This week I'm thrilled to be catching up with Dan Glover, co-founder and creative director of The Academy. If you look at the most famous consumer PR campaigns in the UK over the last 10 years or so, most of them (not all) have come from a very small number of PR creatives (probably less than 10) and Dan, with his work with The National Trust, Kellogs and Heathrow is undoubtedly a member of this pretty unique club.
Here’s a summary of some of what Dan and I discuss:
- Why Dan doesn’t think he’s creative
- How great creatives need to ask questions and activate against those opinions
- Why creative directors must be client facing
- How empathy and problem solving are vital parts of creative thinking
- How cultural curiosity helps Dan’s creativity
- Dan defines what he believes is the role of a creative director
- How and why Dan condensed his GCSE geography syllabus into one word!
- Why Dan believes creativity as a process is difficult to teach
- Dan discusses how his creative approach has changed from his time at Cow, through to Mischief and now at The Academy
- Why communications must be simple, without dumbing them down
- Why Dan believes no consumer PR firm, including The Academy, have fulfilled the ambition and potential of the current power of public relations
- Why there has never been a better time for PR to position itself as the lead creative discipline
- How Dan believes that there are a set of consumer PR firms in London that are capable of producing business defining creative work
- Why no brief should include the phrase “raise awareness”
- Why a chasing headlines, tactical and stunty approach to creativity is unlikely to change the perception of a brand
- Why it’s difficult for PR people to compete with the creativity of ad agencies if they are working on multiple accounts
- Why your best work may not need to be more creative, the activation just needs to be bigger
- Why Dan used to find award nights where he won the worst nights of the year
- How many bad ideas does Dan have before he gets a good idea!
- Whether Ad agencies are coming up with with better creative ideas for earned media than PR agencies
- Why a lot of PR campaigns are low budget because clients have a lack of confidence in the discipline
- Dan identifies his top three favourite pieces of work that he’s done