Most Creative Marketers: Zaid Al-Qassab

When Channel 4 kicks off its coverage of the Paralympics tomorrow, it will be showing 17.5 hours a day of sport - its biggest commitment to the Games since it snatched the rights from the BBC in 2010.

It’s an important statement from a broadcaster that has always been committed to celebrating diversity and is preparing to fight for its independence against possible privatisation.

It’s also always a moment when the channel gets to showcase its creative advertising credentials: the two previous ‘superhumans’ campaigns promoting its Paralympics coverage have been amongst the most respected and awarded ads of the last decade.

Driving this year’s campaign is Channel 4’s Chief Marketing Officer and Inclusion and Diversity Director Zaid Al-Qassab, and it’s fair to say that industry reaction to ‘Super.Human’ - the “difficult third album” - has sealed Al-Qassab’s own credentials as a creative marketer.

Al-Qassab heads up Channel 4’s 4Creative and 4Studios creative teams. This year’s Paralympics campaign, created in the teeth of the Covid crisis, tested the entire department like never before. Working with the executive creative director Lynsey Atkin, Al-Qassab has moved the superhuman campaign on beautifully, bringing out the humanity of the athletes and normalising the fact that people with disabilities can be as brilliantly talented as people without.

So how does Al-Qassab define creativity? After all, he spent most of his career to date working for organisations rather less instinctively creative than Channel 4, including roles as marketing director for P&G haircare, managing director of P&G Beauty, and Chief Brand & Marketing Officer at BT.

“I never forget that if I myself was a creative genius I would be the creative director or the ECD, not the CMO,” Al Qassab laughs. “And I also never forget that if I was here just to create a creative product I would be making stuff that goes in museums and galleries, I would not be in business.”

“So creativity to me is bounded by those two provisos. Firstly that the creativity that I need in my job is a commercial creativity and we shouldn’t think of that as a dirty word. And it's also bounded by the fact that creativity to me is also about me laying the foundations for other people to be creative - I’m not trying to be the creative director, I’m trying to create the conditions where commercial creativity can flourish. My job is creating the structure, the teams, bringing the right people together, giving them the freedom, the understanding of the objectives, to allow the right sort of commercial creativity to flourish.”

Of course, it’s easier to bring out the best of other people’s creativity if you are a lover of creativity yourself. “I am someone who’s passionate about being immersed in creative culture,” Al-Qassab says. “I definitely love going to gigs, to museums, to the theatre, watching amazing stuff on TV, listening to music almost 24/7. But that’s very different from necessarily being someone who creates. I often say to my team, have a look at my output in any day…I create almost nothing, I write almost nothing, I invent nothing…all I do is try to use the fact that I’m passionate about creativity to create the conditions in a business to allow the creativity that has a commercial benefit to take hold.”

Persuading others of the power and importance of creativity may be a walk in the park at Channel 4, but it can’t have always been easy in Al-Qassab’s previous roles. So how has he made the case for creativity in organisations where it’s not a priority?

“There’s plenty of evidence that creativity helps you sell things. But that’s not obvious to everyone in a business. So you have to take it step by step to persuade the people around you to back investment in creativity. You first persuade people that marketing investment - in other words, that talking to your customers about why they should love what you provide is a valuable investment, it’s not a cost. And once you have got them on board with that, you have to explain that the way for that to be more effective is to be creative.”

And Al-Qassab has a wonderfully clear way of defining the role of marketing as a conduit between creativity and business: “If you’re in my job, you are a translator. I am a translator, translating the language of business people - who are typically not marketers and typically not very creative - into the language of creative people. I’m then translating back the language of creative people - which business people rarely understand - into numbers, charts, facts and figures that business people will be persuaded by, because boards, CEOs, finance directors, they’re used to seeing business cases that say ‘here’s how much it costs to build this machine, this plant, or acquire this thing, and here’s how much over time our revenues and our profits will increase as a result’. They need you to frame the argument in that way. So, to the shock horror of many creatives, yes you do translate that into testing results, and awareness and return on investment and all of those things. And I always say to the creative teams, don’t even worry about that. Obviously I love it when people are brilliant creatives AND understand that, but it’s rare.”

It must be a relief, then, to work for a creative organisation where the case for creativity is made naturally everyday throughout the company.

“One of our values at Channel 4 is creative risk-taking, and that’s not just for the marketing and creative department, that’s for the whole company. There aren’t many companies where creative risk-taker is written at the top of the list of things they want to be,” he laughs.

“I’m incredibly privileged to have this role. There aren’t many jobs in this country where you’re the CMO in a business sense but also the CEO of an agency at the same time. That’s pretty unusual. But between 4Creative and 4Studio we’ve got 100 employees - that’s a pretty sizeable agency. Everyone who works for Channel 4 has two things in common that is fairly unusual in businesses: firstly, they are all completely driven by our purpose - because we’re not for profit you’re at Channel 4 because you believe in the purpose; and secondly, they’re all in a sense creative or creative-interested people, why else would you work here?”

So if/when he returns to a more traditional marketing role, what learnings from the creative culture at Channel 4 could he take with him? “Well, I can quite understand why so many large corporations have a risk-averse attitude, because generally there’s a lot to lose. But I think you could take a lot of the cultural cues we have here and try to redeploy them. You’d take the freedom and willingness to allow the creative department to look at anything, rather than bind them. You’d take the openness that the creative department is allowed to come forward with ideas regardless of whether there’s actually a brief for them - those are things that are normally absolute no nos, but they are allowed here because we want that creativity to flourish.”

The Way I See It:

Who is your creative hero or favourite piece of creativity? 

Stevie Wonder – he embraced new technology which allowed him to revolutionise popular music.

What’s been feeding your imagination lately ?

I’d normally say live music, but I’ve been starved of it, so the answer is TV box sets – Channel 4’s It’s A Sin was brilliant.

What do you think has been your boldest creative play? 

If I take creative in the widest sense – rebranding BT – all-in it was a 9 figure cost, with 100,000 touchpoints, so taking that to the Board was pretty bold.

And how did it pay off and what lessons did you learn? 

Always do the right thing by the customer, even if it requires a lot of work – BT’s customer comms was a total mess, it needed a major overhaul.

What do you enjoy most about being a marketer? 

The variety – from analytic to creative, from the strategic to the executional.

What makes a good creative agency partner? 

Someone who gets under the skin of your business and your challenges, not just superficially assumes they know – it doesn’t matter if you’re the most brilliant creative person, if you haven’t understood the client, your work will always be slightly off beam.

And what frustrates you? 

People who don’t speak their minds – we work in an industry that depends on the spark of different ideas, so kowtowing or remaining silent doesn’t allow us to make progress.

What excites you about the future? 

I love change, adapting to it, trying to stay ahead of it, and things are changing faster now than ever, so that keeps me motivated.

Which of the new generation of marketers or agency creatives has impressed you the most? 

I’m blessed to have the brilliant in-house 4creative team led by ECD Lynsey Atkin, and our new digital content team in 4Studio headed up by Matt Risley – what more could I want?