Most Creative Marketers: Alex Naylor

When Naylor first started working for Barclays, he was urged by an admired mentor to get out of financial services marketing within a couple of years, or risk career suicide. Ten years later, Naylor audaciously remains. “It ended up being incredibly exciting,” he says.

Although banks are not generally viewed as a font of creativity, Naylor has been able to push boundaries by daring to tenaciously promote new ideas. Barclays’ ‘Make Money Work for You’ strategy, he says, was challenging to get approved internally because it was “uncomfortable and difficult for people within the bank to talk about money”.

Not to be deterred, Naylor worked alongside Bartle Bogle Hegarty to develop an idea around everyone’s individual relationship with money. “Over time, people have conflated their relationship with money with their relationship with their bank, so the bank becomes part of the problem. We had to break that paradigm, so the bank stands with the customer, helping them with their relationship with money.”

The new message had “a massive catalytic effect on the organisation”, because it was a simple, easy-to-understand, mission that binds people. The power of creative thinking, Naylor says, is responsible. “As marketers, our USP is the ability to see things differently and bring creativity into the organisation. You’ve got to cherish that, and protect it, and not get so distracted by writing finance presentations that you forget your real raison d'être.”

Unexpected connections

For Naylor, creativity means making unexpected connections, joining things up in different ways, with the result that people shift their perspective. The best creative, he says, can completely change the way someone thinks about something, “although it feels completely natural, and you wonder why you never noticed in the first place.”

The skill involved in achieving outcomes, whether financial goals or getting people to think and behave differently, is creativity with a purpose, says Naylor. “And that's when the real magic happens. A lot of the frustrations I have are when people have lost focus on what they're actually trying to achieve. And that way, lies dragons.”

As a young marketer, Naylor was so inspired by Wieden + Kennedy’s new strategy for Honda, based on the company's Japanese motto, ‘Yume No Chikara’/‘Power of Dreams’ that he watched the 'Cog' and 'Impossible Dream' ads hundreds of times. Although marketing law would have said ‘show the metal’, and ‘here’s the car’, Honda chose a different direction. 'Cog' is credited as being directly responsible for an increase of £400m in sales: a solid return on investment from the original £7m outlay.

“It made me see that you can produce real art in our world, and it can still be effective. And you don't need to compromise,” Naylor says. Perhaps no surprise then, that the multi-award-winning director of 'Cog’ Antoine Bardou-Jacquet, is the director on Barclays’ 'Moneyverse' ads that broke in early 2021. “You can imagine how difficult it is to get TV advertising through the layers of senior management for the bank. But working with Bardou-Jacquet has been absolutely brilliant. He’s brought a new visual language to what we're doing.”

The value of ambition

Understandably, here is so much governance in Naylor’s world that he’s constantly battling for headspace for creativity and strategy. Although he finds inspiration in the cherry trees at the end of the allotments that back onto his garden, and listening to lots of music, he says Homer’s Iliad and TS Eliot’s Prufrock, have made him appreciate the necessity of ambition and pushing boundaries by describing the basic choice between “do I dare and push things or do I live a comfortable life?”, he explains. “And you realise that thousands of years apart, people are really dealing with exactly the same issues. And while everything changes and everything changes, underneath it all, human concerns don't really change at all.”

And it’s ambition that he most values in agencies like BBH and Droga5 (which created 'The Crystal Barn' for Barclaycard below).

“You need agencies to be ambitious. To be the people that can drive you and that you can lean on to really think about how to push things forward. A lot of it comes down to trust. And whether you can bounce and build ideas together,” Naylor says.

He now sees potential for “a golden age of growth, with a very different set of ethics wrapped around it. We might enter an age of real progressive optimism, with a very different kind of community spirit, which is really exciting.”

It seems Naylor’s dare to disturb the Moneyverse is paying off so far.