Understated simplicity, collaborative magic and encouraging contributions: Decoding Toby Allen

It's difficult knowing how and where to start with introducing award-winning executive creative director, Toby Allen. Besides his stellar creative career with a number of awards to boot, he's remained grounded and realistic of his achievements - which puts him in good stead to continue over delivering on expectations and future briefs.

Having joined independent agency network The&Partnership last year, he now heads up the creative department in London and oversees creative for all of its existing clients. He arrived from AMV BBDO, where together with his former creative partner he spearheaded the transformation of the Libresse/Bodyform account and was behind its most awarded campaigns in the last two years - both defying stereotypes and advertising conventions.

Allen has accumulated more than a mind-boggling six Grand Prix and three consecutive Titanium Lions at Cannes, three Black Pencils, and over 30 other Grands Prix around the world in everything from Integrated, Film, Digital, Use of Data, Craft, Creative Strategy and Creative Effectiveness. It's quite a remarkable record.

He chats to us about these achievements (and more), remaining ambitions and gives some inkling into his creative leadership style.

Creative Salon: What does creativity mean to you Toby?

Toby Allen: My definition of creativity is the process of making ideas real. We're not in the ideas business, we're in the making-ideas-happen business. So by definition, if you don't create something, it's not creativity. I think sometimes people get seduced by the power of ideas, and not enough thought goes into making them happen.

CS: What role did creativity play in your childhood?

TA: I grew up on a farm in my early childhood years and the thing about growing up on a farm is that you get bored - which is brilliant for creativity. It’s the best school there is. I read a lot, and built dens in the woods, spent time looking at leaves and up into the sky; letting my mind wander. I used creativity to counter the boredom.

CS: Were there any particularly inspirational people who shaped your path?

TA: I was lucky; I had two English teachers who were both brilliant in different ways. I love reading and words, and they saw that in me. I remember reading William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying - which is a novel of fractured viewpoints, with each chapter told by a different person - and one of my teachers recommended I watch John Webster's ‘Points of View’ ad for The Guardian. It was the structure of the book condensed into 30 seconds and I was amazed at how compelling the shorter form could be. That piqued my interest in advertising.

I got onto the graduate scheme at AMV as an account manager, thinking I could move sideways into the creative department but that didn't happen. Nick Worthington – who is a brilliant creative and went on to be CCO of Colenso - was really encouraging. I took him some Economist headlines and he reassured me I had some talent; I also took my book to Peter Souter and he confirmed that I had one (just one) campaign in there worth making.

CS: What is it that you wanted to bring to the creative industries?

TA: I didn’t have a fixed plan. I thought advertising would be a stepping stone into something else, like screenwriting. I thought I'd do it for a few years, learn the craft and then move on. But that didn’t happen. I have a butterfly mind and love variety and the brevity of short form.

CS: Do you have any set conditions that you need to feel inspired creatively?

TA: People talk about the tyranny of the blank page but I Iove it. There’s nothing better than opening a new notepad. It can turn into anything. I don't find that daunting at all. I also love a spider diagram. You begin with one word or thought and watch a page become mapped out with ideas.

I’m a synthesizer; I pull things together. I love testing ideas and visuals to see if they match together for a brand or channel; I look for the spark of something unexpectedly connecting.

CS: How would you describe your approach to problem solving?

TA: I dive into the problem; the best work happens at the interface of strategy and creative. I often get very involved trying to reach an understanding with the strategist to get specific on what we're trying to achieve. The creative process is like a nose cone; it’s important to agree on a single starting point to then direct the creative team. The nose cone requires us to clearly define the problem and know what we're trying to solve. It’s vital to be 100% clear on that.

CS: How do you commit to yourself creatively?

TA: Commitment is interesting - I commit to my department and our clients. It’s about figuring out how to create the conditions for them to be their best and then how to create the right conditions with the client to give the work its best chance of getting made in the world.

My commitment is to other people, rather than myself. I was told that my greatest strength is tenacity and not giving up on ideas; having that energy is the secret sauce. I've been lucky to be around some amazing pieces of work, but all those pieces of work had a valley of despair. You start off with massive excitement and then there's an all-is-lost moment to work through. I’ve been through enough of those to know there’s another side – using the muscle memory to know that all is not lost, despite what it may seem, and the bloody mindedness to keep going.

CS: Do you have a favourite campaign that you've worked on?

TA: My favourite ad I made with Jim Hilson, my former creative partner was Levi's Bike; it was understated and had a very tight brief - which was guy gets girl by talking about his anti-fat jeans. But Nick Gordon, the director said that the script needed tweaking because the guy wasn’t likeable and we needed to root for him. So we had him slip off the bike pedal, which was the moment where the girl laughs at him and he laughs at himself. That’s an example of someone else taking what we’d done and making it better. Combined with the brilliant cast, it was a lovely little 30-second vignette.

In terms of work that I've been involved with as creative director, Viva La Vulva is up there. It was single-mindedly brilliant. Strategy was such a huge part of it and Margaux Revol (the strategist on the job) took us so far. Then Caio & Diego (the creative team) developed it into a compelling story across forms and body shapes, while director Kim Gehrig found the music and suggested we had the vulvas dancing and lip-syncing. Everyone played their part and it was a real WHAT THE FUCK! moment. But behind all the madness, irreverence and general subversiveness, the campaign was about joy. To date, everything in that category was about shaming women so we flipped that and got really clear on the emotion we wanted to achieve: joy.

CS: Any early lessons that helped inform your approach as a leader today?

TA: It takes a team to make stuff. I’ve been in different departments in different stages in my career, so I try to let everyone contribute in some way, having experienced challenges when I was in accounts. Also knowing which problems you’ll have to seek out guidance for; we didn’t have all the answers for the Essity work - being men we biologically couldn’t - so we listened to the team and the clients. Modern creative leadership is not pretending to have all the answers but bringing people in to work together to find them.

CS: What is it about the ad industry now that excites you most?

TA: It's a double-edged sword. If you look at the London advertising scene, we won the last two Titanium Grand Prix in Cannes, with AMV’s Womb Stories (which I was involved in) and Engine’s Long Live The Prince. So UK advertising is at the top of its game, the work has never been stronger. And yet the conditions in which we're working have never been harder. Maybe that's it; when your back is against the wall, you produce your best stuff. We are producing the goods, which is incredibly exciting. And there are so many more channels to play in and partnerships to make. There are loads of ways we can solve client problems through activations, products and services that don't even look anything like advertising.

CS: And what are the biggest challenges?

TA: I use the PTSD acronym: P for People - it's never been harder to attract and retain talent. There are huge opportunities for diversifying our pool of talent, but that doesn't happen overnight. T refers to Time - Long Live The Prince took two years in gestation, Womb Stories, likewise. In my head, there is a clear correlation between great work and having the time to develop and craft it. Clearly, on some briefs, you need to be quick and responsive. But when everything is needed yesterday, there's just no chance delivering great work consistently. S stands for Space - we’re all juggling with hybrid working, flexibility and space is good but it comes with its challenges, like people not learning by osmosis because they're not in the office. And then the D is Devaluation of our craft - every recession, clients fees are cut. There are huge pressures on clients; everything is going up like the cost of raw materials. Our industry - and our craft - is often the first to get cut yet the amount of work doesn't decrease in quality. PTSD presents a cocktail of challenges. It would just be great if we were doing brilliant work because of the system, rather than despite it.

CS: What would you say the industry can do to raise creative standards?

TA: It comes back to having the time to craft something, and being able to train people. A lot of young creatives coming in are focused on ideas as they’re trained to do, but not all of them have the craft skills. It felt like we had more time with senior people before. And more time to experiment and get things wrong before you get it right. There are so many benefits to creating more time.

And there are real growth opportunities in those ideas that don't look anything like advertising, that use or drop into culture in interesting ways. But if you want to be part of culture, you have to listen to it and understand it, and make it increasingly look less like advertising. That plays into the talent conversation; we're looking for more diverse creatives - not just diversity in terms of number metrics, but diverse mindsets and dissolving the demarcation between a creative and a creator, bringing creators into the creative process.

CS: What would you say the industry can do to raise creative standards?

TA: It comes back to having the time to craft something, and being able to train people. A lot of young creatives coming in are focused on ideas as they’re trained to do, but not all of them have the craft skills. It felt like we had more time with senior people before. And more time to experiment and get things wrong before you get it right. There are so many benefits to creating more time.

And there are real growth opportunities in those ideas that don't look anything like advertising, that use or drop into culture in interesting ways. But if you want to be part of culture, you have to listen to it and understand it, and make it increasingly look less like advertising. That plays into the talent conversation; we're looking for more diverse creatives - not just diversity in terms of number metrics, but diverse mindsets and dissolving the demarcation between a creative and a creator, bringing creators into the creative process.

CS: Imagine advertising is banned in 2023. What would you do with the rest of your life?

TA: I would probably try and finish one of the seven screenplays I've started. My eight year old, with a clarity of vision that startles me, has announced that he wants to be a filmmaker, so like, Serena Williams’ dad, I’d get behind him and make him a director so I actually have a chance to get my screenplays shot!