Nils Leonard has been brought out to Australia to give two President’s Lectures for D&AD. That matters to Australian creativity. The bloke who is now chief creative officer and chairman of Grey UK, turned the agency where no creative wanted to work into the agency on most creatives’ wish list.

And D&AD? Well, its awards slogan may have a helluva lot of swagger, but it happens to be true in adland – nothing matters more.

Creativity matters at D&AD. So meet D&AD’s president and Havas Work Club creative partner, Andy Sandoz:

Now meet Nils Leonard.

One of the things that matters least to Leonard is ego. “Agencies are just buildings full of people. Anywhere can be excellent. It’s easy to believe that agencies are turned around by rock star creative directors or digital yogis. Wouldn’t everyone love to be that, but it’s a myth. It’s bullshit and how many times have you seen brilliant people paraglide into buildings and fail.”

What matters to success, Leonard reckons, is how people decide to work with each other. When Leonard joined Grey – which by the way, was no ego decision; at the time, the agency’s name was also its metaphor – he began transforming how the agency’s people worked together. That began with its offices…

Offices don’t matter to Leonard. Nor departments or sign-offs. “Offices reinforce dickheads. They reinforce ego and hierarchy and importance. Offices stop courage. Departments stop ideas flowing. Sign-off stops trust. It makes one guy and no one else responsible. He got rid of all three. The word, open, matters to Leonard.

A balanced client list mattered. Getting one was Leonard’s next task. “We didn’t start with educating the clients. We started with the internal culture and I think it wound some clients up at first.

But if you’re trying to make something new or get a new point of view across, you can take a year trying to drag one of your existing clients to that place or you can win a new client in a month and just start there.”

Grey pitched relentlessly for two years. It won 20 out of 24 pitches the first year.

Tom Uglow, creative director, Google Creative Lab. Google supported the Nils Leonard (r) D&AD President Lectures. 

Awards used not to matter to Leonard. “I have a love hate relationship with them now. Do they breed the wrong stuff in people? Yeah if they become, and it’s so easy to let them become, the thing that matters most. And when they do, they breed the wrong sort of creative that’s looking for the wrong sort of stuff. And you have conversations about bullshit that don’t matter to your clients or to your talent.”

So why has Grey UK won 25 Pencils in two years? “Clients don’t give a shit about what the name of your agency is. We won loads of clients quite quickly. The hardest people in the world to convince are talent. It wasn’t until we went all right let’s enter a few bits. Then we started winning for The Times, and prolifically at D&AD, and then all of a sudden all of these people that I’d been chasing, who hadn’t been returning my calls, suddenly started calling me. And I’m like, I get it. That’s what awards are. Awards matter to the people I need in my building.”

Big ideas don’t matter to Leonard. Because, while everyone in the room wants one, no one’s going to agree on what one is. What matters to Leonard are ideas that people care about, want to engage with and share for the longest time possible. He calls them long ideas. Long ideas come from having cultural ambition. “This is our play. We don’t ask, “What’s your ambition?” It’s sell more cars. Of course it is. But we ask, “What’s your cultural ambition? What are you going to mean in culture to make those car sales happen.” Having cultural ambition leads to work like the Angina Monologues for British Heart Foundation:

And Volvo Lifepaint. The ad about Volvo safety that isn’t an ad. People care about, want to engage with and share Lifepaint. Its first production run ran out. Then a can of Lifepaint reached US$110 on eBay. Its second production run was 250% larger.

TVCs don’t matter particularly. If the creative is a 30 second ad, that’s fine by Leonard. Grey reinvigorated McVitie’s biscuits with TVCs. The agency’s TVCs gave McVitie’s a 10% sales rise. And now it’s making digital kittens for the brand.

Knowing your client’s business matters, That’s how Grey boosted McVitie’s sales by 10%. “You’re going to continue to be dependent if you hide from the business.” And knowing what you’ve done for your client’s business matters. “We probably added a zero to the sale price of that company from the work that we did. If you suddenly start seeing things like that, then hopefully you won’t enter into relationships as subservient.”

Partnerships matter. “If you’re entering a relationship as someone’s bitch, in any sense at all, you’ve got to be worried about that.”

Big data doesn’t matter to Leonard. “Stop worrying about words like big data and the sorts of things clients want and start worrying about the nature of your relationships and how they’re changing. And the sorts of things clients actually want. Their fear is, ‘these guys from the ad agency want to make meaningless art and they want to put my logo on the end of it. I have a business I care about. The ad guys fear is, ‘the client guys don’t want to make good work, they just want to make turgid shit. But somewhere in the middle, which is the best of the relationships we have, is that belief that you’re both in it. And again that’s about that shared cultural ambition. If you can get in a room with a client, work out ‘what we’re about’ together and agree, all the shit goes away.

“If big data is mattering to your clients, buy a big data company and make it work to sell creative work. Stop fucking about. If it’s in the way make it work for you.”

Lastly, frustration matters to Leonard. “Frustration is the most motivating emotion.” It’s also what triggered Grey’s transformation. “A bunch of very frustrated people went in somewhere that wasn’t great… and just took it to bits because we had nothing to lose.”

And it matters to Grey UK that Leonard’s frustration hasn’t ended yet. “Sometimes I feel like giving up, then I remember there are a lot of fuckers I want to prove wrong.”