought ‘who the fuck else is running a company of that size’ and he wasn’t just talking about it like you know, he loved it! You know, and he and he was critiquing it and he was telling me, you know, and I just thought, ‘right, okay, this guy gets it’. In the same way, a client would seek us out for the right stuff. I think they sought us out for the right stuff. That’s what I would say.

Pat Murphy:
So you’re in the UK, you’re in the US and you have an office in Sweden as well. Where else, what’s next?

Nils Leonard:

Well, we are a bit weird in that we don’t really grow those offices out of business. We grew them out of talent. So we happen to have a lot of business in the States, but half our revenue was international two years ago, maybe more, and so when we were looking at it, there wasn’t a burning need to open an office there. It just felt like the right thing to do. The door was open and there was energy and momentum and we should do it. I found Sam and then built the studio out of Sam. The studio in Stockholm is very similar in that Bjorn Stahl, who runs that studio I used to work with at gray he’s one of the most talented creative leaders in the world made Mouldy Whopper, Swedish Number. Uh, he’s just impressed. And so, really, we grew the studio out of Bjorn, you know, and Bjorn said look, I really want to do this thing. And I wondered to myself what if the network of the future was born out of talent, not clients? Wouldn’t that be interesting? That’s the experiment.

Pat Murphy:

That’s kind of how we run! And somehow, you know, it creates an incredible culture because you’re finding the right people first. Actually, what tends to happen in our business? We find the right people and then we decide what’s the right role for them.

Nils Leonard:
That’s exactly right.

Pat Murphy:
It’s kind of you know whether you want somebody.

Nils Leonard:
You can feel in your bones, can’t you, the difference they would make in your organisation. You just know, and I think that’s right. You just got to follow that intuition. Most people over-intellectualise this whole business. Man, it’s crazy. And actually you just meet great people. You’re like I need to find a way to get them in the fold and I know good shit will happen. Robert Saville of Mother said the cruellest thing, but it was brilliant. He said he’d seen me speak a few times this is years ago and he said ‘the difference, Nils, between when you’re good and when you’re crap: you’re crap when you try to impress clients. I’ve seen you try and do that. You’re really good when you’re just speaking about talent and about the motivating talent of what you think’ you know. And he, he says to just do that. And then I took a step back and thought well, what if I engineered a whole business around that? What if all I was trying to do at the top of the ladder was make a place that talent wanted to be most? Everything else would follow. That’s the experiment anyway.

Pat Murphy:
Yeah, I have a tendency tendency to stalk people for years, right, and then they end up coming over, right?

Nils Leonard:
That’s how I found Sam. He made a piece of work called called the lost class which, if you haven’t seen, I think is one of the best bits of work of this decade, to be honest. Um, and I found that and I was like ‘who the fuck made that’? I had to find it. I was like viscerally jealous to the point of hatred that we hadn’t done it, and that is the feeling that you need to chase, and I was like, right, okay, I need to find this guy now you.

Pat Murphy:
You were part of the Mad Men / Math Men conversations from a few years ago, and one of those math men was Sir Martin Sorrell, of course, right, and you work with Sir Martin at uh WPP or Grey. How did you get on?

Nils Leonard:

Really well actually. He’s a ruthless bastard, but I’ve got a lot of time for him. He’s like the mafia – if you’re on his side, genuinely, he’ll give you loads of rope, he’ll throw you in the right room. If you fuck up and you leave him or whatever, he’ll try and crush you. It’s terrifying, and do I think he has a broken relationship with creativity and with creative talent? Yes. And I think if he understood that part of the game, he would be truly unstoppable. But everyone has to have a flaw. But we got on really well. I mean, I would argue, for a period of a few years. Grey – London, in particular, was his agency of choice. You know, when he was looking to make moves or, you know, win bits of business, we were the people he’d come to see. But yeah, I wasn’t over the moon about how he treated us when we quit and tried to start Uncommon. I think he could have played that much smarter, to be honest.

Pat Murphy:
Yeah. I mean I think he’s had that same relationship with lots of individuals. I guess.

You’ve often spoken about your dad being a tattooist and growing up around shockingly bad art, but there’s something deeply human in that imperfection. How did that raw, unpolished exposure to creativity shape your standards, your courage and your tolerance for creative messiness as you were growing up and where you are now?

Nils Leonard:
You only know this stuff when you get asked questions like that. You don’t walk around thinking about it!

I reckon having Flash which is the drawings that tattooists have, you know, when they’re practicing or whatever – there was Flash all over the house and having that everywhere maybe taught me that drawing and making were a thing and that they were quite important. He was a tattooist. A lot of it was cash in hand probably nefarious, to be candid and that also taught me maybe, that you could get paid for creativity. I’d have been an artist. I’m obsessed with the concept of ‘this is worth whatever I say it is’. I just think it’s magic, it’s modern magic the ability to create a thing and then tell somebody what you think it’s worth monetarily.

Pat Murphy:
That comes back to the point you made on one of your podcasts about the RRP of art. Yeah, and the same thing really applies to creativity and advertising, and I think that’s right, you know.

Nils Leonard:
That’s it man, and I think maybe I learned all that and just tried to take it up the ladder. You know we’re very musical, the house is very musical. You know lots of gigs, lots of people over. I learned to play guitars in a band, Like I suppose I would never have said this at the time, but I was learning that making in those forms of art could be valuable, could be what you did with your life.

Pat Murphy:

Does that mean you charge a massive premium for the work we working with clients? Do you charge a lot of money?

Nils Leonard:
We charge the money that we think we need to charge, and so arguably, yes, comparatively probably. But you get me, you get us. We don’t have a ‘b team’. We don’t pass and move whatever that fucking phrase is. We don’t.

Pat Murphy:

And you’re trying to make over revenue off building massive production units, you know the likes that they’re holding from the companies do?

Nils Leonard:

No, because you end up in service of something else. I mean that sincerely. You end up selling things that aren’t creativity. Now that’s fine, but that’s not what we set out to do. People ask us this question in pitches. You know, ‘okay, so say we won. You know how do you actually have space and how do we actually do this’. And you know, and everyone always says, ‘oh, we’ve always got people, we can always do it’, and it’s just nonsense. The honest answer to that is ‘we’re going to say no to some other stuff. If we do this, we’re going to say no to probably two or three other things and we’re going to focus on you. So this better be fucking what you say it is’. You know, that’s the honest answer and that’s what we say to people, which is ‘OK, if you want this and we think this is getting on really well and the energy is good, we will simply just say no to other things and we’ll put our best people on it, and that’s what we do and that’s the process’. And that’s of worth, by the way, that’s worth money.

Pat Murphy:
It is worth money, and I always argue that with our clients’ procurement teams. I say ‘look, , pay well for great creative ideas, right, you can buy all the other stuff and you can do whatever you like with the other stuff, but pay brilliantly for creative ideation, right, and if your agency is doing a great job, then make sure they get remunerated fairly’. But it’s sometimes a hard conversation to have, though, right, because everybody wants to commoditise this stuff.

Nils Leonard:

Well, they, they do, and you know, bless them. They don’t mean to, but they’re trying to systemize it and they’re trying to make it understood and understandable. This is what I mean about Martin. I’m going to tell you something I’ve not told anybody else. This is a bit offensive, so I’m just going to say it. There was a strategy, I think, in play at WPP at that time that we horrendously referred to as ‘more cunts’, and that’s a horrendous thing to say, but what we meant by it is ‘if you don’t like these guys, well, we’ve got more’. ‘If you don’t like them, we’ve got more, we’ve got other ones’. It was literally… I overheard conversations like that and it was like that is not it. And I thought to myself well, how am I an irreplaceable part of this company if we’re simply just more c words? And we spelt it in a German way, with a K by the way. As if it was a company. And in a world that tries to behave like that, we’ve tried to make a company that can’t possibly be just more. We’re just this, we’re other, and that’s where the name and the whole essence came from is. We are this thing over here and you don’t have to like it, but it’s fucking good! And you can either have it or not, but this is what it’s worth, and it was about trying to carve our space out, I suppose.

Pat Murphy:
Tell me about the Iggy Pop story.

Nils Leonard:
Oh, I love that man. Rally love him.

Pat Murphy:
He nicked your idea though didn’t he?

Nils Leonard:
Well, he sort of did, yeah! But bear in mind, so I was going to interview Iggy. I’ve always merchandised myself and us and all the above. I thought, god and and, by the way, when I interviewed Iggy at Cannes, it was the year, I don’t know if you remember this where everyone was dying. So Bowie had died, all our heroes, frankly, were dying, and this sounds awful, but I said this to Iggy, I was like ‘look, I want to talk about death a bit and about you know.’ And I said to him on a text, ‘dude, would you ever think about recording something for me’? And his manager was like ‘what’? And I said, ‘can you read? You know, do not go, gentle’ by Dylan. And I thought, ‘God, wouldn’t that be an amazing trailer, you know, and wouldn’t it be brilliant to play that before we came out’ and he read it and it’s fucking phenomenal, and I set it to some of his music and that we used it as a trailer.

Anyway, about two years later it was on his album and I was like, ‘all right, I didn’t get a credit’, although he was interviewed on the BBC and he called me. He said some ad man gave me the idea. He did say that once. Bless him.

Pat Murphy:
And you didn’t get any royalties? There’s no royalties for you? If you’re going to get ripped off by anyone may as well be him, right?

Nils Leonard:
Dude, 100%. I tell you, what was lovely is when he sent me the recording. I didn’t get a yes back, all I just I just got Henry, who’s his manager. He’s a lovely guy too. He just said look, I’ll ask him, and then it went quiet for like weeks. And then I get this text on my phone. It’s a voice note and he’s in a park or something and I can hear birds and Iggy just reads it and I was like ‘this is nuts’.  He’s a lovely man. He’s a genuinely lovely human, very warm, very smart, very generous.

Pat Murphy:
That’s great. You mentioned Cannes, though. Are you going to Cannes again this year?

Nils Leonard:
I shall be yes.

Pat Murphy:
Good stuff. You’re very welcome to come down to our our presence on the Little Black Book Beach. We’d love to have you down there.

Nils Leonard:
I’d love to. That’d be cool.

Pat Murphy:
Now, as part of my research on you, as I said, I’ve been talking to lots of people, this time to Janet Markwick right, who recalls that you were not only clearly known as a brilliant ECD, but you coupled it with being the commercial ambassador at Grey, as we talked about earlier. You lent into the role to create a commercial manifesto saying one day we’ll earn as much for our ideas as we do our time, and you coined the phrase ‘let’s find ways to earn money while we sleep’. And that kind of turned into the Volvo campaign that you were doing, the Volvo Life Paint campaign. Can you just explain a little bit more about how that worked, Because it wasn’t the normal arrangement, was it, with a client?

Nils Leonard:
No, definitely wasn’t. By the way, Janet is incredible. When I first met Janet, I really wasn’t sure about her because she was so business. She’s all business. And then I realised I’d never met anybody who loved what she did more than her. She’s so ferocious about it and when she found herself, via David Pattern, in this, in this incredibly creative space, I think she was just thrilled every day to be thinking about ways to to make money in that environment, by the way, so I thought she was great.

There was a lot of talk not just about different ways to make money, but I certainly had an itch to scratch around our relationship with clients. You know, and I’d seen the advantage when you go really deep, like you were talking about earlier, and you’re advising a CMO or a CEO or a founder, you’re like I’m not at that point in the service industry at all. You know, I’m on speed dial on a Sunday because something’s gone wrong and they want a narrative that’s going to run in the Financial Times on Monday, you know, and I sort of started thinking about how we could change that relationship. Of course, I realised if all I did was ask to change the relationship. It would never happen. You have to engineer a way for it to happen. So, you know, we found a few things. I’ve learned since to call them narrative objects, Pat. But what I learned is if you make things instead of ads: businesses, formats, events, objects, you can have a very different conversation about it all you know.
So Life Paint was the one we made for Volvo. It was essentially a human form of the gloop you put on reindeer horns actually, um, to stop them getting hit by cars, but we productised it. You know it’s got a part number now. You know it’s sold in Volvo dealerships and that began a conversation around our role really with clients and how we might get paid. That’s manifested at Uncommon in the form of the accelerator we have. You know we have a lot of our own brands now, from Halo coffee to Sex brand to to all the brands that have been through Unrest. You know it struck me there’s only so long we can keep begging clients to be the brands we wish they were, and I was just frustrated by that and I thought well, L ife Paint took me a year to sell.

Why did it take me a year to sell. What was I doing? If I could go back and do that again, I would have just done it. And then I’d have said to Volvo ‘we’re doing this. We are doing this, it’s happening. Would you like we’re doing this? We are doing this, it’s happening. Would you like to play a part in it’? Not, can we please do it for you? Every week for nine months until someone said yes.

Pat Murphy:
Nils, you come across with such huge passion and, like you, you know I’ve had a huge passion for what I’ve been doing for the last 30 odd years, 35 years, and to the point where I get out of bed in the morning and it’s not a job, right? I can honestly say I’ve never had a day’s work in my life because it’s so fun and interesting and every day is different. Do you feel the same way or is it more like work for you? I mean, do you have a switch off? I don’t have a switch off. At the end of the day, it all just merges: personal stuff, work, life stuff just merges into one. How do you feel about it?

Nils Leonard:
I think the former thing you just spoke to you should teach to your children and anyone that will listen, because I actually think it’s the secret to life. I think if you can wake up and make your work and the endeavour and trying, if you can make that something you really are rewarded by, I think that’s the game, isn’t it? Isn’t that what it’s really all about actually? Maybe all about it’s trying to get through it all and enjoy it., I love it, yeah, really, and I I think that what I’ve learned is I have to grow and learn, though, though Otherwise I wake up and I don’t love it actually, and that creeps up on people, I think.

Pat Murphy:
I suppose that comes on to the next question is what is your best advice for the newbies coming into the industry?

Nils Leonard:

Need less people. Be completely powerful. Learn to cut, edit, illustrate, learn to sell, learn to talk, learn to reach out. Have absolutely no fear because no one is thinking about you. You’ve nothing to lose. No one gives a flying fuck about you, so you have absolutely nothing to lose. Contact journalists, build a network, make your own audience. Need nobody.

Pat Murphy:
That’s such great advice. One of those things is storytelling, because Sir John actually said everybody needs great storytellers. Whether it’s presenting on stage, whether it’s being able to pitch something, whether it’s talking to your kids, you have to be able to tell great stories and that’s what I’m teaching my kids at the moment, and they’re better, and they’re better than me!

Nils Leonard:
That’s the best, isn’t it? John is a great storyteller. Do you know who’s better? Thomas Heatherwick. He is the most articulate human I’ve probably ever met, and I don’t know if you’ve heard this, but I told this story to someone else. He was asked at a 30 club thing, which is an ad thing. Someone said ‘Thomas, you’re renowned as a wizard in the boardroom. You know how do you do it. How are you so good at selling’? He said ‘you guys in advertising are obsessed with selling. He said but let me ask you this. He said if someone gives me a million pounds to come up with an idea for them, they give me a million pounds and I can’t tell them about the idea in a way that doesn’t just make them want to do it, but make them have to do it. How could that be their fault? How?’

And I was like ‘fuck’ and I suddenly realised all this talk of brave clients, and then the client said no, and then whatever, how could we possibly blame them? And so the conversation at Uncommon is ‘the work is half the job’. You, you know, Alexander McQueen used to say that the clothes were half the job. The runway, the fame, the moment, the stunt, how he told the clothes to the world, was the other half. And I think half our job is the idea, and the other half is articulating that in a way that makes people have to do it. And I think if we can’t do that, then we’re actually not doing our jobs. I think any creative that removes themselves from believing that that storytelling is a critical part of their job is giving themselves a way into depression.

Pat Murphy:
I agree with you wholeheartedly.

You know what – we’re coming to a near end to this podcast, Nils, which is I mean I could talk to you all day, frankly, and we’re going to have to do that over a beer in Cannes, I guess.

Finally, the question we have to ask all of our guests, since it’s become one of the highlights of the podcast: what’s your favorite ad of all time?

Nils Leonard:

It used to be Meet the Superhumans, but do you know what if it were like Desert Island Discs? There is an ad that I cannot watch without it fucking me up and it’s Macmillan – Whatever it Takes. And I will test anybody to google that. Now watch the 1 minute 30 version and if there’s just literally no way you won’t be in tears, there is, it’s physically impossible to not weep at that piece of work. And it’s not clever. You know someone would be like ‘what was the script’? Absolutely relevant. It is a fucking immortal piece of film.

Pat Murphy:

It’s brilliant neil’s, it has been a true pleasure having you on the podcast today

Nils Leonard:
Thanks, Pat, that’s great!

Pat Murphy:
Today we talked to Nils Leonard, one of the most progressive and provocative creative leaders in the industry. Nils is the co-founder of Uncommon Creative Studio, an agency that’s redefining what it means to build brands in the modern world.

To find out more about the MCA podcast, please head to theprodcast.com, where you’ll find details on all my guests, links to their favourite ads and full transcriptions of all the episodes. If you’re enjoying our podcast, please like, share and leave a review. It’s how everyone can find us.

I’m Pat Murphy, CEO of MCA. Do come and connect with us on LinkedIn or Instagram, of which all the links and the notes for this episode will be there. We’d love to hear from you.

Thanks again to Nils, my team at MCA and my production team at what Goes On Media.

Until next time, keep making, keep questioning and keep pushing the industry forward. Thanks for listening.