Creativity Squared: Positive Addictions and Jealousy as Rocket Fuel with Jolyon White

I have an addictive personality. I get obsessed with things. Collecting things. Learning things. Doing things. I often have to be the best at that thing. I believe that creativity is fuelled by curiosity. If you don’t have it - you can’t learn it. So I will read all the books, watch all the documentaries and buy all the gear. Don’t worry this doesn’t extend to hard drugs but I do have a pretty aggressive vinyl habit. 

This compulsive behaviour is actually perfect for what we do. Each brief becomes a mini obsession. You become a surface expert on everything from dating apps to healthy snack bars.

My brain is wired to see everything as an opportunity. My job as a creative director is to see opportunities in ideas that others haven’t. I’m pretty optimistic too but again, I think you have to be, as everyone is looking to you for solutions. 

I always try to expose myself to things outside of my comfort zone mainly with weird arty films but I do find I gravitate to certain things like dark comedy or absurdity. I am always looking for things that stand out. Things that I don’t feel I’ve seen before. 

I made a short film last year based on a future where introverts were required by law to undertake extroversion therapy to turn them into extroverts helping boost the economy. It was inspired by a stat that said extroverts have more successful careers. I found this concept fascinating as I think I’m a bit of both. I can put on a show and be the centre of attention when necessary but I’d equally happily stand back and watch from the sidelines. 

 

The most important aspect to creativity is having an idea. If you just make something look beautiful - it’s more art than advert. Creativity in advertising is more strategic. You need to get your message / POV / USP across while doing something that feels creatively different. You could say my main criteria is; stand out, simple and sticky. 

The campaign I am most proud of would have to be for Channel 4’s 2016 Paralympics - We’re the Superhumans. We won a lot of awards for this but they mean nothing, especially after we received a letter from a mum who had just given birth to a kid with only one arm. She said she felt awful thinking how tough their life would be until they saw our film. They felt empowered and saw their kid as having an advantage not a disadvantage. That meant a lot. 

One of the best clients I have ever worked with was Lurpak. It was the first day of a shoot and the head of marketing said to me, “I will always give my opinion on the creative but the final decision lies with you. But when it comes down to the butter I call the shots.” This is why Lurpak has made great work for so many years. They trust in the creative agency they have hired and the creative agency trust that they know their product better than anyone. This mutual trust is essential to any client relationship especially if you want to create the most creative work.

The ad industry seems to take itself too seriously. It’s only advertising. And even when advertising can make a difference - I still feel it could be more fun. We released a campaign called Stop The Wash which set out to raise awareness of how certain brands are greenwashing everyone. We released a pop anthem with over 100 ‘green’ slogans as the lyrics, which are copyrightable under UK law. So if any company uses one, our client Wherefrom will sue ‘em. We created a fun quirky music video to get the idea out there. What I loved about this idea, beyond the punchiness, was that it was fun. It didn’t take itself too seriously even though sustainability is a hugely important subject

 

We start each project by doing a deep dive on them as a brand. We look at competitors and gauge what the category is doing as a whole. Often the best place to start is to do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. We don’t like to get too executional too quickly as it can often lead to all style, no substance. Always idea first, then we will focus on trying to make it look pretty.

At 10 Days we believe that it doesn’t matter where an idea comes from. There’s an open atmosphere so anyone in the team can pitch ideas - not just the creatives. We are one team with one goal and that’s to make great work. If we hit a roadblock on a project - we get the whole agency in a room and hammer it out together. It always works. We always land on a nugget of truth or a different angle which injects a new lease of life into the ideas.

We use AI a lot in our process. We were one of the first agencies to use it as a tool to create adverts. We launched a service called Ad Intelligence - it initially started as a speculative service that turned into us working with actual clients. Most notably we did a big art project with Gay Times.

AI is a great tool but you still need ideas to make it work. We use it to open up and push thinking. From an art directional perspective it produces layouts and compositions that trained brains would not. I love that.

People in this industry bang on about the importance of crafting an advert. It is often misplaced indulgent bollocks. Don’t get me wrong, making an advert look and sound awesome is extremely important but it gets to a point where you are simply just wasting time and money as the consumer won’t notice and ultimately won’t care. 

The traditional process between creative and production sucks too. The creatives spend months creating and crafting this so-called perfect signed off script, to then hand it over to a director who then goes away for a week or two and comes back with something completely different. This then takes a few more weeks to convince the client that this new idea will work instead of the one that they loved before. 

Now don’t get me wrong, directors often make the ideas better. But that process is so inefficient, right? Surely the winning formula would have the director work with the creatives from the beginning or have hybrid creatives/ directors who have some sort of vision. So that’s exactly what we’ve done. 10 Days cuts out all this crap and focuses on creative with a production hat on from day one. It is liberating. It saves everyone time making the process less expensive for the client. 

 

I was born and raised in Brighton. I always loved to draw stuff. I ended up doing art at university but quickly realised that I couldn’t justify a splodge with some deeper meaning so I switched to advertising instead. 

After University I did the Watford course that doesn’t exist anymore. Tony Cullingham who now runs the BBH Barn teaches you to focus on ideas and ultimately led to me getting hired from my first placement at Mother - which was actually off the back of this napkin. 

It feels pretty embarrassing sharing this over 10 years later as I can’t tell you what a lot of these mean but there’s a couple of funny ones in there. Saying that, I think we need to get in touch with Just For Men and pitch them ‘Escape from the retirement home’. Ha.

Before 10 Days I used to see an amazing bit of work and be so jealous that I often felt ill. But since having my own agency I now see a great piece of work as an opportunity to show a client what’s possible. I have even started the Jealous Archives where everyone can add works that make them feel jealous or work we wished we had made. It changes the narrative. My team isn't seeing it as negative - they are seeing it as motivation. Jealousy has weirdly become rocket fuel for me now.