China Special: Jonathan Ip

He knows his way around a basketball court, but more importantly he’s no stranger to the inside of a consumer’s head, which makes Jonathan Ip, partner and CCO at KBS+ Shanghai, quite a different breed of digital creative. He explains how redefining relations between clients and agencies and exploiting digital’s interactive possibilities is the key to growing China’s creativity

It’s mid-morning on Wednesday when a taxi deposits me on the edge of Shanghai’s traffic-choked Jingan district. Luxury malls, five-star hotels and office towers – those temples to consumerism and commerce – are everywhere I turn; car horns blare and sunlight glints off steel and glass. Inside the brand new high-rise block that houses KBS+ Shanghai, however, it’s mercifully cool and quiet. A lift silently swishes me up to the 22nd floor, where I’m greeted by partner and CCO Jonathan Ip, meditatively cradling a steaming flask of green tea.

With his circular, heavy-rimmed specs, neat goatee and loose-fitting, all-black garb, Ip has the look of a modern-day Confucius, and strikes a somewhat anachronistic note against the futuristic skyline and stark white, Apple-esque interiors. Yet as we chat, I notice a transatlantic-tinged accent that fits the international tone of our surroundings. “I learned my English on the basketball court,” he chuckles. “I was pretty street when I was young.”

Ip’s intriguing East-West persona is very much the result of an itinerant upbringing and career. Born to Chinese parents in Hong Kong, he moved to New York aged 12 and over the years has shuttled between the two cities, with stints in Guangzhou and, now, Shanghai. Though a career in advertising wasn’t something he’d dreamed of – “I just sort of fell into the advertising world,” – Ip was introduced to the creative industry by his mother, a make-up artist on a local TV station who would often invite him along to shoots to be an extra. “I always liked the storytelling aspect, but I was really focused on visuals. Design was my passion,” he says.

Pursuing that passion as a career, though, necessitated weaving a few tall tales of his own, in order to placate parents who’d hoped for a more traditional occupation for him. “Chinese parents always want their kids to go into business,” he explains. “My mom told me not to go into the creative industry, she knew it was a tough life.” By emphasising the ‘computer’ aspect of his chosen course – computer graphics and interactive media – Ip got the parental nod to attend New York’s Pratt Institute. “Basically, I lied,” he says gleefully.

Graduating in 2000, Ip caught the tail end of the dot-com boom, working as a freelance website designer. The bursting of the Internet bubble and the inevitable demise of digital start-ups marked a turning-point in a career that had barely begun. “Before [the crash], digital was very distinct from advertising. But then the line started getting blurred.” Boomerang-ing back to Hong Kong in 2003, he made his first foray into adland as an art director for a local digital agency, Lemon. The outbreak of SARS soon after was a devastating setback for the region, but creative opportunities bloomed for Ip within the drive for recovery, including organising a series of art exhibitions in collaboration with a group of native designers “to help Hong Kong get back on its feet”.

Learning lessons from China

Later in 2003, an itchy-footed Ip returned to the US, where he spent the next four years consulting and art directing on a freelance basis for the likes of R/GA, Deutsch and OgilvyOne Worldwide. It was while working for the latter on the Kodak account that he was approached by Tom Eslinger, Saatchi & Saatchi’s worldwide creative head of digital, to set up the agency’s digital arm (Saatchi & Saatchi Interactive) in Guangzhou, South China. Ip jumped at the opportunity to bring his extensive experience in the US market to the emerging Chinese industry, though he stresses that it wasn’t about ‘educating’ but ‘sharing’. Three months after he first stepped off the plane, burning with a desire to impart his knowledge, Ip realised he’d got it the wrong way round: there were far more lessons to be learned from China.

“Digital is all about consumer behaviour,” he explains. “And I needed to sit back and listen. I needed to understand more about this market.” The differences were fundamental, even down to the way users would browse. “[In 2007], every time you clicked on a browser it would open a new page, so you’d end up with loads of pages. By US standards that was poor site structure. But when I asked locals why, they explained they liked to have the windows side-by-side in order to compare. It wasn’t bad design, it was just a different logic.”

Ip spent three and half years at Saatchi & Saatchi Interactive, before heading north to take up the reins as digital ECD at the agency’s Shanghai offices, via a year at BBDO Proximity Shanghai. Still attempting to figure out China’s online landscape, he scored an offline career highlight in 2012 with Ariel’s Big Stain. The larger-than-life interactive installation, which travelled around China, saw members of the public squirt giant bottles of ketchup and soy sauce at a five-storey-high T-shirt, creating virtual stains which their Ariel cleaner-wielding counterparts ‘scrubbed’ away – all cunningly achieved via Wii controllers hidden in the bottles. Despite bagging a slew of awards, including a bronze Lion and a D&AD Wood Pencil, the highlight of the campaign for Ip was that “it got people from all generations involved, from grandmas to kids. It was so exciting to see the happiness people got from playing with our work.”

Interactivity is clearly what motivates Ip – he created a running track for soap brand Safeguard, where participants could virtually ‘race’ hurdler Liu Xiang, and turned a Singapore mall into a giant gaming screen for Chinese electronic brand Huawei’s new MediaPad tablet. And interactivity is what sets ‘digital’ creatives apart from their traditional counterparts, he claims.

“I’ve never been a traditional media, TVC kind of guy; I don’t like the way that kind of advertising forces itself on you,” he says. “I’m more interested in how positive interactions affect the unconscious mind.” It might sound a bit Jungian, but this long-running fascination with psychology is helping Ip to identify and tackle the challenges of mobile advertising, which demands a completely different approach to what has gone before.

“Now, people have the freedom to choose their content, they can hand-pick what they want from thousands of options. In five years’ time, consumers will be the 90s generation, who’ve grown up not watching TV, not reading magazines, but choosing content for themselves on their mobiles. And if [agencies] don’t starting changing their mindset, we’ll never get back into that space,” he states. Ip’s advice to his clients is to treat the Chinese consumer like a moody teenager. “If the brand acts like a mom and keeps yelling at them every day, they’ll stop listening. But if the brand is more like a coach, subtly teaching them things in life, they’ll want to follow and embrace it.”

A case in point was last year’s Long Live Music campaign, which saw Saatchi & Saatchi Shanghai team up with Noisey, VICE’s dedicated music channel, to improve the listening experience of China’s legions of music fans. Ip’s team initially looked at sound quality, before settling on a weightier issue: the growing number of traffic fatalities caused by headphone-toting pedestrians oblivious to their surroundings. “We thought, why not create something which can actually help you stay alive?” says Ip. The resulting mobile add-on, Mutesic, uses GPS tracking to identify when users approach busy intersections. It then automatically lowers the music volume, alerting listeners to ambient noise until they’ve crossed the road to safety. Having launched in beta last year, a second version is currently being developed.

Sticking to briefs? So last year

After almost four years of success at Saatchi & Saatchi, Ip started to miss the pace of start-ups and “reacting fast to challenges; really helping the client to change their brand”. So, when New York boutique KBS+ approached him in late 2014 with an offer to head up the creative department of its new Shanghai outpost, Ip saw a chance to recapture the excitement of his early career.

Having opened its doors in March this year with a skeleton crew of just eight, the shop has already added connectivity specialists TE to its client roster. With a creative team comprising of Ip as CCO, a copywriter, and a creative technologist, Ip is confident that this non-traditional set-up and small scale allows for flexibility, speed and the ability to “grow the team to respond to the changing market”. And KBS+ isn’t alone in spotting the opportunities for petite, agile alternatives to established networks. The past two years have seen a clutch of mid-sized boutiques, including mcgarrybowen, R/GA and Anomaly, set up shop in China.

Another draw for Ip was KBS+’s ethos of innovation, which eschews rigid adherence to a brief in favour of more creative, sustainable solutions. What starts out as, say, a TVC, may end up as a series of 20-second pieces of online content. This freedom to experiment is largely absent in China, says Ip, thanks to the slave-master tenor of client-agency relationships – still frequently cited as a major barrier to creativity in China. “Right now, clients don’t really see agencies as a partner,” he explains. “They’re dominant, they give you a brief, you’re scared about losing the business, so you think ‘Ok, I’ll stick to the brief, that’s the safest thing.’” Ip thinks the solution is to go beyond merely fulfilling expectations, despite China’s culture of late working hours and the associated desire to just ‘get things done’. “I tell my team, if you go to a client meeting, don’t just bring an idea. Have one or two [extra] things in your back pocket.”

And though he’s not advocating a return to the martini-swilling days of yore, reclaiming a sense of professional pride is vital. “It’s not about going back to the Mad Men era, but we must remember we are still professionals, consultants. We’ve got to bring that sense of trust back, inspire clients with lots of ideas, even if they don’t buy them. And if we keep doing that, the relationship will become  something closer to a true partnership.”

Asked about the other issues afflicting Chinese creativity, Ip points to the perennial problem of the country’s size and the appeal across different socio-economic strata. “In the lower tier cities, people’s understanding of creativity is very linear. If a campaign’s too abstract, it won’t work. But as the 90s generation grows up, they’ll have seen many interesting ads around the world. The whole understanding of creativity will change.”

Mobile advertising is already helping to bridge these gaps – another indication, according to Ip, that Chinese creativity is likely to find its ultimate expression in technological innovations and non-traditional mediums. “Digital is how China can reach a higher creative level in the next few years. Once we understand why consumers behave in a certain way and tie that to a product benefit – that’s when the magic happens.”