LONDON — At the PRovoke EMEA Summit in London last week, Ketchum convened the keynote panel on the impact of ‘Radical Creativity’ on business performance, and explored what makes impactful, original campaigns in today’s landscape, from AI to client-agency relationships.

The candid discussion was led by Ketchum’s CEO of global markets Jo-ann Robertson, along with three in-house communications leaders, all Ketchum clients:

  • Sarah Hughes, external communications lead, Mars Wrigley UKI
  • Lucy Jenkins, communications director Uber
  •  Adrian O’Brien, general manager Europe, Unilever Wellbeing Collective (LiquidIV)

The conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Five key takeaways:

  • Creativity starts with curiosity, bravery, and being okay with a bit of ambiguity.
  • Creativity must (and can) tangibly drive a brand and business forward against objectives, not be ‘fun’ for its own sake.
  • Trust is the magic ingredient in client-agency relationships: you’ve got to be willing to push the envelope, take risks, and challenge each other to do something bold.
  • AI can take the legwork out and spark creativity, but it won’t replace the human touch; don’t let it turn you into a lazy creative.
  • Radical creativity shows up when everyone’s on the same page – the real breakthroughs often happen once the first round of safe ideas is out of the way.


Jo-ann Robertson (JAR): What does creativity mean to you, now?

Sarah Hughes (SH): To me it means three things. First, curiosity: it’s critical to be really interested and curious about the insights that will drive the campaign idea, or to get your head into a sector or category – it’s a fundamental anchor of creativity. Second, bravery: you have to be brave to be provocative, and a lot of creativity is anchored in provocation, so we encourage our colleagues and agencies to be brave in their ideas. Third, you need to be comfortable with ambiguity – it’s very rare that a first idea is right and there’s often a journey to get to where you want to be, and you have to be OK with that.

Adrian O’Brien (AOB): Creativity has to be the thing that sets you apart from the competition, and enables you to create a relationship with your consumers. Creativity is one of the only ways that big brands can stand out and compete with the smaller players who are eating our lunch.

Lucy Jenkins (LJ): Well, creativity is why we get up in the morning! It’s the fun part of the job.

JAR: For me, it’s about honing in on the creative craft – the things humans can do better than anything else. We’re experiencing a disruptive time in the world, so how do you focus on the craft against all the noise?

LJ: There’s always something new to distract us, but we have to push our teams to ask whether the creative will make someone think differently about our brand.

AOB: We talk a lot about whether this is moving us forwards. It’s easy to do what you’ve done before and know is safe and effective, but is it taking you into a new space, pushing boundaries, while at the same time de-risking by making sure the creative ideas are is still entrenched in the heartland of what your brand is about? It’s about working with agency partners and being very clear on what your objectives are, and outside that, go and be free, have fun, and provoke. If you’re not meeting that objective, it’s hard to say no to an idea when you’re on a deadline, but we need to push to ensure we are delivering quality against our objectives.

SH: Is we look at our brands, Maltesers is 90 years old and remains relevant especially for consumers in the UK, and there is a way to handle a brand that is so iconic and has such heritage, versus a different approach for Snickers – there’s a massive ecosystem of internal and external stakeholders to manage. Everyone at Mars is encouraged to have freedom of thought and ideas, but sometimes you have to work out if the juice is worth the squeeze: it is worth pushing forward and getting alignment from internal stakeholders. So many brands want to be the first to jump on something in culture and agitate, but you need to think if it’s still true to your brand.

JAR: Brands that really understand audiences and are deep into culture are the ones that are going the thrive. What creative work have you really admired over the past 12 months?

LJ: How McDonalds in the US handled the election campaign – their response to internal audiences after Trump’s visit to a branch, and their line “We are not Red or Blue – we’re Golden”, was an elegant way to diffuse an unbelievably delicate conversation.

AOB: We’re now getting to the point where so many brands have great products and great things to say, but consumers have access to all the information, so it’s not enough to rely on a good product. It’s about injecting yourself into culture – like eBay’s ‘Car Park Challenge’ with Ladbible. It was about eBay selling car parts, but they created an entertaining series. Brands need to look at what value exchange they are creating, and making entertainment part of our offer; becoming a publisher, almost.

SH: People want to be entertained now, that’s the environment we’re operating in. I love the Duolingo mascot – it’s clever, mischievous, a bit weird – and that’s what makes us remember it. It’s approach is brought to life with the ‘4am Routine’ campaign – the team jump on stuff so quickly to make it relatable but always bring it back to the joy of learning language. I get excited when they come up in my feeds: what genius have they done now?

AOB: They stick to brand guidelines and tone of voice, and that gives them the licence to do that.

JAR: Is there still such a thing as an original idea? [Referencing the recent ‘food bag wars’ on LinkedIn, where PR agencies were arguing about who made handbags out of food items first as a brand stunt.]

SH: There’s no such thing as an original idea – ideas are mixed and conceptualised based on something that’s come before. But now we’re moving into the HFSS regulations [new UK government guidelines for the promotion of foods high in fat, sugar or salt], there will be a seismic shift in the way food brands think about all media. While ideas might be remodelled, the way they will need to be reconceptualised for the new media ecosystem will have to be original.

AOB: From fashion to music, everything takes inspiration from what’s gone before. The idea is only one part of it – quality of execution and bringing a fresh approach to a brand, category or market is where people don’t always put enough attention onto executing with excellence.

LJ: Part of the challenge is that culture moves so quickly, but there is opportunity in disruption to a brand’s business environment.

JAR: Thinking about working with agencies, what do you think is the magic ingredient in client agency partnerships?

LJ: It’s about trust. To have good creative you have to push boundaries – you have to feel a bit sweaty when you’re pitching an idea, there has to be some risk. So you have to have an agency partner that you trust.

AOB: It’s a two-way challenge to push the brand forward. We work with agencies to bring ideas we don’t have in-house, so the agency has to challenge the client and the brand, but we also need to be able to turn to an agency partner and say it’s not good enough.

SH: It’s important to set that vision out at the start of the relationship. If you know you’re pushing for great creative, but against a backdrop of internal challenges, you need to set your agency up to succeed in the best way possible, so you’re setting out the dynamics of business, as well as where you need to get to together.

JAR: I always say to my team, the toughest clients aren’t the ones who say it isn’t good enough – they are the ones who will get us to the best work. If you’re trying to push the brand or business, how do you guide your agency, what’s your role on the client side?

AOB: It comes back to trust, the challenge, and giving clarity on what you want to achieve. As a client, I don’t want to be marking agencies’ homework – I ask them, do you think this idea is good enough? Otherwise you end up micromanaging a piece of work and no-one is happy with it. Senior leaders don’t struggle with creativity, they struggle with things that don’t move the brand and business forward. When it feels risky for no reward, that’s when they push back.

SH: It’s about bringing the people internally with influence along on the journey and understanding what good looks like to them. People love being part of the creative stuff, they love our brands because of the way they show up. If we involve people, we get to great ideas. It’s easy to get bogged down internally with the mountain of things to do, so we love it when our agency partners bring in stuff we haven’t spotted. That’s where the magic happens: often ideas can get internal buy-in quickly, where no-one in the business would have come up with it.

LJ: It comes down to whether I can sell the idea to internal stakeholders – if you can’t explain in one sentence, you’ve probably got work to do. And are you really addressing something that people internally are focused on? You need to show commercial imperatives, rather than just ‘this is fun’.

JAR: It’s about relevance and driving progress for the brand, but how are you measuring the success of and showing internally why you have this budget? What are the metrics and narrative you use to show that creative campaigns do drive results, beyond reach and impressions?

LJ: If Company A’s reputation is here and want to get it to here, are you driving that story? Does your coverage make people feel differently about the brand, and is comms doing enough? We measure the message.

AOB: There is a place for reach as you need to get work in front of people, but we talk about a family of brand lovers. One of the first things we do is jump into the comments on socials – if you put work out and it only has 10 comments and they are all emojis, you can’t take anything from that. If you haven’t got a lot of comments on your socials, you’ve got some work to do. Comments inform the innovation pipeline and go to market models. If you get thousands of comments, you know you’re really in it.

SH: Our brands have been around for years and because we’ve played a long game and don’t just look at brand equity scores, we can impact how our brands are showing up in different ways over a longer time. It enables us to trip up, if the narrative drifting to where it doesn’t reflect the essence of the brand now, we can adjust that, listen to stakeholders and policymakers, and make adjustments as we go.

JAR: When you’re focused on the long game, it gives you more scope to make a mistake. Too few brands take that approach, rather than looking at quarterly performance. So let’s talk about data and AI, which has been a wake-up call for the industry. How are you being intentional about AI elevating creativity rather than replacing human uniqueness?

AOB: For me, all the constraints to creativity are starting to be removed by AI and the last constraint is your imagination. The sky’s the limit, there’s nothing you can’t now bring to life, so you can really push boundaries – we don’t have to wait two weeks for a render from production, it’s done in minutes. The concern for me is that we will end up relying on AI to do the creative, thinking part, and get too reliant on prompts that already exist. We should embrace it to unleash creativity, but not get lazy.

SH: The risk is that the human work and ideas are devalued if you have an AI model that can churn out 50 ideas instantly. We still have to cling on to accidental discoveries – we have to agitate for that, that’s the stuff you can’t get out of a model. AI is incredible for cutting out legwork, it cuts out so much research, as long as have human analysis front and centre. There are pluses and minuses, but it’s transformative whatever way you look at it.

LJ: You have to ensure there is a person at the end of it. Ultimately, we’re trying to create human connections with brands, and machines can’t do that. But it will take the drudge away and enable us to do creative, dynamic, brand reputation changing work.

JAR: When is the moment for true radical creativity and bravery?

SH: For some briefs, there is a big expectation in the business to do something that not only gets people externally excited at seeing a brand in unexpected places but also generates massive pride internally. Not every brief is that brief. The moment for radical creativity is when you get people round the table, and set the vision and expectations.

AOB: The second response to the brief! Everyone plays nice with the first response, the time to push it is the second.

LJ: If you’ve nailed the brief, that moment is very early on.

JAR: As I tell my teams, if you really believe in an idea, fight for it with passion and conviction, but know when to stop: three strikes and you’re out!