London Special: Overview

It’s the land of the E-Type, the Beatles and Banksy, with a long tradition of beautifully crafted film and technical innovation. For hundreds of years London has been the creative capital of this artistic isle, but with threats from soaring living costs, a talent drain to other industries and even other countries, plus a possible exit from the EU, Selena Schleh asks, is there a future for creative advertising in the UK?

Some might say you can’t put a value on creativity, but the UK government has done just that – and it’s a whopping £84.1 billion per year. According to figures from the UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport, that’s what the creative industries are now worth, annually, to the country’s economy – that’s £9.6 million per hour.

Enormous as these numbers are, they should come as no surprise, given Britain’s rich creative heritage. As Robert Campbell, founder of UK production company Outsider, puts it: “We have an innate ability as a nation to be creative. We have Jaguar E-Types. We have the Beatles. We have iconic artists like Banksy and Damien Hirst. We have [creativity] in our genes.” 

For hundreds of years London has been the epicentre of that creativity. But for how much longer? Thursday 23 June 2016 could mark the moment it all went downhill (and we don’t mean the shots Cannes beach party) if the referendum on Brexit – Britain’s potential exit from the EU – results in a ‘leave’ vote. In a recent survey carried out by shots’ publisher, Media Business Insight, 67 per cent of creative and media professionals polled thought that the UK’s role as a global creative centre would be damaged by Brexit. 

It’s impossible to predict the economic ramifications for, say, network agencies working across European accounts, but it’s clear that freedom of movement between EU member states no longer being an automatic right will have huge consequences for attracting creatives to the UK. It’s something that Graeme Douglas, ECD at TBWALondon, says is already a problem. “There’s some awesome talent in continental Europe and beyond, [but] between extortionate property prices and the pitchforks and ‘go home’ signs of Middle England, we’re not a welcoming country. We’ll lose diversity and talent as a result of it and we’ll all be worse off.”

Many Londoners would say they’re pretty badly off already, at least from a financial point of view. Almost 300 years after English poet William Shenstone declared “nothing is certain in London but expense”, not much has changed: a recent study by estate agents Savills deemed it the world’s most costly city in which to live and work, beating New York, Hong Kong and Tokyo. Cue a slew of headlines screaming about the imminent ‘creative exodus’, with impoverished arts graduates and 30-something professionals decamping to the provinces or further afield, to alternative (and considerably cheaper) creative hubs like Berlin and Lisbon.

London Is Changing, a recent public art project which projected people’s reasons for leaving the city across digital billboards, made the point even more starkly. “What creativity can there be when only money can buy you your next opportunity?” asked one filmmaker. “I used to think people who left London were giving up. Now I’m one of them. I just can’t afford to romanticise the incredible exploitation any more,” was another equally gloomy assessment from a graphic designer.

Unsurprisingly, the ripples are starting to reach adland. While some insiders, such as Dave Henderson, CCO at MullenLowe London, say the problem is not yet acute because people have simply moved east into comparatively cheaper areas of London, Iain Tait, co-ECD at Wieden+Kennedy London thinks it’s only a matter of time before the talent squeeze becomes critical: “If I was 22 today, with the level of debt that students are carrying, I wouldn’t be able to afford to come to London. I’d probably be on a budget coach to Berlin.” TBWA’s Douglas is even blunter. “There’s a dearth of diversity in the current talent pool – if you haven’t got a rich uncle who owns a property near the capital, you’re fucked.”

Trapped by the traditional ways

Others, however, feel that impecuniosity is no bar to a true creative calling. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” points out Mick Mahoney, CCO, Ogilvy & Mather London. “Advertising has always been tough to get into. It’s pretty self-selecting.” Kate Stanners, global CCO of Saatchi & Saatchi, agrees: “When I first started out, I was sleeping on floors. It was almost impossible to survive on my salary. Things aren’t too different today for those early on in their careers. It didn’t put me off, and I don’t think it impacts people who want to make it in our business any more now than it used to.”

Ultimately, concludes Rick Brim, ECD at adam&eveDDB, “it’s a huge issue that really, really needs to be addressed. That being said, creative people are creative and they will always find ways of answering a problem.

London, New York, LA, Paris etc will always be hard to live in, but they are transcendent as centres for creativity across the board – that’s what feeds them. I think what we will start seeing is other cities starting to share this pot; if you look at where the best work is coming from, it is very diverse.”

Aside from a potential brain drain overseas, the UK ad industry also faces competition from other creative and tech sectors, with Google and Facebook siphoning off some of the brightest individuals. While “[London] is a huge focus and hub for all forms of creativity, the challenge for advertising is to make sure that we are attracting the best talent to our industry,” says Alex Grieve, co-ECD at AMV BBDO. “If we have a fear at the moment it’s that we’re not doing that, and that we need to show more of our creativity to people outside our industry.”

And so, at last, to the work. Will the UK snatch the top spot from the States at the official Cannes rankings this year? Just how creative is the UK’s output these days? Verdicts are mixed. “Good, but not brilliant,” thinks adam&eve’s Brim; a sentiment echoed by TBWA’s Douglas, who thinks that the “braver, more provocative work seems to be coming from smaller and/or emerging markets”. “We’re surrounded by amazing creativity but I’m not sure it’s coming out through outstanding advertising,” says W+K’s Tait. “With so much energy and potential afforded by new tools, production and distribution, I’m a bit disappointed with the state of the industry, to be honest.”

It’s not down to a lack of ideas, however. “There are so many talented creatives coming up with brilliant ideas – it’s the industry that’s letting them down, not the other way around. The commercial voice has been allowed to shout louder than the creative voice,” says Ogilvy’s Mahoney. It’s true that many of the challenges cited – risk-averse clients, tight timeframes, shrinking budgets – are commercial ones, but a particular issue for the London market is its silo-ed client marketing structures.

“[They] can make it more difficult for us to create truly integrated work. This is not to say it’s impossible, but it’s undeniably harder,” says Saatchi & Saatchi’s Stanners. “It’s no coincidence that in recent years we’ve seen more breakthrough work from smaller markets – or that agencies such as CP+B, which are based in unlikely cities, can lead our field in integrated creativity. It’s a lot easier to sell a PR-led idea, for example, to a client who has responsibility for PR.”

Compared to its rivals across the pond, the UK has been slow to adapt in this regard, points out Laura Jordan Bambach, creative partner at London shop Mr President. “Over the past five years London has got a bit trapped in the old way of doing things. If you look at how clients are structured in the States, they’re much more progressive. People work across portfolios, they’re not stuck in individual channels. The US has been much quicker at removing those boundaries and making something that’s fit for now.”

While big cross-platform integrated campaigns such as Persil Free The Kids may still be thin on the ground, there’s no doubt that the UK continues to excel in specific fields. Take film: be it beautifully crafted TV spots or compelling content, Currys PC World’s Spare The Act series, Finish Dishes or Harvey Nichols’ Shoplifters are just a handful of the brilliant films to emerge over the past year. Tech and innovation highlights, meanwhile, run from medical game-changers (Deutsche Telekom’s Sea Hero Quest, which fuses mobile gaming and dementia research) to entertaining flights of fancy (the meow-translating ‘Catterbox’ collar developed for pet food brand Temptations).

In or out, we’ll shake it all about

Whatever the outcome on 23 June, there will be challenges ahead for London’s advertising industry. But to echo adam&eveDDB’s Brim, “creative people are creative”, and if anyone can come up with a solution, it’s folk whose raison d’être is to think outside the box and who thrive on challenges and change. “There’s a distinct creative electricity in the air right now,” concludes MullenLowe’s Henderson. “I think this has been born out of the rapid changes we’ve had to make to take on board all kinds of recent cultural shifts. Compared to, say, 10 years ago, we’re expected to deliver ideas at an incredible pace, and this inevitably throws up new fresh thinking.”

“There are interesting things happening, there are interesting newer players,” adds Mr President’s Jordan Bambach. “I think we’ve been more traditional than we should have been for the last few years, but I have high hopes that London is going to be amazing again.”