Ben Williams: Why Modern Creativity Needs A Design Eye

A background in design can open the door to many creative careers. So says Ben Williams, DEPT’s global chief creative officer, who has found it led him deep into advertising, technology and culture.

Williams has worked at agencies including R/GA, TBWA\Worldwide, AKQA, Leo Burnett and VMLY&R. His background in product and experience design has also placed him close to some of the industry’s most significant technological shifts of the past two decades.

He joined DEPT in October and now leads its global creative team, bringing together design, marketing, experience and technology to develop brand solutions intended to make a real-world impact. Based in Los Angeles, Williams is also a member of Spotify’s and Meta’s invite-only councils, where his interests in design, technology and music converge.

“I’ve been in and around advertising for most of my career, not because it was the aim, but because design and technology kept pulling me into it,” he admits.

His work for brands including Nike and Adidas has often sat at the intersection of design thinking, brand thinking and cultural awareness, with technology running through all three. He sees creativity as a triangulation of those forces: an increasingly relevant combination as brands chase cultural relevance, design gains influence at senior levels, and technology continues to reshape how ideas are made.

“The way the world is changing — the media landscape, the pace of technology, the way brands show up — makes a design eye more important than ever,” says Williams, who believes it brings a sense of craft, taste and visual judgement to brand initiatives. “It’s no longer just shapes and colours; it’s movement, sound, interaction and adaptability… Design lets you play across the spectrum in a way that’s increasingly essential.”

Designers, he argues, are now part of the conversation from the beginning of a project, rather than being brought in at the end to “make it look pretty”.

Williams has never viewed technology as a “new thing”. Instead, it has always been central to the way he thinks about creativity. His ability to bring creativity, technology and design together has become a distinctive part of his approach.

Creative Salon: What does creativity mean to you?

Ben Williams: It’s a big word, and one of the first things I started putting down on paper when I joined DEPT was: how do we define creativity as a team? A lot of agencies don’t have a clear definition — or they use one that’s just as vague as the word itself.

For us, creativity means solving real-world problems with original thinking and fresh ideas that are crafted beautifully and engineered for impact. That’s the short and long answer.

It starts with solving a real problem — not making art for art’s sake or doing side projects. Brands come to us with challenges: awareness issues, consumer behaviour problems and business obstacles. Creativity is about addressing those with new, original ideas. Then those ideas need to be crafted beautifully, applying design and creativity to make them as impactful as possible. Finally, they need to be engineered: built with the right mechanisms to deliver the results we set out to achieve.

As a creative group, we come back to those components every day. When someone presents an idea, we ask: is this solving a real problem? Is the thinking fresh? Can it be crafted better? And is it engineered to deliver the impact the client needs?

Did you have a particularly creative childhood?

I’ve often been described as a more systematic kind of creative — Nick Law [former R/GA CCO] used to call me a “systematic weirdo”. My brain naturally breaks down vague ideas like “creativity” or “creative excellence” into something more pragmatic and measurable: something a whole team can align on, rather than a word that means different things to different people.

I tend to approach creativity from that systematic angle, breaking down vague notions into day-to-day behaviours. I put my junior designer hat on and ask, “How do I actually do this in practice?” The more pragmatic you can make it, the better.

But, if I look back at my childhood, then yes — I was absolutely a creative kid. My daughter is three and my son is four months old, and I can see the same thing in them. For me, it was Lego. It’s a cliché, but it’s true. Growing up with a single mum, I spent a lot of time on my own, drawing, building things and making up stories. My mum always said I was just a creative kid from the jump — drawing, imagining and building worlds out of Lego. That’s definitely where it started.

What conditions do you need to be creative?

I think every creative has their own thing, and I always encourage people to find whatever puts them into a flow state. For some, it’s going for a walk; for others, it’s heading to the pub or stepping away from the desk for a bit. Mine is definitely music.

I need music playing — headphones or speakers, it doesn’t matter. I find inspiration and energy in music, and it helps me drop into a flow state quickly. As a designer, I also rely on my reference books. If I’m feeling blocked, I’ll open a few at random. They’re full of design work from over the years, and they help me think differently or look at a challenge from a new angle.

I use those two things constantly: music and reference books. It’s not about copying anything — it’s about seeing something that nudges you out of a rut and gets your brain moving again.

As you have developed as a creative, what has been the biggest challenge you have faced?

For me, the challenge has always been making sure creatives have a voice in the room. Over the last four or five years, conversations have often been dominated by AI and technology, and I’ve found myself reminding people: yes, those things matter — but so does creative excellence. It’s not about one being more important than the other; it’s about balance.

Sometimes business priorities, money, margin or operational pressures drown out the importance of creativity. Maintaining that balance — ensuring creativity, craft, original thinking and creative excellence are valued — has been a constant challenge throughout my career.

It’s always tricky to quantify the value of creativity when you’re working with finance or procurement teams, but that’s the ongoing job: defining, defending and reminding people of the inherent value creativity brings.

How does your view of culture shape your life outside work?

I worked in the music industry, so I’m always listening to music, watching films and paying attention to what’s happening. I also do mentoring sessions, and talking to younger creatives has made me realise I might not have my finger on the pulse any more — but I genuinely enjoy observing how younger generations use technology, what they do with it and what they don’t.

I have a natural curiosity about how the world is shifting. I don’t always agree with it — the way younger people consume media and behave with technology can scare the hell out of me — but it’s fascinating to watch.

Day-to-day, I learn a lot from my nieces and nephews. I’ll ask, “Do you use this?” and they’ll say, “No, that’s ten years old — we’re on this now.” They end up teaching me things. I learn as much from them as they do from me, and the same goes for the mentoring sessions.

What has been the most significant change since your move to DEPT?

The biggest shift has been feeling part of something built for today and tomorrow. At TBWA, I was brought in as a change agent — helping the company think differently about design and technology — but moving to DEPT felt like a natural next step. The pace of technological evolution right now is so fast, and DEPT just felt like the right place at the right time.

What’s been refreshing is being surrounded by like-minded people who don’t see creativity and technology as separate worlds. They understand that technology shapes culture just as much as creativity does, and that intersection is where DEPT really lives. From day one, it felt like a homecoming: speaking the same language and sharing the same perspective on creativity, technology, brands and the role brands play.

We’re moving at a real pace. Even things like Deptify being announced — being part of that with Roy [Armdale, DEPT’s chief product officer], and working at the intersection of orchestration, scale, speed and creative excellence — that’s exactly where he and I meet in the middle. It’s been energising.

Beyond the tools themselves, the acceleration they enable — and the conversations they open up with clients — has been one of the biggest changes I’ve seen, even in these first nine months.

Across DEPT’s markets, do you see significant differences in approaches to advertising, or has the industry become increasingly homogenised?

It’s definitely getting closer, but there are still meaningful differences. I tend to think about culture in three parts.

First, there’s category culture. If you’re working with an automotive brand, for example, there’s a whole set of expectations, behaviours and norms that shape how consumers and brands operate in that space.

Then there’s market culture — the nuances of the UK versus the US, Japan, Korea, Guatemala, or wherever you’re working. You can’t take a one-size-fits-all approach. Markets aren’t interchangeable, and you have to be aware of how people behave, what they value and how brands are perceived in each place.

Finally, there’s global culture — the universal conversations that cut across borders: climate change, environmental impact and the role of technology in people’s lives. These are topics everyone is aware of, no matter where they are.

So, yes, there’s a layer of homogenisation driven by global culture, but market-level dynamics and nuances still matter. Being based in the US isn’t the same as talking to someone in the UK, Belgium, or South Africa. How brands, technology or cultural ideas are perceived varies hugely, and we always push teams to stay conscious of that.

Which piece of work are you proudest of?

It’s probably obvious, but Nike FuelBand is still the career-defining project for me. It’s the reason I was hired at R/GA — Nick Law brought me in and put me on FuelBand, and at that moment it was a key project for a key client.

It was the perfect combination of creativity, design, technology, go-to-market thinking and brand craft, right down to the nuances of the product design. For me, it was a dream brief.

We were doing everything: the campaign, the product and the service layer around it. And it wasn’t just me — it was a team of around 120 of us in a small office on 39th Street in New York, creating something genuinely new. We defined an entire category of wearable technology.

I still think about that team and what we achieved. We all joked that the project was going to die right up until the 11th hour — Nike is famous for pulling the pin if something doesn’t feel right — but it launched, and it shaped the category. You can see its influence today in things like Whoop bands and Apple’s rings. All of that traces back to the FuelBand days.

It was a huge project, and I’m still incredibly proud to have been part of it. It shaped who I am as a creative, and the people I worked with on it had a massive impact on how I think about creativity in general.

How are you maintaining craft in projects involving generative AI?

I think about it in two ways. On one side, there’s creative efficiency — doing the same kinds of things we’ve always done, but faster, cheaper and with new tools, workflows and systems.

That’s where engineering comes in: making sure the checks and balances are in place so we’re not just producing garbage more quickly, but actually maintaining a level of creative excellence we can all stand behind. It’s important, but it’s not the part that interests me most.

The part that doesn’t get enough airtime is what I call creative unlocks. Now that we have AI, the opportunity isn’t just to make the same things faster — it’s to make things that weren’t even possible four or five years ago. That could mean new services, new revenue streams or new ways to solve client problems that simply didn’t exist before.

Maybe it’s a digital service powered by AI that enables one-to-one personalised experiences. Maybe it’s a completely new product or capability. This isn’t about generating assets at scale — that’s the efficiency side. It’s about pushing creative teams to see AI not as a tool for making what we’ve always made, but as a way to make things we haven’t made yet, or couldn’t have made until now.

What would you say to creatives who are reluctant to adopt AI?

My view lately is that there’s only good work and bad work. Over the last few years, we’ve seen AI-generated work that’s complete garbage — and it gets a huge spotlight because people love to pile on. But there’s also genuinely great work.

Take the kid from USC who made the Nike ad that never got made. It was him experimenting with AI, and people said, “This is genius — this is what Nike should be doing.” It was fully AI-generated, and it worked.

Or look at the Liquid Death ad from a year or two ago. Everyone was laughing and sharing it. It was obviously AI — pretty rudimentary at the time — but it had a story and it was genuinely funny, so people accepted it.

On the flip side, the purists who insist everything must be handmade aren’t immune either. Look at the Ferrari Luce. You’ve got Jony Ive and Marc Newson — two of the greatest designers of our time — crafting this thing, and people still said, “That’s not a Ferrari.” So, again, it’s not about how it was made. It’s about whether it’s good.

That’s my narrative: I don’t care how you make it. Use AI, don’t use AI — the tools don’t matter. If the work makes me laugh, makes me buy, makes me download, makes me share it with a friend or watch it with my mum, that’s good work.

There’s an interesting conversation right now about how things are made, but that will fade. We’ll get back to the only question that matters: is it good work or not?

Is there a book, film or song you would encourage younger creatives to seek out?

Is there a single thing I go to? Not exactly. I often give people references to books — some that have changed how I see the world, and others that have shaped how I think about design. Over the years, I’ve collected a lot of design references and coffee-table books.

The Bauhaus movement is probably the one I encourage teams to look at most. It’s not just about the output — the furniture, the posters, the objects — but the philosophy behind it. Coming out of design school, Bauhaus really influenced how I think about creativity, how different crafts work together, and how to build creative teams.

For me, it’s never been about “art and copy” or design in isolation. It’s about bringing different disciplines together, sharing perspectives and finding the right way to solve a problem. I’ve got a lot of reference books documenting the years Bauhaus was active, and I still go back to them.

The philosophy of the school — how it treated each craft equally and worked collaboratively — has had a huge influence on how I think about creativity and team structure.

Imagine advertising were banned this year. What would you do with the rest of your life?

I didn’t go into it wanting to be in the advertising industry. I found myself on the fringes of it and then deep in the advertising world, so I don’t have a strong attachment to the traditional notion of advertising.

I think I’d still work in design, but probably in a different area. I used to want to be an automotive designer — I actually studied industrial design until my lecturer said, “Hands up, who wants to design cars?” We all put our hands up, and he said, “One of you might get to do that. The rest of you will design door handles and teapots.” So I switched to graphic design, which is how I ended up in this field.

I’d probably go back into music as well. I still find music inspiring. I was lucky enough to work in the music industry — festivals and record labels — for about ten years, and I have really fond memories of that world. Applying design and creativity to music would feel like a natural direction.