Pat Murphy
Hi and welcome to the MCA Prodcast. 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 shaped 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 best place to overcome them.

Today we’re talking to Sir John Hegarty, who really needs no introduction. John was Founding Creative Partner of Saatchi & Saatchi in 1970 and then TBWA in 1973, after which he left in 1982 with his colleagues John Bartle and Nigel Bogle to set up BBH – Bartle Bogle Hegarty. The agency went on to create some of the most iconic ads of all time, including Levis Laundrette, Creek and Drugstore, and for other brands as well, including Audi, British Airways and Johnny Walker. John has been given the D&AD President’s Award for Outstanding Achievement and in 2014 was admitted to the US American Advertising Federation Hall of Fame. In 2007, he was awarded a Knighthood by the Queen and was the recipient of the first Lion of St Mark Award at Cannes in 2011. John’s written two books: Hegarty on Advertising, Turning Intelligence into Magic and Hegarty On Creativity – There Are No Rules. In 2014, John co-founded the Garage Soho, a seed stage venture capital fund that believes in building brands, not just businesses, and in 2022 John co-founded the Business of Creativity, an eight-week online course with a mission to teach the world how to be creative.

John, Sir John, may I call you John? Thanks for joining me on this podcast.

John Hegarty
Please do, Pat! John, it is!

Pat Murphy
Thank you very much.

John Hegarty
It is slightly embarrassing because some people go on you know you’re doing an interview and some people going ‘Well, Sir John…’. ‘No, no, no, no, no, just John’s fine, John’s fine’.

Pat Murphy
I’ll do just that. It was great to see you the other day on that panel. Yeah, great fun. It seems like there’s no let out for you at all. You still have as much energy today as ever before. What are you sticking in your drink?

John Hegarty
Well, I’m a great believer in a fine glass of red wine and not to be abused… but a brilliant glass of red wine, especially shared with a friend, is one of the greatest tonics one can have. I have to say here, I do own a vineyard for all kinds of completely mad reasons, so I am promoting something I make, but that’s one of the wonderful things. But I think it’s about constantly staying engaged. We live in an amazing world at an amazing time, with all kinds of challenges and everything else going on. But when you delve into history and you look at where we’ve come from, how we got here, it’s just absolutely incredible. Not to be excited by it would be ridiculous.

Pat Murphy
Yeah, I agree. I find this probably the most exciting time of my whole career. Actually, there’s so much stuff going on.

Going back rewinding, you were a founding creative partner of Saatchi & Saatchi, and I’m curious… your name’s not above the door.

John Hegarty
Well, it was obviously started by Charles. Actually, funnily enough, we were in a consultancy called Krama Saatchi. We were all working together, we knew each other working together and Ross decided to leave – Ross Krama – and Charlie then decided he wanted to start an agency and he liked the idea of doing it with his brother, his brother Morris, to leave Roskrama. And Charlie then decided he wanted to start an agency. He liked the idea of doing it with his brother. His brother Morris was younger than Charlie, quite a long way down younger, and he asked me would I come in as a partner? And you know it was his agency with his brother and it had a lovely ring to it, being Saatchi & Saatchi. If you put, you know, my name in the middle of it, it would have upset it completely. But it was his idea and his vision. So you know, we went along with it and loved it and it was a great place to be. I learned a huge amount from Charlie.

Pat Murphy
And of course I was there back in the late 80s as well, but I missed you, unfortunately, at that time.

John Hegarty
I was long gone by then, yeah.

Pat Murphy
I had a great time as well there at Saatchi & Saatchi.

Now I have to ask you about getting your knighthood – the Queen. Many people say she was very well informed, but did she know you were the bloke who was famous for a half-dressed man advertising jeans in a laundrette? What did she say to you?

John Hegarty
Well it’s very interesting. It’s brilliantly done, I have to say. You know, I have to admit at this point I’m not really a monarchist or a republican. I’m that sort of soppy, soft middle that sits in and I kind of can see why, or I can see why we shouldn’t have it. So I didn’t go there with kind of starry eyes, but I was incredibly impressed with the way it was done and the way it was handled, and I described it as all the pomp without the pomposity, and it’s brilliant. What happens is you go up. As you walk towards the queen, you’re shown what to do. You will bow, you’ll move forward. She will then address you. You shake her hand. If you were with me, I could show you…  she’s no longer with us, of course how you shook her hand, and it’s amazing. You take it or she gives it to you. You give two shakes and then she hands it back to you so you don’t keep holding on to it. One, two. Thank you very much. It’s an incredible kind of experience. I mean, obviously she’s had a lot of practice.

As you’re coming towards her, one person is saying something in her left ear, somebody else is saying something in her right ear, because you get a medal first and then the sword.  And obviously one of the people is saying ‘this is Sir John. He established BBH in 1982 with his partners and he’s got eight offices around the world’. And so as I approach her, she says Sir John, wonderful to meet you and well done having eight offices around the world. Do you get to see them each year? And you go, ‘no, but I go most of them’. She says, ‘well, that’s fantastic and, by the way, keep going’. And then she puts the medal on, shook her hand, gives it back to you, tap on the shoulders with the sword and then you’re off.

But what was great is she was standing there, because they do it in tranches, and she’s there for about an hour and a half, hour and three quarters greeting all this people. She didn’t sit down, nobody gave her a cup of tea said ‘do you need to go to the toilet or anything like that’? And she was amazing – absolutely, and you sense this dedication to duty. And it was in that sense amazing and we’ve lost somebody amazing in her passing. But of course 92, 93 is not bad.

Pat Murphy
Yeah.

John Hegarty
But it was a great occasion. Yeah, a great great occasion. All the pomp without the pomposity.

Pat Murphy
Love it. I thought she was great.

Now you’ve presented to some of the most influential marketers, including a number of WFA events. At one, you posed the question am I a brand that stalks or am I a brand that inspires? What do you mean by that?

John Hegarty
Well, I think a huge danger today in marketing is we forgot persuasion and promotion – two essential ingredients of any great campaign, and it seems to me that brands have veered towards promotion rather than engaging with persuasion as well. Promotion, because I can measure it, I can find out who I should be talking to and, in a sense, what you’re doing is you’re stalking your audience, and I’ve always said I’m not sure that’s a great way to build a relationship. In fact, in life, if you’re a stalker you can actually go to prison. But you know, a brand can do it online and not go to prison, obviously.

But I always think, you know, I came into the industry because I want to inspire people. I wanted to work on, hopefully, great brands, which I did manage to do, and inspire people to come to them. And we seem to have forgotten that, because we’ve sort of gone down this rabbit hole that technology has offered us, which, by the way, is brilliant in lots and lots of ways. I am not saying it’s all terrible, but there’s a side to it which actually is very, very dangerous, and that is allowing a brand just to sort of follow somebody around and supposedly offer them what they want. How you actually know what I want when even I don’t know sometimes what I want does somewhat amaze me. So I’ve described it as the new marketing strategy or the new media strategy as stalking and I’m not sure, as I’ve said, that is a great way to build a long-term relationship.

Pat Murphy
Do you think that’s also part of the fact that clients tend to kind of go after the latest shiny object.

John Hegarty
Yeah, I know what you mean. In a funny way I’ve always said, way before digital revolution, that we’ve had that. Actually, most clients would want it to be a science. They would love the whole communications industry to be a science.

Pat Murphy
Well, they’re trying to, aren’t they? With data and analytics and that kind of stuff?

John Hegarty
Yeah, absolutely.

So, way before that, I always used to sort of say I’m sure most of them go down on their knees at night and say, ‘dear God, please will you make it a science’? And I think God has answered back and said ‘look, I tried, but I gave them free will. Big mistake, Shouldn’t have done it, but I gave them free will and now you’re completely screwed. So get on with it’.

And, of course, whatever you do, clients will always try and make it a science. So, of course, along comes… you know digital media and the whole digital revolution and social media, and it says you know, we can track things, we can get to the people you want, and it’s measurable.

And as creatures, as beings, as we are sapiens, of course we love measurement. We love, you know, the 10 best, this, the top, that, the most influential this… lists and that! So we’ve got it in our DNA that we like to measure things. And, of course, when it comes to marketing, if you can measure how wonderful that is… whether or not it’s absolutely effective is, of course, a different issue. It suddenly becomes the important factor. That you can measure them is the thing which is most important, and I think it was a wonderful director of the CBI, Sir John Bannon, who said you know, ‘the danger of research is we measure that which is most measurable, not that which is most important’. And so we elevate what you can measure because you can measure it, not necessarily because it’s important.

Pat Murphy
I think of many campaigns over the years that have failed in research but done brilliantly, when people have taken some bold decisions and run with the ads. I kind of go. ‘well, maybe there should be more advertising and more decisions made on gut instinct.’

John Hegarty
Well, you know, we would say that wouldn’t we?! And I obviously do agree with that. But you also have to contextualize the risk, if you can call it a risk. One of our most famous campaigns was Vorsprung Dirk Technic for Audi. And the research said, you know, unequivocally, ‘do not run this’. And it was just that we had two wonderful, wonderful people at Audi: Brian Bowler, who was the Sales and Marketing Director, and Johnny Mazarus, who was the Advertising Director, who both were kind of… they weren’t renegades, they just realised there was a part of it you couldn’t measure. And they said you know, when they were told this and they said but we are a German brand, why should we be ashamed of that? And so they said, ‘go ahead’. And of course the rest is history. It was a huge success. And in fact, when we worked on Levis and saw it on two factors there, when Levis decided because they were not in a very good place in 1984, 1985, and that they would relaunch the 501 – that was the only product they really had and they researched it amongst kids.  And the teenagers didn’t like it. Button fly, why would you want button fly when a zip is much better? You know that’s kind of crazy. And then the ‘silhouette’ as they call it in fashion they didn’t like. But the reality is Levis didn’t have anything else. So they said ‘well, you know, we have to ignore the research’. And then when we came and shot the launderette commercial, it didn’t go down very well in research. It really didn’t. And there’s something that happens when you broadcast… a change of perception occurs that suddenly can catapult something into the public’s consciousness. There were two examples. But I love just like three or four weeks ago we had a big thing about it. It was ABBA’s, I can’t remember 50th anniversary was it of winning the Eurovision Song Contest with Waterloo?

Pat Murphy
That’s right!

John Hegarty
And I love the fact that the British public gave it nil poi!

Pat Murphy
Yes, I remember it well.

John Hegarty
They gave it no points whatsoever and if you think about it, there is the most amazing example of mass consumer research. And the general public gave it a thumbs down but on second thoughts they all went ‘I quite like it’ and they went out and bought it.
I can understand why people do it to a certain extent – to kind of see if they can measure something and correct things, but it’s always a dangerous measurement. There was no data, there were no analytics on launching the iPhone. Nobody said ‘I want a phone with a screen on it’. Nobody said to James Dyson you know, ‘I really do want a bagless vacuum cleaner’.

You know endless examples and we all know the Henry Ford line about ‘if I asked people what they wanted they’d have said a faster horse’. But I think when you come to you know if you’ve got a range of fruit drinks and you’ve kind of gone, ‘shall I add pineapple to it as opposed to…’. You can do a bit of researching, see what do people think about pineapple Because they’ve got an understanding of it. When they don’t have an understanding of something, it becomes ever more dangerous. It’s a very dangerous road to go down.
Pat Murphy
I think some marketers might use it as a crutch, because if they make the wrong decision, you know. Then they say ‘well, the research told me that’.

John Hegarty
Yes, it becomes actually, it’s like that old thing of many years ago… People won’t know this, but there used to be a line about nobody got fired for hiring IBM, exactly, and because at that time they were a huge, huge company. Wasn’t that they were the right company, but you know they were the safe company and you’re quite right, it’s a crutch. ‘Well, research said it was okay, not my fault’, and I think it denies the potential that a great marketing person can bring to a piece of communication and to a brand. And they don’t see themselves like that anymore. They see themselves as technocrats who are just pulling various levers. And you know they’re not inspiring people, they’re just promoting to people.

Pat Murphy
So look, john, there’s so many things happening in the industry now. There’s so many things to be thinking about when coming up with new campaigns. There’s the growing trend of in-house agencies. There’s influencer marketing. There’s the whole area of sustainability to be thinking about. What, out of all of this stuff, is important or not important? The traditional agency model is facing a lot of disruption. How can agencies differentiate themselves in this more competitive landscape?

John Hegarty
Well, I think the first thing I always say is a little phrase I use which is ‘principles remain but practices change’, and you’ve got to understand that’s constant. We kind of think of the last 25 years as being massive disruption, but the development of television as an advertising medium was massive disruption. I mean, there were agencies around that were poster specialists and they knew how to do posters and didn’t adopt television and they all disappeared. And I think that sense of that intensity of competition, that intensity of choice obviously has increased. There’s no question about that. But I think the role of the agency should be still the one who is driving the initial thinking, the way a brand should behave, the way it should be, but you’ve got all these other disparate parts all trying to plug into it. But somebody has got to sit down and go ‘this is what we believe in, here’s the big idea, here’s what you’re going to do’, and then everybody else should get involved in it when it’s right for them to do so. And of course it could be influencer agencies start doing that If traditional agencies, if we want to call them, don’t step up to the plate. Or it could be some other element of the communication industry – digital specialists who could start going ‘actually, I’ve understood what this brand is, here’s the big idea’ get everybody else to plug into that

It’s like a race who gets to the finish line first. And agencies have got to understand it is that. So they’ve got to invest much more in, strategic thinking, creative execution. This is what you could do with it. This is how you could drive the campaign and think of themselves. Like you know, if you’re launching a movie like Barbie, you know you’ve had the idea to make Barbie. Here is the movie. Now all these people could go off and promote this film in lots of different ways, but somebody’s got to sit down and write Barbie and an advertising campaign is much the same. You’ve got to write here’s the idea, here’s what we stand for, here’s how we express it in a piece of film or whatever. And then everybody else kind of joins in and goes ‘that’s brilliant, I can take that and do that’. So that’s the way I view it. I view it in that way.

In-house agencies – yeah, I mean, why not? If a client wants to do that, go ahead and do it. There are very good examples of some great work coming out of in-house agencies. I talk in particular about Oatly the oat milk drink, which was hugely successful in, you know, like six or seven years ago, and that was done in-house and I use that as an example of a great piece of advertising – through the line, funny, committed to the brand, promoting it, did a great, great job. So you know, there are no rules, as I said about my book on creativity, and I think that’s the way it should be. I don’t think anybody has an absolute right to be somewhere. You earn your right to be. But agencies have got a head start in that they do understand the essence of the brand and how you promote it over the long term, and they should be reminding clients of the value of staying with an idea, refreshing it, obviously so that the audience is constantly engaged with it, but not to constantly change it.

Pat Murphy
You talk about coming up with great advertising ideas, and I went to Procter & Gamble and that was one of the very first things I learned – a great advertising idea can translate into any channel.

But I’m seeing a change in the industry where a lot of redundancies are happening, in particular with the most experienced people actually, or the more seasoned people. We’re not allowed to say old, so more seasoned! And actually those are the people who, in my experience, are the ones that can come up with great ideas the quickest. They’re so used to doing this, and it’s a real shame to see so many of these people not in the agencies anymore.

John Hegarty
And I’ve seen it in all agencies and I don’t think there’s anybody who is exempt from that, and I think it is a big mistake. I think it taps into another thing about experience versus youthfulness and energy and all of those things, and the reality is you want both! You want energy at one end and you want experience at the other end. And I think loosing those people, those senior people who did have the skill to write a seemingly powerful idea in 60 seconds and capture the essence of a brand, to capture the essence of the idea and promote it in a way that again inspired the audience. And I think we’re losing that craft. We really really are. I mean, I do now talk to agency leaders and say we can’t get great writers to write in film anymore. I use the word film or video, call it whatever you like, because I’m not going to do shoes advertising who have that ability to write something powerful in 60 seconds that actually captures people’s imagination and it’s a real skill. And they say we’re losing them. I say, ‘well, it’s your own fault, you fired them all’.

We’ve taken all these experienced people and we find them because they cost more, but but they had huge skills. You know enormous skills, and it takes a very, very long time to develop this, and a history of doing it is very, very important.

Pat Murphy
I agree.

Now, on one of my previous podcasts, talked to Rishad Tobaccowala, who I really loved my conversation. I just loved it, and one of the things that he said was, ‘if you’re in the marketing business and you’re not telling a story or you aren’t in the storytelling business, you’re in the wrong business’. People are not moved by facts and data. Do you subscribe to that?

John Hegarty
Well, totally. I mean we are storytellers at heart. There’s a wonderful book called Sapiens, that talks about the development of sapiens, which is what we are – humankind, if you want to use another word – from the very beginning to where we are today. And Harari, his name is, says the pivotal moment, the pivotal change, came when we developed fictive language, and that was the ability to tell each other stories. And he says the reason it was important is because we could share a story without actually having met before. Because you’ve heard the story, I’ve heard the story and a third person, we could talk to them about it. Chimpanzees talk, they talk to each other, but their talking is limited to ‘oh, look banana or watch out tiger’, and they get to about a group of 50, then it all gets too complicated and they split up. Because we could have this shared language it was the very, very foundation of society, community, villages, towns, nations. A shared story of who we are and it is so crucial to our existence, to our expression, to our being. Everything about us is a storytelling, just as a brand, a company is a story and we relate to the story. Some people tell them here’s a story about so-and-so, here’s why so-and-so did such and such, I mean, and those things are crucial to it. So if you’re not telling stories, you’re not advancing as a brand and you’re not connecting with people.

Pat Murphy
Now I’ve been reading your wonderful little tome here – Hegarty on Creativity and there’s some wonderful gems in there. I recommend everybody reads this book. I know it doesn’t take long to read through. It’s about an hour or two to read through this whole book. But the nuggets that I managed to glean out of that just last weekend. Things like it’s okay to get angry when you’re being creative, right? Do you think that’s why creative directors are always stroppy?

John Hegarty
I don’t. People think anger is a negative reaction to something. Well, of course it is to a negative, but you channel your anger because it’s you feel powerful about something. You, you, you you’re energized about something and it can be about you’re angry that somebody’s done something in such a way. But the point about it is it’s kind of channelling it and doing something positive with it.

As I think I say in the book, there’s no question that Picasso was very angry when he painted Guernica, one of his finest paintings, because he wanted the world to know about this bombing and what had happened in Spain. But he was undoubtedly angry, but he channelled it and it’s like anything like it’s using that emotion in a way which is beneficial, not destructive. I think I also say in the book, I think great creative people, they may not look it, but they are actually optimists. I mean they might be angry or annoyed optimists or whatever it might be, but they’re optimists because they believe this idea is going to be made, it’s going to change the world, and so I think it’s a necessary adjunct to being a great creative person. But of course, and you get angry and you channel that into ‘I’m going to make something even better. I will show them!’

Pat Murphy
I’d love to talk about every single chapter you’ve got in this book. I haven’t got the time, unfortunately, but there is one other chapter which I thought was really important to talk about, which was the art of craft, and Steve Jobs quoted ‘there’s a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product and as you evolve the great idea, it changes and it grows. It never comes out like it starts, because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties and you also find there’s tremendous trade-offs that you have to make. In our industry that translates into the production process and I was wondering what your thoughts were around the role of the producer. Is the producer the third creative?

John Hegarty
It depends on the producer. There are very practical producers who do the numbers and make sure everybody turns up on time, but I think at BBH we always talked about how producers helping turn paper into film, because you had a script with a bit of paper and he wanted to convert that into a bit of celluloid and and to me that was always fundamentally important that I had producers who loved and felt film. This is what I’m trying to do, and one of the quotes I use is ‘advertising is 80% idea, but it’s also 80% execution’, which I think is a similar thing to Steve Jobs, and it’s how execution informs the idea, how the idea informs execution, and they’re so interlinked that you, in a way, you can’t separate them, but it’s fundamentally important I think that you surround yourself with people who instinctively understand the idea, but they bring their specialist skill to bear to help translate that idea into something that can be shared with people, because that’s what you’re doing. I’ve had an idea. It’s in my head, that’s where it exists. I’ve written it out in a bit of paper. That’s the first stage and now I’ve got to share it with somebody else and then eventually I’m going to share it with somebody else and then eventually I’m going to share this idea with millions of people. Well, the only way I’m going to do it is going through the stages of that. It’s in my head, it’s now on a piece of paper, I now share it with specialists who can help me bring it to life, and then I can share it with millions of people. So, in a way, all along that process, you’ve got to have people who genuinely understand it, genuinely get to kind of go ‘this is a way to make this work’. And I think, actually working on Levi’s for as long as we did, we made something like 30 commercials in that 15-year campaign, something like that, if not more. What we learned very rapidly is you’d write literally to get to a script You’d write about and I’m not joking, I’m not exaggerating – 30 to 50. The whole department and you get to three and you’d go ‘right these are now three really interesting ideas, but this one gives us a chance to make something look very different’, because part of the brief on the Levi’s 501 was the advertising had to be part of the fashion, because the jeans weren’t going to change, but I had. We had to constantly reinterpret the 501 for another set of 16-year-olds who are coming into the marketplace.

So what we used to do is get it down to about three. Then look at each three and go, ‘wow, this one could be shot like this and that would be very different’, and that’s what drove us. But you then really needed experienced directors, producers, music input, all of those things to turn it into something special.

Pat Murphy
And that huge amount of work and effort that goes on behind the scenes – I know that many clients have no idea of the amount of effort that goes in and all night long and all the weekends that you work. And it comes back to a current issue that I have, which is the way that creative is bought and it’s always kind of handed over to the procurement team so it’s treated like a commodity. Is there a way that you think creative should be sourced in a smarter way?

John Hegarty
Well, the first thing I would do is I get all procurement people to go through the business of creativity and to reread the McKinsey quote. McKinsey are a very dry consultancy saying to people, to businesses out there, ‘those brands that engage with creativity positively create better returns for their shareholders’. And I think the problem with procurement is I mean, of course you know you’re trying to get the best value out of something, but, for instance, when it comes to a piece of music – music, as we know, can be transformative. And so what you’re doing is you’re possibly, if you’re objecting to say, spending twice as much on the music that you had in the budget. You’re forgetting the fact that you’ve made it five times more effective by using that piece of music, and then you’re going to spend millions on showing that to everybody, whereas if you listen to the procurement people, you lessen the value of that to those millions of people. Well, that’s not good buying. That’s a very bad buying on my part. You’ve made the product that you’re trying to influence with people less effective.

And the trouble is, I think, with a lot of companies, procurement people are not in control of the big picture and it’s the way they’re probably rewarded. It’s probably ‘we’ve gone over all the budgets and you saved 25% on all of our budgets. Round of applause well done’. And it’s a kind of nonsense because you could have made the work less effective and you’re not being kind of judged on that. So it’s a tricky subject. I mean, oscar Wilde said it, you know the price of everything and the value of nothing. I mean that was in 1890.

Pat Murphy
And we’re right in the thick of it there as well. Us as a business at MCA. We’re right in the thick of it there. For us, it’s more about how do you make the right investment in the right areas rather than cost cutting, making sure that you’re investing in the right area, the things that have the biggest impact. So music is a very specific one, you know. I mean, when I was at Proctor I did some R&D on what parts of a production have biggest impact on effectiveness and music was right at the very top there. So don’t scrimp on it. You know if you can get it right!

John Hegarty
Yeah, it’s the thing that people most respond to. It’s the easiest thing for them to respond to. You don’t need any training, you don’t need any history, you just instinctively respond to it. And music and film has a phenomenal, symbiotic relationship where one enhances and transforms the other. So it isn’t two and two makes four, it’s the old you know two and two makes 22.

And not to understand that is a major disservice to the power and the effectiveness of your communication. You know, imagine Jaws without that music, imagine Star Wars without that music. I mean, you know, and it happens again and again and again. We understand the value of it. People try and just measure it. But the problem is you’re trying to measure empathy and there is no scale you can put on that, because that’s part of what you’re doing with a piece of communication. You’re trying to create empathy, as opposed to saying ‘there’s 20% off for a week, we’re running this as a promotion’. That’s a different thing. But when you’re trying to create, for a brand, empathy because you only buy things off people you like, you don’t buy things off people you don’t like. So you’re trying to create empathy for your bread and trying to measure, that becomes an impossibility. And of course that’s what you’re dealing with and that’s where success will eventually lie.

Pat Murphy
So I’m a man on a mission now, John, because, following our being on the music panel only a few weeks ago, um, we discussed about the music being so far down on the budget that it becomes lesser important, so I’m going to move that right to the top of the budget, next to the production house and see what happens. What do you think?

John Hegarty
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what I would say is I would put it second. I would put it under production cost, making it, and then music, because it is… the two are inextricably interwoven and I don’t think a movie starts with a piece of music. A movie starts with a production, then goes to ‘now what music is going to make this great’? And that’s where I would definitely put it.

But you know, we were lucky with Levis because, being a youth brand and music being very important to that target audience, it was a much easier argument to make. But you know, we have had it with other people and they’ve just not understood it. But generally, having said that, to be fair, I think most of the clients I’ve spoken to who aren’t in a youth market have kind of understood it. They’ve gone ‘no, I do get the point you’re making, I do get it, I just haven’t got budget for it’. And they’ve said, you know, we’ve often said, ‘well, why don’t you get a bit of budget from there and put it there’? And they often haven’t done that Because they have actually understood, because in the end they respond to music, they respond to it. It’s something we all respond to!

Pat Murphy
Let’s move on to something that we talked about when I last saw you a couple of weeks ago. It’s the subject of AI that’s now being adopted by clients, and the conversation we had was very interesting, which is about AI being actually a learning mechanism. And you said and I laughed about it because you said ‘well, actually, it’s not just learning from the good stuff, it’s learning from the bad stuff’, which makes it very homogenized, doesn’t it?

John Hegarty
I think I mean the first thing to say about AI it’s going to be an amazing tool. You’ve got to engage with it. You’ve really, really got to. You’ve got to work out how you’re going to use it, how you’re going to make it work for you. But overall, you’ve got to understand that it’s something that is feeding off what’s out there, so taking everything out, and of course, it’s taking the bad stuff along with the good stuff, because it doesn’t know, it doesn’t have a filter on it. ‘That’s not very good. I’m going to ignore that. That’s fake news’. It doesn’t know that. So you’ve got to be very careful with it. It’s going to feed in all kinds of themes that might be problematic. That’s on the problem side. The opportunity side is it’s going to allow you to do many, many more things. And I think I liken it to sort of imagine you know, you’re a theater, a writing for the theater, in 1890, you’re Oscar Wilde. You fast forward 25 years or 30 years and you say to Oscar Wilde ‘now Oscar, I’ve got a camera, I can do a close up, I can do that. I don’t have to write dialogue there, I can leave it there’. He would have been incredibly excited about that. And he said, ‘wow, this is going to change the way I write’. He’s going to kind of use it as a tool to change the way he puts a thought or feeling across.

I went to see an exhibition over the weekend – Illusionaries – it’s on at Canary Wharf, and it’s AI-generated imagery and it’s phenomenal. It’s just phenomenal. But you look at it and you go ‘It’s just spectacle, it’s imagery without an idea, just because you can do it’. And I walked out of it going ‘now, imagine you’re writing a scenario, you’re working on a script and you’ve got this opportunity to use AI to change the way somebody reacts to something. So immediately in my mind I went now imagine you’re writing a dog commercial. W e always talk to dogs, don’t we? But then the dog is looking at you and is talking to you, but of course, the dog sees you in a completely different way. I wonder how AI would interpret how a dog sees you, and that would be really interesting.

So all of a sudden there, just as a simple idea, you can see how I could change the way a piece of communication works. Suddenly I can do all kinds of things that I haven’t done before. I mean, that’s just a simple example. So my view of it is that it’s going to be an amazing tool. Understand it, work with it, but do remember it has failings, you know, and, as I say, it scoops up all the shit as well as all the good stuff. It’s got to work out how it’s going to do that.

Pat Murphy
I completely agree with you, and it’s not really any original thought because it’s having to tap into stuff that’s already existing out there. Now here’s something controversial, right? So you said it’s arrogant to really think that you have there’s any original thought in creating ideas right. So in essence, that’s the same as AI, isn’t it?

John Hegarty
No, it’s not, because what you’re doing is you’re seeing something in a completely different way. So I use the word fresh rather than original, because it’s all been done and actually you can’t have originality because everything is based on something else. But what you’ve done is you’ve interpreted it in a completely unique and different way, and that’s what AI is going to be hard to do, because you’re going to be inspired by sort of getting up in the morning, seeing a beautiful sunrise, getting a very sad phone call about a friend who’s not very well, and that’s going to affect your thinking. And that’s what your creativity is doing all the time is taking things that have just come to you, not that are out there, but have come to you in a very distinctive way, and that way you can build something very fresh and then take AI to help you develop that and make it more amazing and can say ‘well, now I could do it like this with those tools’.

You’ve got to remember AI doesn’t have a soul and communication is about creating empathy and knowing what empathises with you and knowing how you feel today, which is why, when I talk about creativity and people say ‘define creativity’. And I define it as an expression of self, because we’re all creative. It’s an expression of self. Now, when people say, ‘I’m not sure about that, John’, I say ‘right, okay, how many times have you heard a great film director, writer, playwright, painter say, when they’re talking about their latest work, what I wanted to say was this’. So what is it you want to say? And that’s what you’ve got to remember. That’s what creativity is about. What is it I want to say? And AI can help you with that and help you formulate it, help you expand on it, help you see it in different ways, but it can’t do that.

Pat Murphy
You talk about understanding creativity, John. That’s the first module on the course that you’re doing. Can we all be creative?

John Hegarty
Well, we are. I mean, as I say, that’s what separates us out from the animal kingdom. You know, as I am going on about dogs a lot here, aren’t I? But a dog doesn’t get up in the morning and go ‘do you know something, I’m not feeling very well today. I really want to change my life. I don’t like the way my hair looks. I don’t like my nails’. They just get up and they want to eat. They don’t have a soul as a sapien. We are, sapiens have, and we have this desire to express ourselves, to kind of talk about who we are, what we are, where we are, why we are. That’s your creativity at work. It’s saying to you you want to say something, and it’s that that you’re harnessing when you express yourself. You express yourself in the way you dress. You express yourself in the things you eat. The place you live, where you go on holiday, all those things, the car you buy, is an expression of your creativity. Of course, there’s need in there as well as that, but why we do certain things in certain ways is an expression of our creativity, and that’s what makes us really interesting.

Pat Murphy
So understanding creativity and, in particular, the course that you’re doing isn’t necessarily just for marketers or creative people. This is for every kind of function, not just in client organisations, but anybody who has an interest in this area.

John Hegarty
Absolutely. The reason I called it the business of creativity is I wanted businesses to understand that if you are trying to advance, if you’re trying to be more successful, you have to innovate. You have to constantly utilize the workforce you’ve got and how you use them. All these things touch creativity. How you do that, where you do it, how you engage with people are all about creativity, and this is what we teach people in the course. And of course it obviously works incredibly well for people in the communications industry. But I want the CFO to do it. I want people in procurement to do it, because they would understand.
This thing called creativity is unbelievably valuable and it is going to create the difference that is going to make us successful, because, in the end, everybody’s going to have the same tools. They’re going to be available to everybody. The idea that large organisations could afford the more than smaller organizations has gone. So you know how come Elon Musk, like him or not, can have the most successful car company in the world and he never made a car in his life and he’s worth more than every other car company put together, because he had an idea and he knew how to put it into action. And I think that that’s where creativity is fundamentally important. It teaches you those things.

Pat Murphy
People from that kind of world in marketers or in cloud organisations. So procurement and finance will become, I think, much more powerful and better at their job when they are working and negotiating with their ad agency or their creative partners. That’s my belief.

John Hegarty
Of course they are I mean, nobody would say in a company you know, whatever department you’re in. ‘Oh, let’s forget about innovation’. That’s a cost! Nobody would say, take that. Well, innovation comes from creativity, it’s driven by creativity. So understand creativity, understand the part that it plays within your company and then, when you’re having debates about it, everybody’s going to be informed, Everybody’s going to be pointing in the right direction. You’re going to make your company, as McKinsey said, not exactly. You know people who kind of deal with fluffy stuff. You will be more effective. It will go to your bottom line.

Pat Murphy
The Business of Creativity course. John, you’ve obviously got one coming up in next week, but you do this on a regular basis. What kind of time investment does this need for busy people?

John Hegarty
Well, what we do is we filmed it, so it’s like a well, I like to think of it like a documentary almost, because we filmed it in that way. It’s over eight hours that we release one hour each week, so it’s over eight weeks. They stay up longer than that so people can connect into it through the week. And we do it in two tranches we do it in the spring and in the autumn. The reason we do it like that is that throughout the course, you can ask me questions and you can then get a response which I film, which I share with everybody. So I go here are the latest questions coming through and I answer them, so you learn from other people as well as yourself.

At the end of each session, which is about 40 minutes, I then have a 20-minute conversation with somebody from the world of commerce, so you know people like Greg Hoffman, ex-CMO of Nike, sir Paul Smith, Thomas Heatherwick, James Vincent, who was Steve Jobs’ right-hand man developing the iPhone, talking about how they engage with creativity and what they do. So you get practical tips on how to do it and why they do it.

But it’s an eight-week course and you know, I wanted it to be enjoyable because actually, once you engage with your creative spirit, your creative self. It explains so many things in life, you know. ‘Oh, that’s why I do that. That’s very interesting. What’s at the foundation of it’? What drives creativity? How do you get more creativity into your life and I don’t mean go to art school or… just about every day. How you can do it? You know, know, I always sort of think people talk to me about ‘hey, John, I’m doing yoga because it makes me feel better’and I go, ‘that’s great’. But actually understanding your creative spirit, I believe, would do even more good than even doing yoga. Big claim, but I’m going to stick by it. So what we are trying to do is one, make you more effective in your daily business life, but also it breaks out into your personal life as well.

Pat Murphy
So let’s give the website address a plug. It’s businessofcreativity.com. Go there, you’ll find out all the details, what the various different modules are, and there’s a great little video there as well, which I really loved to have a look at the other day.

A couple more questions, John, we’re running out of time. Obviously we’ve gone over time, actually, for young creatives coming into the business today. Do you have any specific tips for them?

John Hegarty
The first thing I would do – understand the history of advertising, understand where it came from, why it got to where it got to, and it’ll make you better. And it’s a very sad comment to make about our industry, the number of young creatives who don’t do that because they think it’s irrelevant. Well, you know, if you were an architect, you’d know about Mises, Andorra. You’d know about Frank Lloyd Wright, Even though lots of their materials have changed. You’d know about them. But in our industry, sadly, people don’t do that and they’re not learning, which is a great, great shame. History isn’t about the past, it’s about the future.

Pat Murphy
That comes back to your thing in the book Hegarty on Creativity – ‘read shit’.

John Hegarty
Read shit, think shit, you’ll create shit, so don’t read shit.

Pat Murphy
Fantastic!

Final question. John, I always close the podcast with one question, which is ‘what’s your favorite ad of all time’? But in your case there’s a caveat you can’t pick one of your own What’s your favorite ad?

John Hegarty
Oh, there’s no question, it’s for Volkswagen and it’s called Funeral, made in about 1968. It is utterly, utterly brilliant. Go on YouTube, look it up. It’s fantastic. It’ll make you laugh.

Pat Murphy
Brilliant. I’m going to post it up on the website as well. Thank you so much for joining us today. I look forward to being on the live webinar with some of our clients as well, as part of the business of creativity. Thanks for joining me.

John Hegarty
It’s been a real pleasure, Pat. Fantastic,

Thank you so much. Today we talked to Sir John Hegarty, advertising legend.

To find out more about the MCA podcast, please head to thepeodcast.com, where you’ll find details on all my guests, links to their favourite ads and full transcriptions of all the episodes. If you’d like to feature on the podcast or have any comments, questions or feedback, please email us at podcast@murphycobb.com.

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

Thanks again to Sir John. My team at MCA and to my production team at What Goes On Media. Thanks for listening. See you next time!