Seamus Higgins: A digital native with a creative mind that won't sit still

Seamus Higgins, who joined Havas London as CCO in March, is an Irishman with a South African accent who has spent a large chunk of his life in Australia but now lives in leafy Bucks. Similarly, his career is suitably hybrid, and he has spent those 25-years resisting the idea that creatives should stay in their lane.

A digital designer by training who has previously worked at R/GA, AKQA and Uncommon, (and a DJ), and a creative leader who still describes himself as having “the hunger of a junior”, Higgins is instinctively drawn to the space between disciplines. It’s where, he believes, the most interesting solutions are found and where an industry being reshaped by AI will need to look if it wants to stay creative.

This instinct has served him well, from his early days in small digital agencies to network jobs, including at Havas Sydney where he was responsible for an award-winning 'non-traditional' advertising campaign that helped persuade tourists to protect the environment of the Pacific island nation of Palau (among others). This campaign, in particular, is indicative of his imaginative approach to creative problem solving.

For Higgins, creativity is about taking a problem (in Palau's case, earnest environmentally-conscious travellers who probably didn't realise that they were in danger of doing more harm than good), bringing different influences to bear on it and finding an unexpected solution. For the Palau Pledge, this manifested itself in a mandatory environmental immigration policy that requires every international visitor to sign a physical promise stamped directly into their passport upon arrival.

His definition of creativity crystallised when he was asked to represent the discipline on a panel in Australia discussing its future in a world of AI. Faced with the prospect of talking about it to an audience that included AI representatives, he realised he needed a better answer than the usual humdrum appeals to imagination and originality.

“We have this intelligence that everybody's got access to, and it's all about the questions that you put into that intelligence that will define what you get out of it,” he says.

Creativity, he believes, comes from the way people connect their experiences and influences through their own particular view of the world. The unexpected connection is what makes the difference.

It is a philosophy that has its roots in a childhood spent moving between countries. Born in Ireland, Higgins grew up experiencing life as the Irish boy in South Africa, the South African boy in Ireland and, later, a newcomer in England and Australia. He was also the only boy in his family, and spent a good deal of time finding ways to entertain himself - much of this through creative endeavours.

“I spent a lot of time just playing by myself,” he says. “I really, absolutely loved to draw, to write, and just to express these creative impulses that I knew that I had.”

Music became another outlet. Higgins has been DJing for nearly 30 years, including a period when he was resident in six clubs in South Africa and played at festivals. As his advertising career developed, the club work became less central, but music has remained a constant. He still DJs every week.

Higgins' original ambition was to work in game design, fascinated by the combination of innovation, technology, and art required to create new gaming worlds. However, he ended up enrolling on a three-year digital graphic design course in South Africa that introduced him to digital tools at a time when the discipline was still developing. What he discovered was that he loved both the intellectual challenge of solving problems and the practical business of bringing ideas to life.

“I have never ever aspired to be a traditional creative,” he says. When he started out, he knew little about the distinctions between designers, art directors, writers, and strategists. Working in a small agency, he simply did whatever was needed to make something happen.

That broad approach became a defining characteristic: as the industry began insisting that creatives specialise, particularly during the shift towards digital, Higgins worried that becoming too narrowly focused would limit his ability to find the best answer to a problem. He wanted to be able to draw on whatever discipline was appropriate, rather than force every challenge into the shape of the skills he happened to possess.

“I could not believe that I worked in an industry where we could just apply creativity and intelligence to solve problems,” he says.

Hggins' enthusiasm for that possibility has never really diminished. He describes the industry's fundamental purpose as finding new ways for brands and people to connect, and sees the opportunity to invent those connections as one of its great privileges.

Getting into the industry in the UK, however, was less straightforward than discovering what he wanted to do within it.

Arriving in London, he found an advertising world still divided between above-the-line and below-the-line disciplines. His portfolio seemed too art-directed for design leaders and too design-led for art directors, he says, and the result was six months spent packing T-shirts in a warehouse before he finally found a job.

It was a frustrating introduction, but one that reinforced the value of being able to work across disciplines. Once inside the industry, he found opportunities to learn from some remarkable people, and one influence, in particular, stayed with him.

The responsibility of leadership

At the age of 23 David Droga, who had become an executive creative director in Australia at the age of 24, came into Higgins' orbit. Keen to learn from people further ahead of him, he went alone to a D&AD President's Lecture at which Droga was speaking, and remembers one line from the talk almost verbatim: “If, as a creative leader, you're not trying to make the people working under you better than you are, then you're not worth shit.”

It was a typically blunt and direct statement of what creative leadership should involve, and one that struck Higgins as much for its underlying humanity as for its frankness. “If I feel like that, then everybody on the team should feel like that at whatever level they're at,” he says.

Droga may never know how much the remark influenced Higgins, but its effect has endured. It also illustrates something Higgins values about the creative industries: the capacity of a conversation, an observation, or a piece of work to inspire.

That responsibility to help others improve sits alongside another principle that has become increasingly important to him: creative excellence should be a habit, not an occasional event.

As well as the Palau Pledge, one of his own favourite bodies of work came from a five-year relationship between Havas Sydney and the Australian Defence Force. The strategic idea was straightforward - rather than relying on abstract representations of military service, the work introduced people to the individuals who wore the uniforms, making them more relatable.

The strength of the client relationship allowed the agency to develop the idea across a broad range of formats, he says. As well as major brand campaigns, hundreds of pieces of content, fitness apps, and a virtual-reality experience supplemented the campaign.

Together, the work produced the best recruitment figures the organisation had achieved, a record that, Higgins says, has yet to be beaten. The campaign also won a Grand Effie for its long-term effectiveness, but more importantly it showed the power of an enduring commitment to creative solutions.

“It took real determination to make every piece of work that we made better than the previous piece of work that we made,” he says. “I really don't believe in an agency world where they're happy with just a few creative spikes and everything else is shit.”

This exemplifies Higgins’ interest in the cumulative effect of good work; in the idea that a consistent standard across hundreds of executions can become more powerful than a handful of celebrated campaigns.

Higgins also credits the different perspectives that contributed to the campaign, and the importance of embedding these within the creative process. “Diversity, literally, is creativity,” he says. “When you have different shaped thinkers looking at a problem, they're all looking from different angles. If you're all just the same, you end up looking at the problem all the same. You may as well just have one person on it.”

This argument was informed by his experience in Australia, where smaller budgets, more difficult-to-reach audiences, and smaller teams often made collaboration a necessity rather than an aspiration. Such constraints could be challenging, but they also encouraged different and more integrated thinking.

Higgins' experience at R/GA, where design was central to the mix, helped reinforce the value of bringing different capabilities together from the outset, he says. At Havas London, he sees a similar opportunity in working closely with the brand design team, rather than treating design as a discipline that enters the process later - something that has already become apparent in its work for Asahi.

A new era of intelligence

Higgins is optimistic about the future of creativity, even as he recognises the scale of the disruption facing the industry, as it enters an entirely new era of (artificial) intelligence. Brands will need to show up in ways they never have before and be equipped to behave differently, while agencies will have to rethink the processes, structures and teams required to make that possible. “The biggest thing at the moment is the pace of change,” he says.

And that neatly brings him back to the principle that has informed his career from the beginning - whether the challenge involves environmental tourism, military recruitment, or the changing relationship between brands and consumers, the starting point is the same: understand the problem, bring together different perspectives and find a better answer.

There is a risk, of course, that a career spent leading creative teams can take someone away from the very thing that made the job appealing in the first place. Higgins is conscious of that, and of the industry's tendency to exhaust the people working in it.

He describes himself as a senior [creative] with the hunger of a junior. Maintaining that appetite means understanding what gives you energy and what drains it, particularly if, like him, you are not naturally an extrovert. For Higgins, the answer lies in remaining close to the creative process: the pleasure of working through a problem with smart people, and the excitement of discovering something that none of them had seen before.

It is also the advice he would offer to anyone starting out. Keep the passion that brought you into the business; find ways to express your own particular view of creativity, rather than allowing the demands of the job to extinguish it. “Ultimately, that's what you have that sets you apart from everybody else,” he says.