Hegarty: Kick Data Out – Everyone Has the Same Data, Not the Same Ideas

Sir John Hegarty will "tell a few home truths" when he headlines Marketing Week's Festival of Marketing on Wednesday, 14 October – and he has already made clear where his ire falls: market research, always-on content and the collapse of the traditional agency relationship.

"I'm going to tell a few home truths. I'm not going there to be nice and wonderful. I don't give a shit," Hegarty says of his keynote. "But I am going to say that creativity is the future and that's because it is about imagination. The core of innovation is creativity. Now, what brand, what company, doesn't want to innovate? Creativity is the answer. Celebrate it, understand it, worship it, appreciate it. Kick fucking data out because everybody's got the same data. Everybody hasn't got the same idea as you."

The co-founder of BBH, who last week attacked the "repetitive, cliché and boring" work he sees across the industry, is not uniformly pessimistic. He sees real potential in AI and in influencers – provided brands hold on to a core set of beliefs.

Influencers need a belief system, not a free hand

Hegarty likens effective influencer marketing to the Catholic Church – which he calls the greatest brand in the world.

"The whole development of influencers is really interesting. It's another means of communication, but you shouldn't hand over responsibility of what you stand for to somebody who is going to interpret it as they want," he says. "If I was a brand, I'd be working with them. But you've got to have a core belief in who you are, what you are, and what you stand for that people buy into, and then they can go and become the apostles."

The church analogy is deliberate. "Every lesson you need to know about marketing, the Catholic Church did it first. Best logo in the world. Seven day opening hours. Went global straight away," he says. "But the point about it was, it had apostles, and they went out and they talked about the church and they spread the word."

His criticism: not enough brands have beliefs for creators to communicate. "So, therefore, they just make their own stuff up, and sometimes it's very good, sometimes it's not."

Always-on marketing is "digital landfill"

Hegarty dismisses the pressure to publish continuously. "Digital landfill is what I call it. We're creating this stuff but where does it all go?" he says. "You don't have to be on all the time. Why don't you go on when you've got something interesting to say?"

He blames the technology companies for the doctrine. "The social media companies have told you that because it's good for them, not necessarily good for you," he says. "Just do stuff that's meaningful. That might be once a month or twice a month, whatever it is. But make it meaningful."

AI: a collaborator, not a tool

Unlike many of his generation, Hegarty believes AI will be "quite momentous". He frames its impact in two ways. "It's going to level the playing field, it's going to benefit smaller, faster, more nimble organisations," he says. "And think about it as a collaboration. You collaborate with it. It's not a tool and I think people make the mistake of thinking of it as a tool."

The wrong response, in his view, comes from "left brain thinkers who look at it as a way of saving money". "They immediately go, 'Oh, I don't have to employ all these people.' Rather than what can it do for me? How can I grow with this?" he says. "It's your imagination that will take it to the next level. It's going to be a great aid to the creative process."

He also insists the copyright question – AI models trained on creative work and reselling it – "has to be resolved", but argues these things can be fixed. His advice: "Work with it, use it, become familiar with it. Because, like anything in life, the more you do so, the more you are going to be able to make it work for you."

On fully AI-generated creative, he is blunt. "It's called artificial intelligence. What you're surely trying to create is something real, something that connects with people, has empathy," he says. "I can work with it, yes, but I'm the creative director. I'm the one driving it forward."

Research produces average decisions

Hegarty's most sacrilegious claim, by his own admission, concerns market research. "As I get older, I become more convinced that research hasn't done anything for the world of marketing," he says. "All it does is it makes everything the same and it allows people to make very poor, average decisions. I want exceptional decisions, not average."

He invokes an old industry maxim: "We always used to say, 'Good is the enemy of great', and research gets you to good, but good isn't good enough."

He recalls meetings at BBH where colleagues claimed "consumer understanding" to prospective clients. "I'd see red here. 'You've got customer understanding? Wow! I don't understand myself sometimes. How do you have that? Are you God?'" he says. "We have consumer knowledge, and that's quite different. We have knowledge that people are spending more time at home, they're drinking more beer, they're drinking less wine, they're buying smaller cars. That's knowledge. Now, what do you do with that knowledge?"

In-housing costs brands the outsider's view

On the shift to internal agencies, Hegarty is unequivocal. "One of the great values of an outside agency is that it is an outsider. It can comment and observe. Look at the great artists and great thinkers – so many of them were outsiders," he says.

Bringing agencies in-house is, to him, another left-brain efficiency drive: "I'll bring it inside, control it, I won't pay all those fees. It sounds great. But they lose the ability to have a really challenging relationship that might make them rethink and do something a little bit more profound that adds real value to the bottom line."

The great creative agencies were "staffed by renegades, mad people, crazy people, but they had a power to make you think again", he says. "Whereas if you take them inside or you make them part of a corporation, they lose that ability."

Cursed as an optimist

For all the criticism, Hegarty describes himself as an optimist – and argues optimism is a professional requirement for creative people. "They have to believe that the next idea they have is going to change everything. Pessimism is the death of creativity," he says. "I've seen what a great idea can do. I've witnessed it. I've been there. I've been part of it. I've helped create it."

He compares it to love: "Unless you've fallen in love, you will never actually understand what love really is."

Hegarty says he is no longer really in advertising. "I'm now trying to teach the broader world about the value of creativity," he says, quoting Archbishop Desmond Tutu's line: "I'm a prisoner of optimism."

Marketers heading to Festival of Marketing on 14 October can expect more of the same refusal to be polite – with creativity, not data or research, positioned as the only durable competitive advantage left.