At the intersection of creativity and business

For those who don’t know me, my name is James Ray, and I’m CEO of specialist CRM agency Armadillo based in Bristol. I’m very honoured to be the new IPA Chair for England and Wales, after a couple of years as City Head for Bristol, Wales and the West. I’m critically aware of having some big shoes to fill, as I succeed local lad Richard Aldiss. Go easy on me… 

For starters, I’d like to say a big thank you to Dentsu for kindly hosting us today. I’m delighted to say we are also joined by our City Heads from across the UK - a special welcome to Nichola Elgie from Drummond Central, our newly joined City Head for the North East. And also by Brian Scott and Jim Kelly, my fellow Chairs for Northern Ireland and Scotland, respectively. Please do take the opportunity to introduce yourselves to them later. 

I see my role as Chair to listen, help, raise awareness, and fuel engagement around the things that matter to us around the UK. Working closely with our City Heads and Chairs to garner opinion and build a UK regional picture, ensuring I represent our agency membership the best I can to the IPA and for the collective good of the industry. 

And the thing that really excites me about the role is the opportunity to support and connect with the incredible diversity of agency sizes and specialisms across the wider membership. In my opinion, that’s what gives the “out of London” agency community a very distinct flavour – and that leads me on to setting out my agenda for the next couple of years.

Brian, Jim and I are very fortunate to be beginning our chairships as Karen Martin, CEO of BBH, takes on the Presidency of the IPA. Because Karen has set an absolutely doozy of a mission for the organisation: to revitalise the UK advertising industry and celebrate the immense value creativity brings to business success, the economy and British culture. I hope you’ve been able to watch her address, and the brilliant “The Woman Walks Around Soho” film.

Karen argues that in the face of short-termism, AI, mega mergers, budget pressures and regulatory constraint, the ad industry risks losing focus on its superpower: human creativity. Her agenda seeks to put it at the heart of everything we do as an industry. Because as she says, creativity “isn’t a nice to have, it’s all we have”. 

Karen set out four key pillars for her agenda:

1. Celebrating human creativity, including bringing Creative Directors onto the IPA Council
2. Training the next generation of creatives, including the launch of a new Creative Essentials Certificate
3. Attracting more diverse creative talent by expanding Barn, the ad school based at BBH
4. Rewarding creative excellence, with a new Creative Award as part of the IPA Effectiveness Awards

Now, I stand here before you as a chippy career direct marketer from Bristol who’s never made an ad in his life, and gets as excited about a nifty automation as a beautiful copy line. But Karen’s agenda resonates with me as strongly as anyone. My agency’s purpose is to fuse strategy, CX, data and martech to create more valuable customer relationships for our clients. And the catalyst for that fusion is creativity.  

And while the mix of specialisms, skills and disciplines within our membership varies enormously, I’m certain that the central truth is the same for all of us. Creativity isn’t just the job of Creatives. 

So far, so inspiring – but how does that need to show up at a regional level? 

Well, let’s start with a Venn Diagram. Obviously. 

Imagine a Venn with two circles. Let’s call them “Creativity” and “Business”. Agencies sit in the middle bit of the Venn: we exist to solve business problems with imaginative and creative ideas. A culture-defining ad film. A groundbreaking media strategy. A perfectly personalised experience. That’s what makes our industry meaningful, vital and distinct. The energy, opportunity and excitement of operating in that middle bit of the Venn is why I do my day job, and I’m pretty sure that’s the same for many if not all of us agency people here. And to paraphrase a well-known football quote, I’m not saying Advertising is the only sector in that space, but we’re definitely in the top one. 

And I’d like to contend that, out of London, we have some specific opportunities – those distinct flavours - in our Venn that my agenda will seek to support. It’s about channelling Karen’s creativity mission, with a distinct twist, to help our member agencies around the UK make what’s already a superpower an even more super one.

Celebrating human creativity

First, in lockstep with my fellow chairs at City Heads, we’ll be taking opportunities for the IPA to sponsor connecting, learning and drawing inspiration from our wider creative industry communities. Thinking about the Creativity circle in the Venn, we’re privileged to live and work within amazing centres of creative excellence. That’s one of the reasons I love working in Bristol: connections with adjacent creative businesses, including the likes of Aardman, through partnership with the Bristol Creative Industries trade body, have always been a huge benefit. 

That’s why we're so pleased to have Dave with us tonight to do exactly that, through a Manchester lens. And without stealing any of their thunder, Jim and Brian have some exciting stuff coming in their regions in a similar vein. 

Second, we’ll be reflecting Karen’s move to bring Creatives onto the main IPA Council, with events or meet-ups that bring creativity and the voices of creatives to the fore. 

I will steal some of Brian’s thunder here! Next month, he’ll be hosting his Chair’s event in Belfast and will be joined by Karen herself, plus Creative Directors and ECDs from the Northern Ireland member agencies, to explore the theme of Creative Power within the context of the NI agency landscape. 

Third. And for this, just like my Spotify “On Repeat” playlist – Manchester, you have been the inspiration. The Manchester Showcase of your outstanding creative work, orchestrated by Sue Benson, is a great example of how sharing great work helps raise all ships. Together with our City Heads, I’ll be looking at how we can widen this approach to collating and cascading to celebrate and inspire fellow member agencies. 

Those three moves all sit under Karen’s “Celebrate” pillar: it’s where I see most of the opportunity for my role, and those of my fellow Chairs and City Heads, can best help add that distinct flavour to the IPA’s support for its members.

Attracting more diverse creative talent

In the other pillars, the focus will be on getting the most from our membership and the IPA’s existing and new resources to attract, nurture and reward creative (small c!) talent.

Here are a few pointers to the opportunities that we’ll continue to guide members towards.

For those that aren’t familiar, Advertising Unlocked is the largest industry-wide ‘open day’ where the advertising industry welcomes the next generation of talent from local schools and colleges. Participating agencies will be revealing how campaigns are made, what it’s like to work in advertising and giving students the opportunity to work on a brief. To give just one example, IMA’s cohort came up with Lamborghini roller skates and Eminem-themed Lush bath bombs!

So it’s a fantastic platform to seed the excitement of working in that middle Venn bit amongst the talent of tomorrow. This year’s Advertising Unlocked Day is on 12 November. 77 agencies have signed up, 30 of which are outside London. Now, the deadline to sign up has passed, but but if you are super keen to take part, please do have a quiet word and we can see what can be arranged. The more school children we can inform, inspire and engage with, the stronger our talent pipeline and the more enriched our industry will be.

Training the next generation of creatives

On training, the IPA Creative Essentials Certificate is in development under Karen now, with the intention of launching it in a year’s time, in late spring of 2026.  

In the meantime, there is a selection of courses available to help members create great work for clients. The Advanced Application of AI In Advertising has been a popular addition to the IPA programme recently; it is running virtually at the beginning of next month and will be repeated later this year. Creative Brief Writing Essentials is an online course running at the beginning of October. Brilliant Creative Brainstorming works best face to face and is happening at the IPA at the end of September, but it can also be run around the UK where there’s demand. And a couple of other courses will be piloted: one on commercial creativity, and the other on inspiring, nurturing, evaluating and protecting creative work.

So, to draw all that to a conclusion, I wanted to highlight one particular stat from Karen’s address: the creative sector contributes a vital £40 billion to the UK economy and supports 4 million jobs across the country. And 60% of those are outside of London. So that’s us! 

It’s a fantastic honour to hold this role, and I’m looking forward to playing my part in championing, celebrating and supporting world-beating creativity advertising & marketing industry around the UK.

Thank you for listening. 

The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and were submitted in accordance with the IPA terms and conditions regarding the uploading and contribution of content to the IPA newsletters, IPA website, or other IPA media, and should not be interpreted as representing the opinion of the IPA.