What The Creative Leaders at AMV BBDO Think About Culture and Creators

Keeping on top of what interests audiences and navigating an almost constant shift in cultural references that fall-in-and-out of fashion is one of the biggest challenges the advertising industry faces. Tapping into culture is an exhausting mission, but one that successful advertising practices have leaned on forever.

Fresh from see their teams winning various accolades at this year's British Arrows for work with Libresse, Currys and RSPCA, two of the industry's most revered creative minds, Nicholas 'Nick' Hulley and Nadja Lossgott, chief creative officers at AMV BDDO, share how they view the concept of culture and attempt to keep on top of it.

Alongside that, they discuss the growth of the creator economy and partnering with creators to strengthen brand marketing while reaching new, highly-engaged audiences.

CS: What has inspired you lately?

Nadja: The most inspiring thing I've seen recently is that play; My Neighbor Totoro. I haven't tried to describe it before because I find it indescribable, but it's the set design and the character design and how it is constructed sculpturally that is awe-inspiring. And the movement and the way it's choreographed all together, it's done in a way that is bigger, better, and more beautiful than anything I've ever seen. It’s the choreography and movement and the music all together. It's just stunning.

Nick: What’s been inspiring me is also theatre, but it’s kid’s theatre. I've got a four-year-old, and he likes going to the theatre and I love going with him. It's good bonding. But I find it inspiring watching people who entertain three-year-olds and four-year-olds for a living because it’s very similar to what we do [as creatives].

Nobody on the internet and on social is as polite as an adult theatre audience who will sit through more than 90 minutes of a boring play even when they just want it to end. The three-year-olds – they start screaming. So, watching entertainers work hard to hold their attention for an hour is a technical inspiration, because you will see the the tricks that they are pulling to keep a disinterested, antagonistic and quite hostile crowd engaged, which is probably what we have to do now that nobody's just sitting there waiting for our content.

I find the tricks that they pull; it's loud, it's in your face, it is constant surprises, it is action, it is participation. They throw balloons into the crowd, they never let anything settle for long and they keep it moving. It’s inspiring because it must also be spectacularly rewarding when you get to engage three-year-olds or else it's very hostile when you've lost them.

CS: We’ve been discussing the concept of culture recently. What is culture to you and how do you decide what to reference within your work?

Nadja: The public decides what culture is - it's pop culture for a reason, and that's because if it’s popular and something that worms its way into your brain and your heart, that makes people excited, that makes people go; “that's what I want to be looking at. That's what I want to be doing. That's how I want to dress. That's what I want to watch.” It's so many things.

Nick: It’s like society's in-jokes, right? It’s your societal shorthand with each other. It's what we collectively understand about the world and the references we pull, the phrases we pull, the shortcuts we make. So it's Adolescence now, but the problem is that the world that we live in – that thing comes in and it affects everybody. We’re all talking about it, but because of the way the internet is working and the way we all think, it spins off into so many fragmented things.

What I find mind-expanding and scary but inspiring is that it comes in and we all talk about it, but there is a group of people talking about it because they think feminism has gone too far, “that's why these kids are doing it.”  Other people are having conversations about it as just a brilliant piece of filmmaking and how they got that drone shot. It comes in, and it becomes a thing we all talk about, but it quickly fragments into people’s own narratives and agenda. That’s quite scary.

Nadja: But it’s also interesting because everyone sees things in a different way. So all the filmmakers and creatives look at how the camera language is making you feel, and a lot of people won't be bothered that it's a single cut and what an achievement it is to get that. So it's that kind of fragmentation where everyone sees the world, and what they are interested, in and the minutiae, and the detail of their interest, and their crew, who they speak with about that.

Nick: Culture, for sure, has become decentralised. It’s not the current line-up of movies at the cinema or the best list of books or what’s on at the theatre or what TV channels are pumping out. It’s wild and chaotic. I think I know exactly what Brat Summer is although I’ve never heard the song or seen the video, but I have my own interpretation of it. Things are bubbling up that we are all collectively aware of but it’s coming from every single angle.

Nadja: It’s also interesting to think about things like Hollywood and what that might look like in a few years because a lot of teenagers refuse to watch movies, they want content and content creation through YouTube. That’s what they are interested in – not The Oscars. Is that going to matter in a few years? That’s not the content future generations necessarily want.

CS: How do you apply that evolution in society to your work? It must be daunting to try.

Nadja: I think it is, but it is also at the sharp end of strategy because strategy will lead you to a place - what is a particular audience up to at the moment? What is the cultural heartbeat at that time?

I was just thinking about the talk that we did for the APA on Guinness, which is based on the APG Guinness paper, and just what was going on in culture at the time where Guinness needed a change. And you get a pulse of what is going on at the moment. I do think that you have a general overview but the sharp point of strategy is going to shorten and make the aperture smaller of where you need to look and focus on. Then, it doesn’t feel daunting or overwhelming because it focuses you.

CS: And so naturally, advertisers and agencies have turned to the creator economy to help them reach audiences and stay in touch with culture too. Are the creators of today the creative leaders of tomorrow?

Nadja: You will still need curation but I also think that creators are, partly, the creatives, but it’s fragmented. You have artists, and you have creators; it's just a different way to communicate.

Nick: It’s like you’re building a mirror ball. You still want a big idea, a point of view and to make something that everyone can see themselves reflected within. You need to give brands a strategic point of view on why you're talking about what you're talking about, but how that is articulated and how that appears in the world. It's a mirror ball.

So, for me, I might get the classic YouTube video, but the younger people are getting the content creator version of that point of view. I think otherwise, if you don't hold a big idea, it's just too fragmented a point of view we're looking at the world, and then your brand works as a mirror ball, rather than just a mirror.  I can see myself in that opinion, but it's reflected in the way I view the world, through content or through film, or through out of home.

Nadja: You need to have a centrepoint in a branding sense. How you execute it and who you execute it with is going to change for all the varying audiences. But if you don't, a brand that will behave entirely different and have a completely different point of view or tone of voice on social to how they behave out in the world, then eventually, you're not going to be able to recognise the brand. Everything needs to have a tone of voice that is simplified and streamlined, so that everyone recognises what the brand looks like, what the brand feels like, and the brand will then associate it.

Nick: And that style, or that esthetic, or those techniques - they change all the time. You can now watch footage about how Millennial D2C businesses are suffering because there's a whole new language that their influence or way of creating controlled content - Gen Z, they're not interested. They make it. They talk to camera. It's sort of people-generated. The language has already changed, and that's in the space of three or four years. If you are just chasing the style without an opinion or point of view, it’ll get lost. So it's always going to change, how people receive and consume content.

CS: How has your experience of working with creators been so far? How different is it working with other service providers or partners?

Nadja: The most recent launch was a project that we did for Refuge on International Women’s Day. The whole idea was about the red flags in a coercive relationship. So we did a gorgeous installation, and we had a content creator, who's a poet, write a poem. She came in and delivered the poem in this installation. She was filmed for social content in the installation to go onto her channel as a joint thing for Refuge as she is an incredible creative voice and the way that she summarised a coercive relationship and abuse in the most poignant, beautiful way for me, that's a wonderful experience of elevating a big idea around the flags, Being surrounded in the flags and walking through that experience in itself, is a gorgeous experience, but again, having a slightly different way of articulating the same thing in social or with content creation, I think it's just as awesome.

Nick: The relationship between agencies and content creators, or brands and content creators, it's a cool little contest, because you come with your big idea that you want to impose, because you want your brand to be famous for and then you have content creator who are like; “I know my audience. I know what they want to watch”. And those are two antagonistic things.

I want to control the message, and they want to do whatever keeps their audience engaged. The balance and the kind of thing that you need to find is a really cool, interesting contest because it means you have to design big ideas that can be adopted relatively easy and that can be recognised when they go through a content creator. Maltesers is a good example, because it's ‘Look on the light side’.

It's not hard to then brief content creators to say; “Look, it's women laughing through life and their shared experiences”. And then we just give that to the creators, which is an easily graspable insight, plus the lightest creative casing of ‘it's like little treats and whatever you're dealing with, you deserve a little treat’. They then play the role of 'Little Treats Administrators'. We just started it, and there's a lot of different humour, but there's still a coherence to it.

If you're too much of a control freak, as an agency or a brand with your content creator, it's a mess because they know their audience and what engages them. But if you have no big idea, they'll just do whatever they want and it’ll be so fragmented.

CS: With social being so malleable and formats varying in length and scope, do you have more freedom on social?

Nadja: Yes and no. It's media driven as well. So you have mass reach in some formats which can take place on traditional TV or out of home - as you're out of home goes viral and travels, then it's mass media. But I think in social, it's just a different way of doing it like Gravy Race, for Sheba. It's such a great example of a social-first campaign that is literally a product demo.

The brief was: “We've got a new product with 70 per cent more gravy". How do we show that? Well, actually, we're going to turn it into a new sport, and we're gonna have a Titans Cats of the Internet compete in a gravy-licking contest.

That's bananas, and that is pure social. It was massive. It's competitive and it's got catfluencers in it - that's our audience. If you're a cat lover, you're following all of these cats and then you can participate with your own cat, because you most likely also have a cat, and that is the full circle of. If you want to participate, you have to buy the product.