Sir John Hegarty is the co-founder of advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi. Photo / Richard Bord/WireImage
Sir John Hegarty’s name is synonymous with some of the biggest advertising companies in the world. Here’s what he thinks about the state of business today.
If you were to list the most influential and respected advertising companies in the 20th century, it would undoubtedly feature: Saatchi & Saatchi, TBWA and BBH.
So what do all these businesses have in common beyond operating in the same industry?
Sir John Hegarty.
Working behind the scenes, Hegarty was integral in bringing to life iconic ad campaigns that are still studied for their brilliance today. Levi’s laundrette, Johnnie Walker’s “Keep Walking”, Xbox’s “Champagne” and Audi’s “Vorsprung durch Technik” are just some of the ads featuring the careful, creative eye of Hegarty.
Now in his 80s, Hegarty’s mind is still as sharp as it’s always been. His still-luscious head of grey hair bounces as he offers animated views on young creatives, advertising, artists and God.
Offered the impressive Amano wine list that could take your palate on a journey from Veneto to Waipara, Hegarty opts for still water. The veteran doesn’t need old-school advertising’s favoured poison to have an interesting conversation. And it doesn’t take long for him to get stuck in.
“I wouldn’t join an advertising company today,” he says when asked what he would do if he was entering the workforce in 2025.
“If I was coming out of design school in the 2020s, what I would try to do is build a following and leverage that following to create a channel within which I could communicate and which I could leverage to work with other people.
“In other words, I would take control of my creative career.”
Hegarty isn’t all talk and no action. Even after eight decades, he is still putting his words into practice by amassing an online audience of more than 80,000 followers on LinkedIn.
Armchair critics often take a reductionist view of influencers as talentless people who are just chronically online, but Hegarty is as influential as they come and his audience has been built on the back of his talent and ability to create. It’s that resource he believes young creatives should be looking to harness for themselves.
The battle for creative control has become central in media today, with many creatives and content creators looking to break away from bigger publishers to find their own audiences.
Internationally, we recently saw the high-profile departure of young political commentator Brett Cooper controversially break away from the Daily Wire – the publication that gave her the platform to build her audience – to develop her own YouTube channel.
Locally, we’ve also seen this trend in talented journalists like Dylan Cleaver and David Farrier carving their own path on Substack as well as the podcasters Steven Holloway and Seamus Marten of Between Two Beers starting their own business.
Hegarty believes this independence offers the best route for today’s most creative people to stand out and capitalise, both commercially and creatively, on their core skills.
“You need to develop your own ecosystem of culture, of ideas, of thoughts, using drawings, designs, thoughts or whatever it might be to develop [your voice]. I think this is all exciting. It would be a completely different way from which I started my career.”
Hegarty’s concerns about modern advertising aren’t without reason. A 2023 YouGov survey showed that 70% of respondents found adverts annoying, and a follow-up study by Hubspot suggested that 91% of people find online advertising more intrusive than it was a year ago. And with more advertising being pumped out online every day, these numbers aren’t likely to ease any time soon.
“Brands have become lazy,” says Hegarty.
“They think they can just rely on the data now, instead of creating something that can inspire people to come to them. That’s why I came into the industry: to inspire people. And that’s what we did. We developed creative work that gained attention. Today, too many think they can just use the algorithm and data to do it.”
The tech promises of data, targeting and online advertising have rarely lived up to the hype, leaving audiences frustrated and brands unable to cut through.
“If real estate is about location, location, location, then communication is about attention, attention, attention,” says Hegarty.
“Today is about attention. You’ve got to get attention. And not enough people realise that. Algorithms won’t give you that. What hasn’t changed is the need for a brilliant idea, in order to get that attention – and the commensurate business result.”
Reflecting on his own career and the moments he chose to move on from one agency to start another, Hegarty says the conditions within an organisation have to be right to allow for the messiness of creativity to take place.
“Structure is a huge issue,” he says.
And it’s not just about companies. It’s about countries. Why do some people go to the United States and do very well when they haven’t done well in their own country, or for most of their lives? It’s the (new) structure that allows them. It permits them to do what they want to do.
“Every business owner has to think about that. What kind of structure are you operating? People often asked me about the structure at BBH. The thing that made it was that it permitted risk-taking.”
In a nod to the enormous confidence he had in his business, Hegarty says that his agency would sometimes stop working with clients if they felt that the relationship wasn’t conducive to the necessary creative risk-taking to really do work that caught the attention of an audience.
“This was not a monetary decision,” he says, “but it allowed us to hold on to our creative integrity”.
The pressure sometimes also came from internal forces. As holding companies started to take over independent ad agencies, Hegarty said that the internal motivations and structures would shift, making it difficult for him to do the work he wanted to do – and which he felt the client deserved – in those circumstances. In many ways, he was driven by the same force that today nudges young creatives into taking their talents to YouTube, Substack or TikTok – or simply something independent.
Hegarty’s thoughts appear to overlap with the trend of purpose-led brands that has seen major organisations embrace causes in a bid to appeal to consumers, but Hegarty calls BS on this concept in advertising.
“The word purpose doesn’t sit well with me,” he says.
“It’s nebulous. It’s grandiose. It’s pompous. Because let’s be honest. What’s your purpose? It’s to make a f***ing motorcar on the road that doesn’t harm the environment and lasts as long as it possibly can. Your purpose is to give people great service. Once you’ve done that, you can talk about other things.”
He says that businesses that get tied up into some higher purpose end up becoming confused and forget that they need to sell stuff.
“You’ve got to understand that a business is in business to create profit. It wants to make a product as cheaply as it possibly can and sell it for as much as it possibly can. It’s very simple. It’s fundamental. And that’s where business sits now.”
As the example of Elon Musk shows, this approach to business can be taken to the extreme.
“For Musk, it’s about cutting costs as much as possible and making as much money as possible. You can’t be against that. You just have to realise that for what it is. You can run companies like that and then you have to accept the problems that may or may not come up with the law and bad press.”
Some businesses are comfortable riding out that criticism and pushing the line on regulation, but this is a risk that every organisation needs to weigh up internally.
BP, for instance, recently backtracked on its sustainability pledge, cutting its renewable energy investments and doubling down on fossil fuels. The company plans to invest US$10 billion ($17.8b) annually in oil and gas while slashing more than US$5b ($8.9b) per year from its green energy initiatives.
If anything, it’s a reminder that a “purpose” as bold as “Beyond Petroleum” can shift very quickly when the numbers don’t make sense any more.
As someone who lived his first year as the final shots rang out during World War II, Hegarty has seen his fair share of political and business chaos over the years. Some of the best work in his career was forged amid the tension that separated Europe into East and West. In both business and politics, he’s seen giants rise and even bigger ones fall.
So in all that time, what has he identified as the key to longevity? What is it that separates a lasting brand from one that slowly crumbles and ceases to exist?
“People often take Darwin’s quote about the ‘survival of the fittest’ to mean survival of the strongest. But he didn’t ever say – or imply – that… It’s one of the great misquotes. Darwin believed that survival was based on those able to adapt… Remember, Kodak was once an incredibly wealthy company, and then it wasn’t.”
Indeed, Darwin did argue that organisms best adjusted to their environment were the ones most likely to survive.
Blockbuster, Nokia and BlackBerry are just some of the companies that once had enviable market positions but failed to respond when the world around them started to change. Your size is irrelevant if your business is still rooted in something that worked in the last decade. No one cares if you sell the finest horseshoes when all they want is a Model T Ford.
Hegarty has committed the latest era of his career to helping businesses avoid falling into the trap of the familiar and doing the same thing over and over again until the world doesn’t want it any longer.
His latest venture, The Business of Creativity, which was built on the back of a massive online following, looks to train businesses on how to unlock creativity and move beyond the patterns they’ve created for themselves.
“It’s about getting businesses to understand how important creativity is to their existence,” says Hegarty.
“When you mention creativity in most companies, they generally go: ‘Oh, we don’t do that. We’re not a creative business.’ And then I have to say to them: ‘But business is a creative act. You have an idea and you bring it to life.’”
By refusing to invest in creativity or challenge staff to think creatively, Hegarty argues that a company risks not engaging with something that is fundamental to its business.
“Creativity is the heart of innovation. If you don’t understand creativity, you’re not going to be any good at innovation.”
While many businesses today focus on improving the physical and mental wellness of their staff through initiatives like health insurance, yoga or gym memberships, Hegarty says that he rarely sees much evidence of business owners taking steps to develop the creativity that will ultimately help their businesses stay relevant in the future. The argument here is that too many businesses take it for granted that today’s sales will carry on tomorrow as long as we keep doing the same thing.
“In terms of businesses, creating value and building centuries-old legacies, my top 10 business people would be filled with artists like Picasso, Matisse, Warhol, Dali and Hockney, I could go on,” says Hegarty.
“They were geniuses… If you studied artists as business people, you’d learn more about business than you will be reading some f***ing stupid management book in your bookshop.”
The thing that all these artists have in common with great innovators is that they pushed and challenged themselves time and time again to create something that people valued for generations. If Picasso didn’t constantly shift and evolve his art, he would be as irrelevant as Microsoft had Bill Gates decided to stop his innovation at Windows 95. In art, as in business, we don’t respect those who do the same thing over and over again. It’s the companies and creators that adapt, evolve and shift with society that stay relevant.
And to Hegarty, this isn’t about employing a futurist and predicting what the future might hold. Soothsaying – or any attempt to do it – is a fool’s game.
“I don’t know what’s around the corner. I genuinely don’t … I’ve never gone: ‘I’m going to do this in five years and then do something else.’ I’ve just tried to make what I’m doing now really, really interesting.
“I always say: do interesting things and interesting things will happen to you.”
As Hegarty says his goodbyes and walks down the street away from our chat, he does so with an energy and enthusiasm that belies his 80 years on the planet. It feels as though he’s made us all a promise that he will indeed continue doing interesting things and finding new ways to stay relevant. There’s a lesson somewhere in that for businesses worried about their own mortality.
– Damien Venuto is a senior account director at One Plus One Communications. He previously worked on the Herald business team for seven years and wrote extensively about media and advertising.
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