Why There’s Room for Creativity in the ‘Corporate Beast’

"There is a sense that there is a creative business and there is a business over here that is not creative." Nobody in the latter half of business in that sentence should agree with that distinction, but it was a useful way of seeing the industry to frame Andrew Sandoz’s D&AD Festival keynote, ‘Creativity & the Corporate Beast’. Because as partner and UK chief creative officer (CCO) of Deloitte's creative digital consultancy Deloitte Digital, Andrew is a creative leader working from the belly of the corporate beast.

With half an hour to rattle through what he admitted were too many slides, Andrew made a caveat that his talk would be similar to listening to a podcast at 1.5x the usual speed. And he lived up to that expectation. Also in this disclaimer stage of his talk, the former founder of UK hot shop Work Club joked that when people ask him what working as a creative leader at Deloitte is like, he tells them 'extraordinary' because that can mean all sorts of things.

The good news from the ‘corporate beast’ world for the creative D&AD audience is that the business world is obsessed with creativity. And increasingly so. He pointed to the World Economic Forum ‘Future of Jobs Report’ for 2023, which shows creativity as the second most sought-after skill in 2023 and the number-one skill on the rise. Which may be a surprise to anyone who has seen the number of times AI is written in conference programmes in recent years.

But Andrew is also a realist about the gears of capitalism and how they turn. More than creativity, businesses are obsessed with growth, he asserted. However, the challenge to the ideology of growth for its own sake has been becoming louder too: "At what expense is that growth?" he asked. "This has become a troubling word."

What the hard-nosed business world has done in response, he suggested, is get creative and reframe it as 'value creation'. Creative people should thank the business world for that reframing, he said, because it allows space for business arguments to be made for value beyond the monetary. Creative agencies, whether attached to a Big-Four consulting firm or not, can now tell businesses that there are other kinds of value to be sought – functional, psychological and social. That has meant businesses are more into creativity. That doesn't mean they understand it. But that's good for the people at D&AD, Andrew said. 

"People deny their creativity rather than embrace it,” he said. Outside of the kind of businesses like those in the D&AD audience, people don’t feel they can access it unless someone tells them they are creative. But Andrew and his team at Deloitte Digital are confident that they can unlock the creativity of everyone and everything. He has spent a career doing that, he says. And he’s seen the power for building value within businesses.

"A new act starts as a new thought, and anything new stirs an emotion and needs explanation," Andrew reflected. It’s a chain reaction he’s witnessed time and time again with clients – the “psychoactive Powerpoint” that he jokingly compares to LSD (a riff on the pharmaceutical company Sandoz, who produced LSD for research purposes – a reference always welcome at a creative festival). He talked about how the energy changes in the room when there's an idea. "This is mythical for me."

When it’s what you’re selling to clients, it’s useful to have a definition of creativity though, rather than a memory of energy in a room. So Andrew shared that he “spent about a week” working out what his definition of creativity is. He landed on this: 

"Creativity is the process of having and making ideas."

He broke that down further. Having ideas consists of imagination – “a new way of doing something” – and communication – “a new way of explaining something (new)”. Making those ideas comes afterwards.

People say ideas are fragile, Andrew disagrees. "I think they're slippery," he said. “They don't break, they just get away from you.” He conjured the image of the Romantic poet having to run down a mountain to get a pen and paper before the idea disappeared. “I sort of believe it all,” he said.

"I guess I am a management consultant, I've come up with a framework." It says that the process of an idea has two parts:

1. What to say

2. How to say it

Both are creative skill sets. And both are required. In part one, “get it down” is the task that Andrew knows “gives creatives the sweats” – the bit where they have to synthesise ideas that have been swirling around a brief into a tight paragraph of prose based on cultural, human, market and brand truths. "We use that structure all day, every day,” said the Deloitte Digital CCO.

The second part of the framework, once you’ve got it down, is “lift it up” – how do you want to express that thought? 

Even though Deloitte pays Andrew’s salary, he confessed that "they work for me in my mind." He has an agenda that he's created and the huge corporation he works for allows him to pursue that.

What he wants to do, and Deloitte allows him the resources to do is: "Take the idea out of advertising and put it in the centre of business." That's what he says all the time. But he worries that the advertising industry is “losing that superpower.” It’s powerful and very welcome (“for the right price”) in businesses. “What if you take that peripheral power and put it right at the heart?”

People like Andrew think a brand is a financial asset ("course we do,” he said with a wry smile). And that, he said, is why he got into Deloitte – he could get into the brand, not just the advertising. It was also a way that he thought he could help brands change themselves for a more sustainable future.

Together with the audience, Andrew did something not very ‘corporate beast’ at all – he led the room in a prayer for creativity, situating that line in the context of the world today. It ended with another line he always uses: "Now is the time for creativity." It’s a line that doesn’t end. But it gets more urgent as the world feels more and more in the throes of crises. The energy in the room thing he said about creativity? We felt it. And the man bringing it works for the world’s largest accountancy firms.