IPA On... The value of creativity

Award-winning strategy and transformation leader and author Sue Unerman joins the IPA On... podcast to discuss her book 'A Year of Creativity', and lessons from a storied career in advertising on belonging, wellbeing and success strategies for women at work. You can purchase 'A Year of Creativity' here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Year-Creativity-Boosting-Innovation-Inspiration/dp/1399413252

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to IPA on Talent Matters, the IPA podcast covering all things people, culture, and talent. Hello and welcome to IPA on Talent Matters. I'm your host, Antonia Stern from the IPA, and I'm joined today by Sue Uniman to discuss the value of creativity. So a 2025 Canline reports that creative confidence is waning. Only 13% of companies are creative risk friendly. However, risk-taking brands generate four times higher profit margins, according to research by WARC and Cantar. And brands with a high appetite for creative risk are 33% more likely to see long-term revenue growth, reports Deloitte. Here to discuss this very topic with me is Sue Uniman, a British media and advertising leader. She was most recently Global Chief Strategy Officer at performance marketing agency Brain Labs, fulling more than three decades helping to build Mediacom in the UK's largest media agency and a multiple-time campaign agency of the decade. Alongside her agency leadership, Uniman has become a prominent voice on diversity, inclusion, and workplace culture, co-authoring four business books, Tell the Truth, The Glass Wall, Belonging, and a Year of Creativity, which we're going to be discussing today. So welcome, Sue. Hi. Hello. Hello. It's lovely to have you. Thank you for inviting me. No, of course. And just to get started, so I loved reading your book, A Year of Creativity. And I loved reading about different people's perspectives and what creativity means to them. So, you know, the idea that creativity is a world between worlds, an unending carousel curiosity, the most honest part of who we are. And at its simplest, it's making people feel something. So it's intrinsically linked with emotions. What does creativity mean to you? I've been thinking about this since you warned me when you were going to ask the question.

SPEAKER_01 1:57

And I would say it's life-enhancing. I think, you know, what are we here for? What are we here for? Um to live our best lives. And I don't think you can do that if you suppress the creativity instinct. And I think as part of living and your your best integrated, being your best integrated self, I think you have to allow the creativity muscle to be as exercised as any of your other muscles. So I think it's life-enhancing. And I would say to anybody who calls themselves not creative or doesn't think that they've got the chance to be creative in their job, at a time when the industry it feels like there's that you read so many things about how people are finding work at the moment soul-destroying, which is the opposite of what this industry should be about, then I think the practice of creativity, whatever your day job is, that that will make a real difference.

SPEAKER_00 3:04

But I loved in your book, it's like a theme throughout is that anybody can be creative. But what would you say to those people who are like, oh, it's just, you know, I'm not artsy, I'm not creative, and they kind of close the door to it.

SPEAKER_01 3:16

Well, I think both me and my co-author, um, shout out for Catherine Jacob, um because uh she wrote the book, we wrote the book together. Both of us, during the course of our education and our careers, were put in the not creative bucket. And once you're put into that bucket, for whatever reason, and I think you know, for me, I started out as a TV time buyer, and creativity was the last thing anybody wanted. I also worked for a boss who basically the way to get promoted was to do what you were told. And you know, I've had more than three decades in this industry now, and um, I've worked with a lot of people, and I think most of my bosses would agree that one of the things that I'm not very good at is doing what I'm told. Um, certainly when I started out, it was about being analytical, it was about getting your sums right, it was about a negotiation technique that was a script. And I think if you'd said to anybody that I work with in the first two, three years of my work, you know, who are the creative people around the team, they would not have mentioned my name. And partly as a result of that, I hate this idea of the label. I think it is impossible to be only right-brained and not left-brained, and equally impossible to be left brain and not right brain. And people put themselves into those buckets as well, with right brain largely meaning creative and left brain largely meaning analytical. It's kind of like you couldn't function as a human being if you were absolutely 100% just one of those things or the other. So the first thing that I'd say to those people is, well, you were sorry, but you're wrong. You are creative. And also, as one of my ex-colleague, Nick Nick Lawson, as he said to me, and we quote him in the book, um, I think, if imagine if you've got a whole company where everybody feels empowered to be creative, where any problem isn't just either kicked to the curb because it's too difficult to solve or you know, bottlenecked into the creative genius, but you've got everybody who can come up with a solution. That's a company that's flying.

SPEAKER_00 5:32

Yeah. And I think going on from that, I like again reading in your book, you've mentioned that creativity for a long time was seen as like an elite thing that only white men would sit around and only they would be allowed to be creative. From that, how has creativity kind of impacted your career going forward? As you say, you weren't particularly thought of as creative, but then later on, how did this come to you that you were like, actually, I am creative, and it is really important?

SPEAKER_01 5:57

It began as asking questions and asking why. And honestly, that to begin with, in the role that I had and the people that I worked with, that was quite difficult to begin with because I I am innately curious, and there were ways of doing things, and I was questioning them, and I was questioning them over and over again, even when I was told to stop. Um, and in the end, I think I just had the fortune to start working with people who, instead of seeing that as annoying, saw it as a good challenge to the status quo that could win us business. And that's the honest truth. You know, when I joined the company that was the media business in 1990, it had just over, just under 50 million pounds worth of billings. Um, and when you know that company grew and grew and grew because of looking at challenges, coming at things in a different way. And at its height, it was billing 2 billion in the UK. It's exponential growth over, you know, decades, and then obviously became the Mighty Media Common, is now the mighty WPP media, and you know, things have changed and things have moved on. But purely my role in that was because I was for the first time after several years actually of working in full service agencies where I was told to stick to my knitting in the media department, I was encouraged to challenge everything, to shake things up, and to question how to do things in a different way. And that's essentially one of the most essential parts of creativity is to go why are we doing this in the way that we've been doing it? And that's the other thing that I'd say to anybody out there is if you are doing something today when you're listening to this podcast that seems to you pointless and boring, ask why you're doing it. Think about is there a better, you know, more productive, newer way of doing it. At the moment, with the way everything's changing, it's essential that businesses encourage everyone to do that. It's it's I'd say it's existential.

SPEAKER_00 8:17

Yes, it's like the then it's the company culture of allowing people that freedom. And I think you've said it, and I've read it before, that like in times of uncertainty, which you know everyone keeps saying that we're in and we have been on whatever, this leads to a lack of creativity, um, especially within leadership. Well, what would you say to leaders to change that?

SPEAKER_01 8:34

Because it's not black and white, and it's not a red light and a green light, it's it's find the moments. So that might be if you've got a regular meeting that takes an hour and a half, find a way of doing the main content of it in an hour, and frankly, there are many, many meetings that are too long, and then during the last half hour, encourage some new ways of thinking, some different ways of doing things, some questions to ask, which is you know what the body of the book is is different sorts of techniques, or encourage people to take an hour and a week and actually do something that's bucket-filling, that kind of encourages creativity, that gets you out of the routine, that breaks the mould. You know, one of the things that happens with very kind of left-brain processes is that they tend to be very repetitive and they tend to basically mean that you don't try new things. Trying something new once a month, you know, that that that's kind of all you have to do. Um and if you can as a leader encourage that. In fact, I would say it's kind of your job to encourage that, then you will find that you've got a more productive and a, you know, look, we're sitting in the IPA um as we record this podcast. Um, for a long time, I was I sat on the effectiveness committee and you know, was convened, convened the um effectiveness awards. Um let me give you a guarantee, if you do this as a creative leader, you will get a return on that investment.

SPEAKER_00 10:25

No, a great point, and which leads us on to actually the latest IPA's effectiveness research, which concludes just that that creative quality is one of the biggest factors determining financial impact of campaigns. Do you have a particular case study that demonstrates this? Um this question's thrown on you.

SPEAKER_01 10:47

I um had the joy of judging um the Glass Lions a couple of years ago um at Cannes. And the first thing that springs to mind is the thing that won the the entry that won the Glass Line worldwide, which was a campaign from Vaseline for a a new product which was specifically for people who were transitioning gender. And it was created in Thailand, and they made the product as a to answer the brief, and the brief was how do we create more saliency for this brand? And instead of saying we're gonna do an ad with some, you know, glamorous women slathering slathering lotion on themselves, they said we're going to they they went through a process that ended up creating a product for a tiny community of their uh buyers, which through marketing it proved the effectiveness of the product, which meant that it created brand sales and saliency for the product for everybody. And I think that's one of the examples that comes to mind as a truly creative solution. And when I talk about that, you know, for me it's important to say it may not have been the most lovely, fantastic little movie about it that that made it creative. It wasn't that it was shot in um 3D or black and white or you know, yeah, had a new soundtrack, or it was about the idea to change a small group of people's lives and to market that to prove the efficacy of the product. And I think that's it was a truly creative endeavor from the agency, from the client, from the marketeers, um uh, and also sometimes reaching out to a minority of people proves that you care about people.

SPEAKER_00 13:07

Transition body lotion. It was amazing. Yeah, I wanted to touch on something you mentioned earlier, which was about how important it is to start doing new things and having new experiences. I guess I what if I'm really interested again in your book was reading about, and I felt this sometimes where you know you end up looking at the same media from the same sites, you know, what whatever leaning that is. The algorithm's got your number.

SPEAKER_01 13:32

Yeah. Yeah. Because you have to break the algorithm. So you have to that there's a there's a huge amount of capitalist interest in nailing you and serving you content that will get you to stay on the channels that you're in. And I don't think that's good for creativity. I think you know, one of the things we just talk about, and again, it's not it's not about sort of lurching out of your comfort zone and and and you know, jumping out of a helicopter. It's about if you only ever, you know, if you love ABBA, you know, goodness help you, but if you love ABBA, guilty, go to a concert of Bach at the Royal Festival Hall. You know, it it's just sit, just sit, you can always leave. Just just just sit see what it's like. See what it's like. You know, if you're spending all your time on TikTok, you know, go to the movies and watch something that you know your hasn't been recommended to you.

SPEAKER_00 14:41

And something that I wanted to bring up was this because also like there's that there's experience there, but then there's also I guess like having a diverse team around you who then obviously bring different experiences.

SPEAKER_01 14:52

So that's so important. Um, I wrote what one of the books that I wrote was about belonging, belonging and inclusion. And there's this kind of trap in belonging and inclusion, which is that if you are all the same sort of people that went to the same sort of school and the same sort of university and have the same sort of politics, then you do feel like you belong with each other. But the real meaning and the real truth of belonging is when you can get a diverse team together. Um, and it's the Avengers Assemble idea, which is the Incredible Hulk and Black Widow may not get on, you know, in every context with Iron Man, but coming together for a single purpose to sort of ace a challenge is just incredibly powerful. And everything that I know says that the best teams are full of people who have lots of different kinds of diversity.

SPEAKER_00 15:49

And how I guess what was interesting is this idea that how often managers, I remembering this that you wrote, um, hire people with values that they have, and how like what would you say to like break out of that mold?

SPEAKER_01 16:03

It's just wrong. I mean, it's like you can really see why you would do it. So if you know you're hiring an assistant because you're getting promoted, or you're hiring the next uh someone who, you know, to replace you because you've you've been bumped up, you're gonna think, well, I'm really good at what I do, so if I hire somebody who's exactly the same as me, that's perfect. And people do it all the time. I see it over and over, I've seen it over and over and over again. And actually, that's the last thing you want. What you want for somebody that's gonna report into you because you've been, you know, bumped up is someone who's as far the polar opposite of you as possible, because then your skills will be complementary, and then you'll actually be able to build on each other's strengths both ways in order to get to a better answer. So, yeah, if if you're hiring someone that's the same as you, don't just don't do that.

SPEAKER_00 16:55

No, it was great advice, and I wanted to touch on AI because I've been reading more and more about how it's so important to have people who are creative working with AI and like why is creativity more important than ever in this landscape?

SPEAKER_01 17:10

Well, you know, is AI creative? I think so. So what the surveys show so far, so I think I'm quoting the economist here, um, is that people AI is predominantly helping two sorts of people people at very low levels who are doing kind of repetitive tasks and expert people who know how to get the best out of it. And but what AI can't do is know instinctively the right creative solution. What it can do is give you 130 suggestions for whatever it is you're you're briefing. It is then down to you to pick the ones that will work best and work out how it will work best. It is going to change our industry. I mean, frankly, as you know, one of the things that um we deplore, both Catherine and I, is um a pointless brainstorm. I mean, you don't really need a pointless brainstorm anymore because it does it for you. Yeah, AI can be your brainstorm, buddy. Um, but it's about the next stage and it's about taking it further. And also the other thing with AI is that you need to be very careful that it's not lying to you. The other thing is is that it has been engineered by well, it's largely been engineered by men. Yeah. And so one of the other things that that is kind of shocking and a bit sad and not really a surprise is the bias that is innate in AI in the answers to things, and there's been a lot of um digging into this, you know, if if if you ask it, you know, any of the classic questions about show me a successful business person, up comes, you know, a white man with you know a suit on, um, show me a successful home, you know, carer. Um, and it will be the traditional 1950s answers. Yeah. Um, and I know um, so we've got um the Glasswall, which is the book that we wrote on, Catherine and I wrote together on gender, is coming up for a 10th anniversary edition, and we've just submitted the copy for it. And I remember speaking to Martha Lane Fox, the internet entrepreneur paranoia's Martha Lane Fox, the first time um for the for the first edition. And uh she sort of paused and she went, and it was at the time, you know, we weren't talking about AI, we were talking about you know the internet, and um she said, it's kind of disappointing, isn't it, that uh in this day and age it should be so gender biased. And here we go, ten years later, and we're walking into exactly the same situation.

SPEAKER_00 20:12

Yeah, because that was what I was gonna ask you the ten years since. Has there been a positive change?

SPEAKER_01 20:17

Well, there's been some positive changes. I mean, we've got a woman as the Archbishop of Canterbury. Mm-hmm. That's good. That wasn't the case from the Chancellor at the moment at the moment. I don't know when this podcast is going out. Um but no, I think that um, I mean, you'd know better than me the IPA census data, but it's I believe it's got a bit stuck. And what I do know is that if you take the FTSE 100 data um when we were um talking about the book the first time, kind of going, well, do you know you're more likely to be a CEO of the FTSE 100 if you're called John than if you're a woman. Oh, yeah. Still true. Ugh, John. No, and you know what? Where women are more than 50% of the population, the Equal Opportunity Act came in in the 1970s. It's been a while now. Baroness Helena Kennedy, who wrote the foreword for the first book, said to me that all the way through her career, and she's been a real strong fighter for women worldwide, um, not just in the UK, um, and for women's rights. And she said to me, all the way through my career, Sue, men have been saying to me, the women will come through, the women will come through. And and you've probably heard that, and I've heard that. It's like it's it's okay, the fights happened, the you know, the battle's been won. And she said, and they haven't come through, and they're not coming through, and it's not okay. And we looked at all of the techniques that we'd recommended in the glass wall the first time, and we spoke to a lot of Gen Zders and people that weren't in the workplace 10 years ago. And the sort of premise of the book, which is that there is a set of rules in the workplace that men seem to innately understand and women do not, is still absolutely true. And yeah, there's a there's maybe a couple more. There's some some new ones to look at.

SPEAKER_00 22:15

What rules are that are just out of interest?

SPEAKER_01 22:18

Well, one of the biggest ones, and I don't know if you have experienced this or not. Um I know the IPA is a great place to work, but one of the biggest ones is about showing off. Ah, okay. Men, and I found I found this when I've been mentoring people as well, that um men are naturally apparently very good at telling everybody what they've just done that's very good. And women are don't but women apparently think that if they do a really good job, they will get rewarded for it.

SPEAKER_00 22:54

Yeah, okay. I've I've heard that before of just being like, who who was I speaking to? Where they just said they didn't ask because they thought that the work itself, the boss would know that they wanted this promotion, they wanted this and that. They're like, Well, I've done the work, and it's like, you have to do you have to explicitly say? You have to explicitly say.

SPEAKER_01 23:12

And one of the um talks that we gave, which was at a big city firm where they did not have many women partners, and we'd been invited in to talk to the Women Fast Track by the one woman partner who was in the UK, I think. And she had invited uh some men partners to listen to the talk as well. And at the end of the talk and the QA, she asked the men, you know, it what have you learned? And one of them said, he stood up and he said, Well, he said, I I I'm a partner at this company, and um I've been showing off about what I do since I came here, and you know, to be honest, all the other men around me show off about what they do as well, it's just what we do. And he said, It never occurred to me that women would expect it to be recognised without shouting about it. And he said, in fact, if I had thought about it for a minute, which he hadn't, I would have thought, well, they just don't have anything to show off about. Oh so that's what's going on. Now, people, women react differently to that, and there are some men who don't show off naturally. Yeah, what I've personally found is that when I've been doing mentoring and I've mentioned this to a bloke, he will immediately then start showing off and get promoted about ten times in the next five minutes. Whereas some women can be very ambivalent about it and go, Well, I can't possibly, and no, it's not me, it's the team, and you know, I would be embarrassed to do that. It's like we're okay, but then you need to find a way of doing it. And there are ways in in the book we talk about ways that you can do if it doesn't come naturally to you. And you have to deal with it if you want to progress.

SPEAKER_00 24:53

Okay, so it's basically advocating for yourself in a very loud way.

SPEAKER_01 24:58

Yeah, and I kind of think, you know what, maybe there's something innate in that. I don't know, I don't know if it's nature, nurture, what it is.

SPEAKER_00 25:06

Um I like this idea of how important psychological safety is in allowing people to be creative, and in an organization, obviously it's so important for so many reasons, but how can it help with creativity and what exactly would people need to look at?

SPEAKER_01 25:24

I think psychological safety is is crucial to happiness at work. Um I think I hear anecdotally that there's uh not very much of it about at the moment that everybody is seriously worried about what the next thing is going to be. It is the job of people leading organisations to give that psychological safety to the people that they are leading. It may be the most important thing that they have to do. And hearing things oh, this company have said that they're not going to do any more redundancies at the moment because they've spent the redundancy budget. So don't worry for a bit. For sure. And feeling like I've also heard this anecdotally, could we just have some safer ideas because they're easier to sell, so they're quicker to sell, and so we'll get a better return, and we'll worry about whether they're more effective or not later on. If that's the kind of vibe that's been given, then you're not gonna get creativity. And without creativity, I think I I don't know what happens to this industry without creativity. I mean, it it is such an important craft, and I do think it's a craft as well for all disciplines within within our industry.

SPEAKER_00 26:47

It brings me on to really quickly to another point, but this idea that during times of stress, people kind of shut down, as you say, like make very small, kind of safe decisions and choices. And why is it so important now be thinking quite bravely and quite creatively?

SPEAKER_01 27:04

So sometimes when I have the job of chief strategy officer, people say to me, Well, what is strategy? What is strategy anyway? And my predominant answer is competitive advantage. Strategy is looking for the competitive advantage. If everybody in your sector is making safe decisions and you can make a decision that's like 10% braver than that, you will cut through the competition like a knife through batter. Whether that is your own personal career, whether that is the fortune of your agency, whether that is on behalf of the brand that you work on, the opportunity to win is superb. And I would, you know, you want to make yourself safe, do something a a bit braver. It does as I say, it doesn't have to be, we're not talking about you know breaking every norm, but it will there is an opportunity at the moment for that competitive advantage.

SPEAKER_00 28:02

I love that. So to take away, to be safe, be braver. Yes. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming onto the podcast. It's been great to have you. And yeah, thank you. Cool, thank you very much. For more conversation on talent, join us at the hybrid IPA Talent and Diversity Conference on the 28th of April. There will be a panel discussion on the power of diverse communities in driving creativity. So we hope to see you there. And following Sue's point on the importance of creativity as a craft, we have the IPA Creative Essentials certificate starting in April. This is training for junior creatives, which is part of President Karen Martin's agenda to put creativity back at the heart of our industry. So please do get in touch for more details.