‘Stop Working in Advertising.’ To Engage You Need to Entertain.

In today’s attention economy, irrelevance is the real enemy. People pay good money to avoid advertising. They don’t pay to avoid Netflix. That should tell us something.

Marketing must stop borrowing from science and start learning from show business. Entertainment understands attention, emotion and culture in ways the industry has forgotten. In this talk, Sir John Hegarty draws on decades of experience to argue that creativity must seduce again. Through provocative examples and uncomfortable truths, he explores why safe, beige thinking leads to invisibility.

This session will challenge how you capture attention, inspire more compelling work, and remind you of a simple truth: if it doesn’t entertain, it doesn’t work.

• In an age of targeting and optimisation, how do brands recapture the art of seduction and earn their place alongside the best of popular culture?
• When did data stop serving creativity and start replacing it, and how do we reverse the order before we optimise ourselves into invisibility?
• What does it take for a brand to stop behaving like an advertiser, and start acting like a movement? To create work that doesn’t feel like advertising at all, but like something you’d choose. A song you play again. A film you remember. An idea you believe in.