Following the popularity of recent restaurant dramas, bearIt's no surprise that Javier Campiano likens his next challenge at McCann Worldgroup to running a big kitchen.
Mr. Campiano achieved great success early in his creative career, winning accolades and awards in senior roles at FCB and Saatchi & Saatchi (think “this is Tide advertising”), and in 2021, Gray After working his way up to one of the world's top jobs at a company, he made the switch. That's when he left last year to join McCann.
At the time, the global CCO, which now oversees creative work in 100 countries, sought “the full range of creative possibilities,” once again poised to captivate clients, consumers and critics alike.
Six months later, he still appreciates his talent all over the world and invites them to participate in a large “open kitchen” of creative collaboration.
Campaign sat down with Campiano, who recently visited Singapore for a global pitch and had the opportunity to speak directly with McCann's regional CCO, Valerie Maddon.
Below is an edited version of the conversation.
Now that you’ve been at McCann for six months, what are your creative strategies and ambitions for the future?
My goal as a creative leader is to try to open the creative community even more into what we call an “open kitchen.” When we started the group, one of the first things I said to the group was that creativity belongs to all of us. It's not something a group does alone. This makes sense, but in a network, the creative community may be working on one track while the rest of the organization is working on another track.
But what we want is an open kitchen where everyone cooks together and is responsible for creating a great product. This is very important these days. Because the more open we are, the more talent we can offer to clients who really want it now more than ever. So we're building on the concept of openness to make talent more accessible and collaboration more streamlined.
Conceptually, we also value “true, well-told” as a creative criterion, which is important to me. When I joined the organization, I told Darryl Lee that one of the things that appealed to me most about McCann was his ability to tell the truth. It's one of his best philosophies in the industry and the agency's first trademarked slogan. And I completely fell in love with that line.
At a time when truth is under so many attacks on so many fronts, we are honored to be an organization that stands up for it. It's in our DNA, so we're trying to articulate a common language around it and leverage what we already have within the organization. I don't think we need to reinvent the wheel. My goal is to focus on our strengths, see what positions our talents can play, and make them more available and work together.
Much of your work involves a blurring between advertising and entertainment. We saw that in our work with Tide, Coke, and Walmart. Will there be any more in the future? Can we take it even further in this multimedia world?
That's an interesting question. Because it never happened in my career in a planned way. It happened when a certain brief of a certain brand had the right to play in that field. I don't think you should do it intentionally.
Clearly, brands are looking to create more collaborations, whether between brands or even competing brands. That was unthinkable years ago, but now it's visible because consumers don't really see lines like that anymore. Things change. We don't watch TV like we used to. We do it while scrolling on our phones, and it all blends together as we consume content. This blurs the lines between categories and brands competing for the same attention.
Therefore, blurring the lines between media, such as using screens in a complementary way by leveraging the power of one platform to drive people to another, as in the Coke and Tide examples I mentioned earlier. If I have the opportunity to break that cycle with my work.
When you create branded content, you're competing with a lot of other content. So, bursting the bubble really depends on the quality of your content and the connection it has with your brand. I think we'll see more things. The lines become more and more blurred.
Now, creators' work is blurring those lines even further. You once said that advertising is better at capturing the zeitgeist and turning trendy things into interesting content. But now creators are the true experts at leveraging daily news and trends in ways that advertising cannot. How do you think the relationship between advertising and creator content will evolve?
I think this is an interesting challenge for marketers who have two ways of doing things. If you have structures in place to allow this, you can also play at the speed of content creators, but unlike individuals who can simply upload content, content must be vetted and approved, so marketing It's difficult at his level. So I don't think it's that easy.
Then there are traditional games that take more time. The challenge for brands here is how to build a brand platform that allows them to engage with people in a culturally relevant way, if not at the speed of culture. But it's hard to stay responsive to what's going on in the culture. Because you have to create the culture from a place that actually connects to the brand. You can't just react to things.
For us, communicating through an enduring brand platform where we can continually play and connect with culture is where we can add more value. This allows brands to react to cultural phenomena and consider whether they need to react. Without it, communication becomes scattered and less effective.
On International Women's Day, we are reminded of how much has – and still is – changed when it comes to gender representation and equality in creative fields. What do you think about the amount of progress, or lack thereof, regarding women influencing creative work?
We are far from a place where equality is a reality. I believe hiring is where you can have the biggest immediate impact, and I'm doubling down on my searches to make sure representation is a must-have, not a “nice-to-have.” This obviously applies to diversity as a whole.
Once hired, it is equally important to ensure that women are included and supported, especially as they progress to more senior roles within the organization.
When it comes to influence, it's easy to see that creative language and approaches are changing rapidly. Both old and new, there has clearly been a change and a fresher way of saying things. That applies across the board, not just the obvious (to some) topics and campaigns.
NYX's latest Super Bowl campaign is a great example. For the first time in a long time, the joke – which was really stupid by the way – was directed at the men watching the game. And that created a little shortcut in the system that, jokingly, made it impossible to run the original ad. I was shocked by this. Behind this idea was an almost all-female creative team, evidence that a new language is forming, with more women leading the creative process and teams (and more diversity overall). This is the result.
The language will be different and richer across all categories, not just women's products, which is another bias. Not so long ago, it was less likely that a particular project or product would be led by a female creator. As that is currently changing, we can expect that the language of those categories, such as alcohol and cars, will change with the influence and influence of the different actors shaping the work.
What is McCann doing to enable or accelerate change?
Ambition Collective is supporting greater female representation in several important projects, including Nurofen's 'See My Pain'. This project is very interesting. You could say it's a normal project led by a female creator, but the way the work was created was clearly different, and it felt sharper and more direct. I have been in far too many rooms where projects that capitalize on causes most affected by women first are led, criticized, and approved by men.
And of course in the region, Valerie Maddon is clearly leading the way for us as one of Asia's most prominent creatives and a rare female chief creative officer at the APAC level. This topic is also very personal to her.
The liberating element, in my opinion, is that we are moving towards a place where comparisons between genders become irrelevant when it comes to art and sports. Women's football is great in its own right, the style of play is different, more direct and attacking, and people enjoy it without comparing it to men's football.
