What is the role of creative leaders for the communication industry? And what key insights and messages can they deliver to the public?
To answer these questions (and raise others), Cannes Lions 2022 invited some of the most relevant creative leaders in the global agency market to the “Chief Creatives on the Terrace”, a sequence of debates held during the festival, which takes place this week at France.
Today’s panel (22) received names such as the North American Madonna Badger, creative leader at Badger Agency and Judy John, global head of creativity at Edelman, who were alongside the Brazilian Eco Moliterno, from Accenture Song for America. Latin.
Madonna Badger was working with Calvin Klein when, shortly after Christmas 2011, she experienced a giant personal tragedy: she lost her parents and her three daughters, aged between 7 and 9, in a fire on December 26th.
To try to move forward, she left the market and said she found a year later, in purpose-driven advertising, a ray of hope to stay in the industry.
“It was a time to find meaning at work and generate real change. That’s because I knew I couldn’t go back to a world that basically sold jeans,” Badger said.
In 2016, she created the project “Women not Objects” — which, through creativity, fights against female objectification and exploitation, especially in communication.
Moliterno, in turn, highlighted that it is necessary to base oneself on the real needs of people’s lives, and not just consumers, when asked about the evolution of communication and new business models.
Metaverse on stage
Regarding the metaverse, for example, the Brazilian creative highlighted that this environment “will not be formed by creatives, but by creators”—referring to content creators and platform users, who are not necessarily advertisers or who have brand bias.
Eco also reinforced that we have to learn more and more from the younger ones, especially in terms of the use of new technologies.
“The biggest mistake is to look at the future with the eyes of the past. It is the young people who are building the world we will have from now on, and one of the keys to the success of new leaders is knowing how to listen more than wanting to teach”, he said.
Creativity to solve real problems
In this scenario, Madonna still reinforced the power of creative people to go far beyond bureaucratic work.
“The leader has to help his team understand what it can do, the strength it has to create. Our job is not to fill a to-do list, but to find solutions to real problems through creativity”, he declared.
