Dan Watts: The Daleks, the grandfather, and the edge of madness

Before Pablo CCO Dan Watts learned about advertising, he learned how to make things, an early introduction to craft that has subsequently held him in good stead through his career.

His grandfather, who had worked at an ICI factory in the north, was, Watts remembers, an instinctive creative problem-solver. He made things because he could work out how to make them, and Watts cites him as his creative inspiration.

When Watts became obsessed with Doctor Who as a child, his grandfather figured out how to build Daleks. The raw materials were hardly the stuff of a prop department: the middle of a Kinder Egg, matchsticks, split peas for buttons. “He made me a few,” Watts recalls. “And I sold a couple of them at school.”

There, perhaps, was also the first spark of entrepreneurship that has seen the independent Pablo under Watts' creative leadership become one of the most interesting and successful UK agencies (the trophy cabinet in its reception groans with awards).

“It was like the first example of ‘I can make money out of being creative’,” he says. “It was problem-solving. He was really good at creative problem-solving.”

There was plenty of creativity around Watts as he grew up. His mother was an art teacher (a vocation also followed by his sister), and Watts was also an enthusiastic consumer of popular culture, with an encyclopaedic memory for ads.

Some of his earliest advertising memories remain vivid: the public information film Play Safe warning children not to climb electricity pylons, and Chambourcy Real Chocolate Mousse and its “Don't tell the children” endline.

But it was not until he went to Watford College in 2001 that creativity became a career choice. He made a series of unsuccessful approaches to agencies before suddenly receiving three offers at once, including one from 180 Amsterdam, which he took. From there came Campbell Doyle Dye and then Fallon – a sequence of agencies that placed him in the orbit of some of the most influential creative work (and creatives) of the period.

At Fallon, he says, the challenge was that he was “standing on the shoulders of giants”. He adds: “They were making not just industry-leading work, but industry-changing work,” he says.

For a young creative, that could be intimidating. "The ambition was to make the next Sony 'Paint', even when common sense told you that you probably weren't going to," he says.

But it also spurred him on. Back then, he says advertising felt competitive, relatively simple, and culturally significant. There were fewer agencies, fewer channels, and fewer places for an idea to hide.

Watts has since worked across agencies and the client side of creativity, becoming head of creative at Channel 4's 4Creative, where he worked on the broadcaster's brand and programme advertising, before moving to CP+B London, and eventually Pablo.

His Channel 4 years included award-winning work around the 2017 'Giant' 4 idents and the launch of The Great British Bake Off, which is emblematic of the love of craft that was instilled at such an early age.

At Pablo, which he joined in 2020, Watts says he found something that reminded him of the early Fallon: a small agency with a clear vision and an entrepreneurial streak, with founder Gareth Mercer leading from the front. The ambition was not to imitate anyone else but to work out what Pablo could do that would get noticed.

As he put it in an earlier Creative Salon interview, the agency had stripped away “guff and baggage and layers”, involving creatives early, and was making pitches more like conversations than presentations. The ambition was simple: “We just want to surprise people each time."

And some of its work has been very surprising indeed – witness this recent spot for Candy Crush:

He has a provocative definition of creativity that might explain this approach. It is, he says, “going as far as you can to the edge of madness without it becoming nonsense”.

Horror too, as a genre, is an unusually good model for creative thinking, he says. “The best horror stories have a logic behind them, but they take your brain somewhere that makes you feel a bit uncomfortable. I think really good creativity does that.”

He argues that this discomfort is important. If an idea feels completely safe when presented, perhaps it is not pushing hard enough. “You should feel scared presenting your work because it feels wrong,” he says. “And that's a really good place to be.”

There is, however, a difference between madness and nonsense. For Watts, creativity is also “novelty and utility”: a new idea executed in a way that gives people something. “What you'll hear me say all the time at work is: ‘Cool. What's the idea, though? What is it?’.

"The answer can be an invention, a product, an experience or simply an ad that makes someone laugh. But the idea has to be there – like in this huggable poster the agency made for giffgaff to celebrate how it doesn't impose mid-contract price rises on its customers," he adds.

That insistence on having an overt "idea" has become particularly important as Pablo has grown like Topsy. Watts has played a crucial role in shaping an agency that has expanded considerably since he arrived, while trying to preserve the entrepreneurial character that attracted him in the first place.

In 2025, he became Pablo's first chief creative officer, taking responsibility for its creative agenda and structure as the agency entered its next stage of growth. He did so alongside a formidable bench of creative talent assembled through Pablo's Creative Council.

The job, he says, is increasingly about creating the conditions for other people to do good work. Watts is not interested in building a department in his own image. In fact, quite the opposite. “I want everyone that's coming in to think completely differently to me,” he says. “And I want everyone that's hired to be very different to the person next to them.”

That requires a certain lack of ego, something that the affable Watts has in spades. “You look at all the creative directors [at Pablo] and the work they've done. It's world class,” he says. “They could be doing a top job on their own anywhere they wanted, really. But the fact we can all work together and help each other out the way we do just shows there is no ego. There's absolutely no ego.”

It is a philosophy he has written about before. In a 2023 Creative Salon piece, Watts argued that creative leadership is not about being a “rockstar” or controlling every idea, but about getting “the best ideas out of the best brains”. His prescription was characteristically uncomplicated: hire an interesting mix of people, encourage odd-shaped thinking, listen and debate without shutting ideas down, and “get out of the way unless you're needed”.

His other great organising principle for his department is what he calls "open mode" and "closed mode". To an extent, open mode is play. There are no wrong answers. You don't edit. You don't kill an idea because it doesn't quite fit yet. You ask what else, what next, where could this go?". Then comes closed mode: the point at which the idea or thought is subject to interrogation. “The problem I think a lot of agencies face is everyone's always in closed mode,” Watts says. “And you can't be creative in closed mode.”

The distinction sounds obvious, but Watts is evangelical about it. “When you mix the modes, it's a cluster of fucking nothing,” he says. “You don't get anywhere.”

It is another version of his wider argument about simplicity. Advertising has accumulated more media, more disciplines, more agencies, more technology, and more opportunities for collaboration. The result should, theoretically, be greater creative possibility. Instead, Watts thinks it can make thinking harder.

“The downside of that is it can make thinking really, really complicated,” he says. “So it's always the battle to simplify. Just simplify and simplify and simplify everything.” It is a useful philosophy at a time when the industry is busy talking about complexity, particularly around AI.

Despite his extensive portfolio of work, Watts regards building Pablo itself as perhaps his most satisfying creative achievement (although there are plenty others on his book that rivals must eye with jealousy – as can be seen in this ambitious debut spot for Honda).

“Helping build this place has been my best bit of work,” he says. “It's not just the ads that come out. It's the brand, it's the agency, it's all the things that come out of it,” he concludes. Lucky Pablo.