Ad Astra: Looking on the Bright Side of Life with Chaka Sobhani
“I don’t think there is a greater feeling in the world than laughing.” For Chaka Sobhani, creativity is, at its heart, all about connecting with people, making them feel something. And of all the feelings in the whole wide world, Chaka wants to make us laugh with joy.
She’s about four months into her role as the global chief creative officer at DDB, and she’s been doing what she loves, getting out there and meeting people, making those connections and, no doubt, spreading a few laughs along the way. The travel has been “brutal”, but she’s been whizzing round the Omnicom network’s offices – Paris, Sydney, Miami, New York, the “delicious” adam&eveDDB, and DDB Nord which she says is “on fire”. She’s been on a mission to ask as many questions as possible, a mode that has served her well ever since she hustled her way into an independent TV production company and all throughout her journey that’s taken her from music video director, TV writer and filmmaker to global advertising creative.
It all started when, as a small child, Chaka found solace in classic British and American comedy. Having moved with her family from Iran to England, and experiencing a childhood that wasn’t always easy, she found the lightness, levity and laughter of the likes of Billy Connolly and ‘Only Fools and Horses’ irresistible.
“When you’re a kid, you don’t understand tragedy, comedy. You’re just a big ball of feelings. I think you gravitate towards things that make you feel a certain way,” she says. “I was never drawn to the tragic because – and this isn’t a sob story – I think when you have struggles and difficulties, you’re very aware of the fact that you have to work at being happy.”
That’s not to say that happiness isn’t a natural state for Chaka – she describes herself as “annoyingly Pollyanna-ish” – but she doesn’t take it for granted.
Similarly, when it came to art, creativity, stories, beautiful things, something just connected in a deeply instinctual way. The odd one out in a family of scientists, Chaka found that something didn’t quite click when it came to science. But with creativity, something just felt right. “I was very aware that there were certain things that I saw that would make me just buzz and feel really good and curious and envious.”
That buzzy feeling spread and transformed, becoming an irresistible urge to make films and tell stories of her own. Chaka confesses that she’s never planned anything in her career (and that she’s incredibly impressed when she meets young people with “a real bloody vision”), and lacked any real roadmap to follow. She just had that desire and deep reserves of tenacity.
“I just knew I wanted to tell stories and I wanted to make films. I wanted to tell those stories of people that were a bit like me or that I had things in common with and that would make me feel, ultimately, the way that the films that I watched would make me feel,” she says.
She tracked down production companies and started contacting them and applying for jobs – and when she landed those first interviews, Chaka couldn’t quite believe she was meeting the people and companies that made the TV and films that she loved. “It was like being invited to the most incredible party ever – but I didn’t have an invitation so I had to hustle my way in, and I hustled like a motherfucker.”
And once on the inside, any potential feelings of intimidation were washed away by Chaka’s overwhelming enthusiasm and excitement. She threw herself into it and asked as many questions as she could think of. “As you can imagine, I wasn’t a wallflower,” she chuckles.
After a stint in an independent studio, Chaka moved to Fox Kids and then to UK broadcaster ITV, where she would set up their ahead-of-its time inhouse agency. Listening to Chaka talk about her time at ITV, there’s something kind of magical. In their studios on London’s Southbank, Chaka would chat to the chippies, hang out in the galleries to learn about visual mixing, linger in the cafe watching the guests for shows like ‘Loose Women’, ‘Good Morning Britain’ and the ‘Jonathan Ross Show’ coming and going. In her time at ITV, she saw the launch of massive shows like ‘X Factor’, ‘Pop Idol’, ‘Dancing on Ice’, ‘Love Island’ – big-hitting shows, some of which have become global brands.
“I know I sound like a fan girl – but I bloody am! Every day I was in a room with someone who I just thought, ‘you’re the fucking nuts. I think you’re clever and interesting’. And what sat at the heart of them was a collective, collaborative approach,” she says.
Throughout her career, Chaka has worked with some of the highest profile names in UK entertainment, notably talent show svengali Simon Cowell and prime-time presenting duo Ant and Dec.
“The tenets of being the best people remain the same… the fundamental is they’re really good human beings. They’re really, really kind. They know how to work collectively and collaboratively and in teams. Ironically for being such celebrities, known in the individual right, they are absolutely aware of the collective. They don’t have an arrogance and rock star [attitude]. If you’ve got these tenets, then you’re the sort of person I want to be around.”
These values run deep. At school, Chaka says she was certainly cheeky and found herself playing the joker as a release valve, but she’s always had a deep respect for others and has no time for rudeness or being disruptive for the sake of it. “I was brought up by an amazing woman who I would really hope taught me manners and respect and kindness and gratitude. They’re the most important things to me as a human being. When people talk about legacy, that’s the only thing I care about,” she says.
“I have a very strong sense of right and wrong, and I have a very strong sense of justice. I’m not putting everything down to being an immigrant or ‘other’, but I’m a brown, queer woman. So you have different experiences that are not necessarily fair. What is fair in life? But you see them, you experience them for yourself, and there is not a fucking chance in hell I will stay quiet about that. I hate – hate passionately – power that is abused, whether that is in a playground, in a workplace - wherever I see it,” Chaka continues. “I’m not having that. No one has the right to make someone’s life miserable. No one does. And I have no problem speaking up about that and acting on it as well. That’s when I get feisty.”
This isn’t just about being a good and decent person – although it is that – it’s enmeshed into Chaka’s views on what creativity is, and how it works.
“I do believe creativity is a collective endeavour,” she says, a belief that was cemented when she worked as a director (curiously, while there’s a long legacy of ad creatives jumping behind the camera, Chaka is one of the few who travelled the opposite way). “Directing is one of the best environments to learn that and learn how to work in a team and then, hopefully, at some point, if you’re lucky enough, to learn to lead. As a director, you have to set a vision, but it’s not ‘your way or the highway’. You are one cog in a massive machine. You are nothing without craft services, your gaffer, your grip, your actors, your artists, your cab driver who brings you in in the morning.”
Chaka relates it to her early love of sports, which almost took her in an altogether different direction. Even as a toddler, little Chaka was rarely seen without a ball in hand, and she eventually fell in love with the thwack of the tennis racket, running herself ragged for hours at a time on the court. Soon there was talk of Junior Wimbledon. “The minute it became super competitive, it stopped being enjoyable. It was a solo sport and everything was on me,” she says.
With creativity, however, that fun has never disappeared to this day – exactly because it has this innate collaboration. “This is why I’m the luckiest person in the world,” says Chaka. “I still feel like someone knocks on my door and goes, ‘do you want to come out and play?’.”
Chaka doesn’t just have endless playmates to have fun with – in the world of advertising she also has endless playgrounds. After leaving ITV, she went to Mother before ending up as global CCO at Leo Burnett - and now DDB - and she’s thrived in the varied, constantly evolving world of adland. She says she has a huge amount of respect for people who want to hone a single craft and stay there, but for her, the ability to jump between different mediums with their different behaviours is the joy of advertising. “On a personal level, this excites me so much because I love all of it. I don’t ever want to be pigeonholed in one place or space, be it linear, non-linear, traditional, non-traditional, all these crazy words. At the end of the day, they’re just ideas that need to live in different places for the right reasons.”
Perhaps the secret is that, just as Chaka expressed her love of watching telly through making telly, Chaka embraces emerging platforms as a ‘punter’, and understands them as such. She was an early adopter of podcasts and YouTube, and these days is an avid consumer of TikTok herself (cockapoo content, emotional reunions, filmmaker interviews and ‘hope and motivation’ videos). These days, she’s watching a lot of French and Spanish TV as it scratches her itch for low-key human relationship drama, and confesses to being “massively sentimental” about ‘Ted Lasso’. Her YouTube diet runs the gamut. What she’s not here for is snobbery around different formats and platforms.
“There is a difference between a great TikTok creator and a shit TikTok creator but what you can’t do is hold up a TikTok against a 90-second film or a 90-minute film because they’re different and you’re judging different criteria. The aim of it is still connection, but it’s just done in a massively different way.”
No, Chaka sees the bigger picture. “I, personally, am motivated by creating ideas and work that resonate and connect to the largest number of people because I want to be able to have that emotional impact on as many people as possible. That’s why I’m drawn to big brands. It’s not that I don’t love niche brands – I love niche brands, then, I’m very clear about the audience I’m talking to. But I love the McDonald’s of the world. I love the Coca-Colas of the world. The VWs of the world, where you think about the number of different types of people who touch this brand. What’s our commonality? What are the ties that bind? I think it’s so much harder to be able to do that brilliantly. How do you tap into those universal human truths that are not diluted, but that mean something to a 15-year-old kid and a 65-year-old woman in different countries? How amazing is that?! What a challenge is that?!”
That broad populism is Chaka’s happy place – she recalls the buzz of heading to the pub after launching a new TV show to see what the papers had to say, sharing successes and failures collectively. What makes a mainstream hit is not, reflects Chaka, hard to grasp conceptually, though somewhat trickier to execute. She recalls a major flagship project that appeared to have all of the ingredients for success – the aforementioned Ant and Dec, a million pound prize every day, lots of humour, big celeb guests – that absolutely flopped. ‘Red or Black’ was a show with a simple premise (take a bet on Red or Black), but the team discovered the lack of personal struggle or skill involved meant viewers were pretty disengaged. It all comes back to understanding how to connect with people.
As much as the advertising industry is often accused of sticking inside a bubble and creating work for awards juries rather than the general public, from Chaka’s perspective, there isn’t, in reality, so much of a difference between what the ad world and the entertainment worlds are trying to do. The challenge is the same, it’s just that advertising has an extra layer of difficulty – both worlds have to create engaging or useful experiences and content, but in advertising you also have to imbue a product or brand with meaning.
“I think the same principles apply. Ultimately: why should anyone care about it? What does it genuinely mean in their lives? How does it turn up?” she says. “We’re just in the world of feelings and we can over-intellectualise that. Of course, we have to be clever about where we show up and there’s a whole media map that needs to be figured out, but ultimately we’re trying to find those moments of connection.”
Chaka has been seeking out those moments of connection internally at DDB, spreading her boundless enthusiasm around the network and galvanising teams around the world to get out and make work that has that all important emotional impact. No doubt, with a fair amount of laughter along the way.
“It’s one of the most personal and individual things,” she says, “but also the most collective.”
