Simon Gawn.
Simon Gawn, Global Strategic Advisor, Ideally
My first week at Ogilvy, 2008. Stu O'Brien is scribbling Telstra logos on a napkin. The creative team is chasing their Qantas moment: “Still Call Australia Home, but make it telecommunications.”
Meanwhile I’m dispatching ads to rural newspapers. Towns nobody in that room had visited. Customers nobody was thinking about, who happened to be the brand.
Nobody cared about that part. Creativity had somewhere better to be.
This isn’t an advertising story. It’s a plea to make creativity the frites in steak frites. Not the side cast aside next to the meat that is money, but the thing that makes the meat get chosen off a crowded menu.
Creativity has always had an uncomfortable relationship with management, because it asks for belief before it can offer proof, and most organisations are far better at rewarding proof than belief. It’s the colleague nobody formally invited who turns up anyway and insists on talking about something other than the numbers.
Smart marketers have spent decades trying to make that colleague defensible. Les Binet, Peter Field and Byron Sharp gave organisations a language for it. Not because creativity was artistic, but because it was economic. Kantar’s BrandZ work puts a number on it: 94% of a brand’s pricing power comes from meaningful difference, and just 6% from salience.
Six percent. Even a creative director knows that’s low.
Salience matters. It drives volume and availability, helps people think of you at the moment it counts, separates the brands that lead from the ones that follow. But the premium a consumer will pay, the margin a business can command, the advantage that actually separates leaders from followers, that comes overwhelmingly from being meaningfully different.
Difference is the job. It always was.
Then the algorithms arrived, and for a while they looked like the answer to everything. Targeting improved. Measurement improved. Demand zones became purchasable. The machine got very good at finding people who were already interested.
But finding interest isn’t the same as creating it. The easier it became to capture demand, the less attention organisations paid to building it. Creativity went back to being the awkward friend insisting the steak needed frites.
Turns out the fastest way to prove creativity matters is to spend five years pretending it doesn’t.
Then AI arrived, and did something nobody expected.
By its own efficiency, it handed a much wider group of people the feeling of being able to persuade with something beyond numbers. CEOs drafting manifestos. Product managers briefing brand campaigns. CFOs using Claude to make logos. The barrier to producing something that looks creative effectively disappeared.
And then it reappeared, sharper than ever.
Because once everyone can generate ideas, ideas stop being the scarce resource. Judgment does. The leaders who win won’t be the ones who can make the most. They’ll be the ones who know what’s worth backing.
Can creativity become to executives what vaping is to eighteen year olds: something that feels accessible and turns out to be highly addictive? I think so. And when it does, creativity stops being the uninvited colleague and becomes the thing everyone is quietly trying to get more of.
Technology is available to everyone. Product advantages get copied overnight. Platforms are better at taking value than creating it. Nobody can buy their way to different anymore.
Strip it all back and you’re left with the thing that was always there: meaningful difference, built by people willing to think independently, and proved over time.
Which sounds obvious, until you’re the one who has to convince the room.
Every creative person knows the moment. You’ve just shown them something that requires belief, and the room goes quiet. Because belief, passion and reputation aren’t enough anymore. Clients don’t want to hope it works, they need to know. They aren’t being difficult, they’re being accountable: to the CFO, the board, the CEO who wasn’t on the journey.
That’s the room Ideally is built for. Not to make creativity safer, but to give the person with the napkin more than conviction: evidence that makes the bold choice look like the obvious one. We lead with creativity, not because we’re romantics, but because the data says that’s where the commercial upside actually lives.
Without the frites, it’s just a steak. And a steak without frites is a perfectly fine meal. But you can’t enjoy it if you weren’t compelled to order it.
Simon Gawn is Global Strategic Advisor at Ideally, a consumer intelligence platform built to connect creative confidence to commercial outcomes.