James Millers' Tale: 'Creativity is ultimately about problem-solving'

Having originally set his sights on a career in architecture, James Millers subsequently ended up building brands rather than houses or offices, working at the likes of M&C Saatchi, MullenLowe and, most recently, Leo UK.

But his interest in construction (and reconstruction) might still prove useful following his arrival at McCann London as ECD in February. He was hired to lead a reinvigorated creative department alongside New Commercial Arts’ creative directors Charlotte Prince and Loriley Sessions who joined as deputy ECDs.

But back to the beginning. After dropping architecture as a career choice he then did an art foundation diploma and went on to apply for graphic design courses at university - but without much luck. Fortunately he was offered an interview at the University of Central Lancashire where he figured out during the interview that it was for Advertising not Graphic Design. It wasn’t a course he’d considered, but after the application disappointment he thought “oh well… this sounds interesting”

This accidental introduction to advertising would prove to be one of those “sliding doors” moments that define a career. At university he met his long-term creative partner Andrew Long (previously his joint ECD at Leo), and discovered that advertising offered a creative canvas that was more suited to him.

“I feel like it's a more varied form of creative problem-solving than graphic design, which is more focused and disciplined,” he says.

Millers’ relationship with creativity had started much earlier. He grew up in South Manchester in a single-parent household, on a huge council estate, where money was tight. But his mother always made sure there were pencils, crayons and paper around the house. It fuelled his passion.

“Creativity in that kind of upbringing wasn’t a nice-to-have, it was essential — not just to keep kids entertained, but because it was a world where you had to figure things out, fix them, and make stuff work somehow,” he says.

It wasn’t just drawing that drove his creativity. If Millers wanted something, quite often he had to fix it up himself. He took old radios apart to just understand how they worked and built up his own bikes from parts. Creativity, he realised, was as much about resourcefulness and making things work as it was about artistic expression.

That remains central to how he thinks about the job today. “Ultimately, it's problem-solving,” he says. “You have to dig into a problem and really understand it to find the right solution.”

For Millers, that means creatives should be brought closer to the actual problems businesses are trying to solve (especially where there is more time), rather than always being handed a neatly packaged creative brief.

“I’m interested in hearing the client's problems firsthand,” he says. “Seeing them raw, before they're filtered into a brief, can unlock something you'd otherwise lose — and be a brilliant way to solve them.”

It is an approach that extends beyond traditional notions of advertising creativity. Millers loves art direction, design and beautifully simple out-of-home work, but is equally interested in more participatory ideas that invite people into the experience.

Learning the hard way

Millers’ early working life was less comfortable than his current position might suggest. He started his career at M&C Saatchi working under Graham Fink - an experience that taught him an important lesson about resilience.

Fink, Millers recalls, might demand 50 out-of-home ideas overnight. The next day, there would be another challenge. “You have to be really resilient in this industry,” Millers says. “95 per cent of everything you hear is some form of 'no' — it's just the small percentage of 'yes' that creeps through.”

There was also a more practical challenge: affording to work in advertising in the first place - an experience that sadly still resonates with many today.

Coming from Manchester, Millers had to travel to London for his placement and found a spare room through a friend’s sister’s friend for around £60 a week. His weekly pay was no more than £160 (less than £9k per year) so at weekends he continued working in the restaurant where he had been employed since he was 16, travelling home by bus rather than spending the money on a train.

“It really didn't go far,” he says. “I'd travel back home on a Megabus or National Express to make it work — and sometimes bring my mum a bag of washing.”

The experience has stayed with him. Millers believes the industry has become better at paying and structuring placements, but there remains a significant geographical barrier for young people outside London.

“It's hard if you're not from London and you haven't got family or friends here,” he says. “As we build out opportunities, especially at junior level, it's important we're not just creating diversity of people within London — it's diversity of voices across the UK.”

It is an issue he is now keen to address. Despite having only joined McCann recently, he says he has already begun talking about ways to make opportunities more accessible to talent outside the capital.

From Leo to McCann

Millers spent a significant part of his career at the then Leo Burnett, joining in 2017 alongside his partner Long. At the time, he says, it wasn’t necessarily the obvious agency destination but that was precisely part of the attraction.

The pair became part of the agency’s transformation that saw it named Campaign’s Agency of the Year in 2022 and 2023, eventually leading the creative work on the McDonald’s brand for around five years.

Of the work they produced, Millers singles out Raise the Arches as the closest he has come to creating something genuinely iconic. “It's so well known, in and out of the industry,” he says. “It was an amazing piece of work to be part of.”

Another McDonald’s campaign remains particularly close to his heart: a series of graphic out-of-home posters in which the brand’s golden arches appeared to drop into different houses.

The work, called Lights On, was created during Covid and combined design craft with an unusually appropriate cultural moment. With people confined to their local area and McDonald’s focused on McDelivery, the campaign became a ubiquitous part of the landscape. “Every street you walked down, there was one of those posters,” Millers recalls. One of those houses, it turns out, was his own — a detail that makes the campaign even more special to him.

The team deliberately built the campaign using varied British architecture – from Victorian homes to 1960s buildings and council blocks and modern apartments – and translated them into a simple graphic world. “I love print and out-of-home,” he says. “It was a beautiful, simple piece of work — one I'm really proud of.”

After years of working closely on McDonald’s, however, Millers felt it was time to test himself somewhere new. This is where McCann came in: the agency was looking for a replacement for Regan Warner under the creative stewardship of Andrés Ordóñez, McCann’s global chief creative officer, and the leadership of McCann London CEO Mel Arrow.

The attraction wasn’t simply the agency’s heritage or its famous “Truth Well Told” philosophy. It was the people, the opportunity to work across a broader roster of clients, and the chance to take everything he had learned at Leo into a new environment, he says.

“When I met Mel [Arrow], I knew I’d found it. There was an instant click in how she thought about creativity and her ambitions for the work and for McCann. That, combined with the chance to lead a creative department in its own right — after over twenty brilliant years in a partnership, under a creative leader — felt like exactly the next step I was ready for,” he says.

“McCann’s roster of clients made the decision easy — a legacy agency with a proposition as strong as Truth Well Told, already producing brilliant work on Xbox, as well as historic brands like L’Oréal, Nurofen and Mastercard.”

The opportunity to be part of a ‘new’ McCann following the Omnicom/IPG merger also appealed.

“McCann had been through a period of change too — bringing their specialisms together under one roof, the Omnicom merger, a period of creative leadership shifts,” he continues. “All of that left the agency primed to push into its next chapter, one with so much opportunity that I wanted to be part of shaping it.”

There was something else about McCann that Millers noticed almost immediately: its connectedness. “It's far more connected to the network than anywhere I've worked before,” he says.

That applies across the UK, where McCann has agencies in cities including Manchester, Birmingham and Bristol, as well as globally. Millers says briefs are routinely shared across the network, giving creatives the opportunity to contribute to work originating in other markets. These are part of the famous McCann “Rumbles” that Ordóñez talked to Creative Salon about earlier this year.

“Even in the three months I’ve been here, a few briefs have already come in from the US along the lines of, ‘This is an amazing opportunity — we’d love to get the best minds.’” The response, he says, is generally immediate: “We’re in.”

Truth Well Told

Millers’ philosophy of creativity fits neatly with the McCann proposition. For him, “Truth Well Told” is more than a slogan. It describes the basic architecture (coughs...) of a good idea.

“The truth is where you're starting from — where's the insight, and how does it connect to culture? 'Well told' is how you execute that,” he says. “That's fundamentally the process behind any piece of great work.”

It also informs his thinking about research. Millers is not anti-research - far from it. But he believes the industry sometimes asks it to do the wrong job. “Research is amazing — when it's used at the right time,” he says. “I think it's best placed at the start of a process, not the end of one.”

The best research, in his view, should uncover truths and fuel creativity rather than become a final arbiter of whether an idea is good. “Research should fuel the work, not judge it.”

It is an important distinction at a time when the creative process is increasingly surrounded by data, technology and testing.

The same tension applies to the expanding number of channels available to creatives. Millers acknowledges that the sheer volume of work expected from agencies has never been higher. Twenty years ago, he points out, a creative team might have been given two weeks to make a poster campaign. Today, a brief can encompass a seemingly endless number of formats and platforms. “And even when it doesn't, you want to express the work as an idea that stretches the opportunity and tells a story — not just fills the media channel on the brief.”

But he sees the fragmentation of media as an opportunity as much as a problem. “We've never been able to interact and play with fans of a brand, or with consumers, in quite the same way,” he says.

In the distant past, TV represented the major route into popular culture. Now brands can enter much more specific communities, cultures and subcultures. “It's more accessible now, and easier to connect with those cultures and subcultures than ever before.”

Making room for new voices

For Millers, that opportunity makes diversity even more important. If creativity is ultimately about finding something genuinely new, then the people generating the ideas need to bring genuinely different perspectives into the room — and maintaining that diversity of voices, he believes, is what has always made advertising great.

That's why the rising cost of living is such a watch out for him. So much of the industry remains concentrated in London, and London has traditionally offered more economic opportunity for the people who already live here — easier access to work, family, a cheaper room, a way to make it stretch. As living costs climb, Millers worries that some of that diversity of voices risks being squeezed out, not because the talent isn't there, but because it's becoming harder to afford being part of it. His own experience of having to sleep in a spare room and work weekends to afford an early career in advertising is a reminder of how easily talent can slip through the net when money gets in the way.

He says: “What I want to bring is my own perspective on ideas and on people — building a department that reflects a genuinely diverse range of voices and backgrounds. That's what sharpens the work, gives us a wider lens on culture, and helps us find the truth in more places, for more brands.

“We already have real momentum on that front, and my ambition is to keep pushing it further as I build and shape the department: more perspectives, more distinct creative voices, all in service of showcasing McCann as the progressive, culturally relevant agency it is.”

For Millers, newness is ultimately the point. The expression of true creativity is not simply doing something that has already been done with a slightly different twist - it's finding a perspective that could not have come from the same old collection of voices.

The first 20 minutes

His own creative process is less regimented than some might expect. Millers doesn't have a particular ritual or location where he needs to work. Ideas can arrive anywhere, often as the collision between something he has been thinking about for years and something he has only just encountered.

“A creative solution is a combination of two things,” he says. “Something you've had in your head for ages, and then suddenly you see something else and think, 'Oh — combine this with that thought I never knew what to do with.'”

He does, however, have one particularly productive creative window: the first 20 minutes after waking up. “If I've got a problem to solve, those first 20 minutes are the most productive creative thinking time I get,” he says. There is one important condition: write the idea down. “If I don't write it down, I'll forget it.”

He also prefers working with people rather than alone. As a creative leader, he enjoys throwing ideas and prompts back and forth with [human] teams, and believes physical interaction remains more valuable than endless [Microsoft] Teams calls. “You can understand what a person really means, and the weight of what they're saying,” he says.

Pull people up

If there is one lesson Millers would pass on to the next generation, it is not to mistake leadership for competition. “You grow by pulling people up underneath you,” he says. “You don't grow by pushing people down.”

It is something he learned from the creative leaders around him, including the people who taught him what good leadership looks like - and, occasionally, what it doesn't.

His other piece of advice is even simpler: be useful. “Throw your hat in the ring. Make yourself available. Be the one who says, 'Yeah, I'll jump in on that, I'll help with that' — even if you're not sure how. Just try to be useful as often as possible. And always have an opinion.”

It's a point he feels strongly about beyond his own career too. His wife worked in project management some years ago and was once told not to have an opinion — advice Millers says he couldn't disagree with more.

It is advice that feels appropriate for someone whose own career began with a youthful ‘wrong’ turn: a failed application; an unexpected interview, and an advertising course he hadn't even realised he was applying for.

Millers may have arrived in advertising by accident. But the innate resourcefulness that got him there - making things, fixing things, solving problems and being prepared to put in the graft - has turned out to be a rather good preparation for a career in creativity after all. Sod architecture; this is a building of an altogether different, more human and inspiring kind.