For all the change that can come with a new chief creative officer, Howatson+Company’s recently promoted Richard Shaw has made one thing clear: don’t expect too much change.
Shaw, who stepped into the chief creative role earlier this month, said his first priority is less about putting his own personal stamp on the department and more about giving its creative talent greater room to do its best work.
“The plan is to enable people to elevate a bit more,” Shaw said.
Shaw said the shift will see more creative responsibility pushed across the agency’s senior ranks, rather than concentrated with its top creative leadership.
“We’ve got an awesome layer of group CDs and CDS,” he said.
“I want to make it everyone’s job to lift the work, not just the responsibility of two people in the agency,” he said.
While Shaw remains available to teams when needed, he said giving its creative talent more room to grow was the starting point.
“Giving them space to grow was the start, and there’s plenty more things to come.”
While Shaw is changing how creative responsibility is distributed internally, when asked whether the indie’s signature “no in-house style” rule would change under his leadership, Shaw’s answer was emphatic.
“Absolutely not.”
For Shaw, the whole point of rejecting a house style is not to avoid having a creative point of view, but to ensure the work starts with the brand rather than the agency.
“We don’t want to impose a Howatson+Company view on a brand. It needs to be the brand’s personality first and foremost, not a point of view on how we like to do work,” he said.
That becomes particularly important as the agency continues to work across some of Australia’s biggest brands, winning the highly coveted CommBank account in June.
One of the biggest shifts underway at Howatson+Company may have less to do with creative style and more to do with how that creativity is produced.
Shaw is “all in” on AI.
Rather than viewing the technology as a way to cut production costs, he sees it as a means of expanding what agencies are able to make within budgets that previously imposed much tighter limitations.
“If you take a production budget where it would be, at best, a one-day shoot to sustain a campaign for three months, now, with the right creative, the right craft, you can execute that in AI and create hundreds of assets where you were quite limited before that,” he said.
But the increased use of AI does not mean Shaw expects traditional production to disappear.
Howatson+Company will continue working with directors, production companies and traditional shoots, while bringing different skill sets into the creative process as AI becomes more prominent.
The agency has already appointed executive story director Paul Meates, with Shaw pointing to the need for people who understand how to shape a piece of work beyond simply generating an image or film.
The technology may change, but the creative bar does not.
“However much we lean into AI, quality never fails,” Shaw said.
“There’s a H+Co standard that no matter how we produce work, we have to hit that.”
And while the industry continues to chase increasingly edgy and attention-grabbing work, Shaw has another priority: fun.
“In the quest for creativity and edginess, one thing we might have lost sight for a little bit is just sheer enjoyment,” he said.
For mass brands in particular, he argued that advertising should leave people feeling positive rather than prove how creatively provocative a brand can be.
That philosophy feeds into what Shaw sees as another imperative in his new role: the next generation of creative talent.
Despite industry-wide concerns that AI could remove traditional entry-level jobs through which young creatives develop their careers, Shaw believes Howatson+Company has a responsibility to continue feeding juniors through.
“Eventually I’m going to die, and if there’s no one coming through, who maintains the standard?” he said.
Shaw believes the value of human judgement will increasingly lie in taste, curation and knowing which ideas are worth pursuing.
“You can generate everything, but there’s still got to be a human selection process that picks the right one.”
Ultimately, Shaw said clients should not expect a radically different Howatson+Company.
“Hopefully, nothing,” he said when asked what would change.
That may sound like somewhat of an underwhelming answer for the newly minted CCO. However, it is arguably the clearest indication of where Shaw sees the agency going.
The ambition remains the same, to make the same highly creative work, while the way the agency gets their continues to shift.
“One of our mottos is care fiercely. The fierce is a determination to be the best in the world for ourselves and our clients, and the care is caring the people around us as we do it.”
And perhaps the most important takeaway, Shaw wants the department to remember that advertising is supposed to be enjoyable.
“I genuinely want the creative to all be making the most interesting work of their lives, but also with a greater sense of collaboration and enjoyment,” he said.
With major works new expected across CommBank, Vodaphone and the indie’s wider client roster, Shaw’s first year as a solo chief creative is set to be less about changing the agency’s creative identity and more about seeing how far he can push it.
