A Ride on Malcolm Poynton’s Magic (Mountain) Schoolbus

After even a day sitting in the Encore hotel’s air-conditioned conference rooms, it can be easy to forget that Las Vegas, where the London International Awards is taking place this week, is in the middle of the Mojave Desert. But for the mentees of Creative LIAisons this Tuesday, that mirage was comprehensively shattered.

While the majority of the week’s conference, workshops, and mentoring sessions are taking place in the comfort of the seventh-largest hotel in the world, with all of the strange detachment from regular life that brings, the experience offered by Malcolm Poynton, global chief creative officer of Cheil, took the form of an off-site experience a short bus ride from the Las Vegas strip, into the surrounding environment that feels so at odds with the city.

Malcolm’s considered narration guided the bus-riders, addressing the screen-obsessed culture that we all find ourselves in in 2024 – one that’s even more pronounced for those of us in the marketing business (and one that he knows intimately as a creative leader whose major client is Samsung). With the advent of technologies like Vegas’ very own Sphere, he noted that “even buildings are turning into screens.”

That’s why the Cheil CCO wanted to “take the session beyond the screen” and get the assembled mentees from agencies around the world to “reconnect us with the real world” and consider how “brand success comes from what you make people feel,” not just what marketing makes people think.

He referenced recent research into human decision making which he concluded “shows that there’s no such thing as a ‘rational’ decision.” Rather, it is feelings that drive our decisions, he asserted.

As the bus cruised along the Interstate-15 into a landscape dominated more by cacti than concrete, Malcolm’s narration turned to an advertising example – that of small start-up sneaker brand Allbirds, which began in 2016, gaining rapid hype for its 100% sustainable wool trainer. “That’s a real breakthrough in an industry that’s mostly petrochemical based and has a pretty bad track record,” he said, going on to chart the rise and fall of the company’s share price, which this year dropped below the NASDAQ minimum compliance level for 30-days straight.

The reason Malcolm offered is that while the product was pioneering, the brand left consumers cold. “There’s not a lot there for people to feel,” he suggested to the bus of up-and-coming creatives.

A brand “in direct contrast to Allbirds” is Liquid Death – a brand built almost entirely on chutzpah and attitude, openly admitting that the product (canned water) is not what they’re really selling. “You can feel the attitude of the brand” just from the packaging, let alone its advertising, Malcolm remarked. “It makes all of their competitors look boring.”

The bus continued in the direction of Goodsprings (exciting for this ‘Fallout: New Vegas’ fan) and our tour guide expanded his thesis with a brand story that he was part of. “Back in the early 2000s I was leading Ogilvy in the UK and we launched the ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’ for Dove. It’s still running today so you probably know it,” said Malcolm. “But what you probably don’t know is that before the campaign launched, Dove was sold in the soap aisle of retail stores. The ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’ shifted Dove into the beauty aisle and catapulted it to become a billion-dollar brand, which added huge value to Unilever’s stock price.”

That campaign was based on how people feel, he argued – specifically, how women are made to feel about their bodies. That campaign’s success, he said, “was a direct result of making women feel greater levels of self-esteem.” By broadening the stereotypes of beauty and portraying beauty via real women, Ogilvy made women feel positive about themselves and “started building their self-esteem instead of taking it away.”

Going back to Allbirds, Malcolm invited the Creative LIAisons mentees to consider how a sustainable brand like that can flounder in such environmentally-conscious times. Meanwhile Nike, which has “had all kinds of media attention about [its] sweatshop labour issues” and “a crazy carbon footprint,” can still be a preference for consumers. “Quite simply because Nike’s brand is built on how they make people feel,” he argued, pointing to the way that platforms like ‘Just Do It’ and culture-defining moments like ‘Dream Crazy’ can’t help but make people feel something about the brand.

Zoom out from the bus. At this point it was nearing its destination – Seven Magic Mountains, an installation created by Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone. “An exploration at the intersection of nature and human intervention; of the artificial and the natural,” as the Cheil CCO put it. Seven stacks of rocks, precariously balanced and painted in colours that both reflect the natural surroundings and feel somehow at odds with them.

Then Malcolm set a four-part task as the group was invited to leave the bus and do the following:

1. Turn their phones to flight mode and leave them in their bags or pockets

2. Remove any earbuds or headphones

3. Remove sunglasses

4. Remain silent for 10 minutes

“Open your eyes, open your senses and open your heart. Slow your breathing and immerse yourself in the analogue world of colour, frequency and feelings,” he said. “For some of you, at first, you might just see a pile of brightly coloured rocks. And that’s OK. This is not some kind of instant digital dopamine hit so don’t expect that. It’s a deeper, more enduring experience.”

Malcolm continued his invitation to the mentees in a style not dissimilar to a guided meditation, before releasing the group of under-30s into a confluence of art, nature and feeling.

Speaking after the Magic Mountain trip, Malcolm explained to me what he expected of the session. He’s most intrigued by “what will happen as a result of it, not here but in a year – and in some cases I would say in years to come. Those creatives who walk away with something more than what you get from a slideshow.” His intention was to move people now, so that something might emerge later down the line.

“Our industry is really guilty of what we see in our client behaviour – information overload. Advertising is compromised so much by information overload that consumers can never remember. We’ve got all the research in the world that says ‘just one message at a time’ but very few brands are comfortable with that,” he said.

“How we even pass on insights and wisdom to the next generation in our industry, it’s information overload. We’re in a time when there is so much advertising, we cause everyone to attach to a screen of some kind or another.”

Pair that with the weight of effectiveness studies showing that more than the famous 50% of advertising spend is now wasted and Malcolm sees a problem that urgently needs addressing. “We must be the only industry in the world that’s gone backwards in terms of effectiveness because we’re just showered constantly with all of the touchpoints.”

As a long-term Creative LIAisons mentor, he’s met many of the recent cohorts who have only ever put out work on digital screens. “You talk to them and it’s all messaging,” he said. “Which of those brands you’re working on has had a quantum leap in terms of business performance?” He looked sceptical. “That’s why I decided to step back, look at the brands over the past years who have had quantum leaps [like Dove, Nike, Liquid Death]. These are not brands that are messaging you; they’re brands that are moving you.

“The whole point was to take time and space and bring just that one message to you. Hopefully it will give them the opportunity to elevate above the constant messaging for a client. And ideally we’ll see someone out of that cohort as the next creator of ‘Real Beauty’, a ‘Just Do It’ or a Liquid Death because they’ve got something to take from this that can bubble up in the future to move consumers with emotions that get them to respond.

Malcolm had some instant feedback from the Creative LIAisons cohort. One felt massively anxious standing under one of the towers with the big blue boulder perched precariously on top, feeling the weight of it. Someone watched on while that person was explaining that to him, slightly puzzled. “They felt something else about it,” said Malcolm. “Some people literally couldn’t stop smiling because of the feeling it creates.”

Creative LIAisons is potentially the only place that a global CCO like Malcolm can carry out this kind of event. LIA isn’t like another advertising event. “There are a number of things that are interesting about the seeming contradiction of putting LIA in Las Vegas,” he said. The physical spaces that LIA takes part in are in some way not like the Las Vegas you’d expect. 

“There is some mysterious thing that happens here where I see more jurors and mentees detaching from their work than at any other festival. When you’re in your home city, if it’s somewhere where festivals take place, there seems to be an energy that means everyone is attached and checking everything all the time. 

“We’re in the most crazy place in the world, but there’s a calmness to this space. People can detach and the whole thing becomes about creative people and creative work. It just works.”

The event - described in the programme as ‘Off-Site Creative Experience Hosted by Malcolm Poynton’ - delivered that LIA-ness on a different level. “It was totally about disconnecting, to reconnect to something bigger [...] challenging ourselves to disconnect from the cadence of everyday life, to get that deeper resonance of what it is to move a human being emotionally.”