Three weeks before his Festival of Marketing keynote, the BBH co-founder tells Marketing Week the industry makes a product people dislike, that data cannot imagine tomorrow, and that taste is the metric nobody measures.
Sir John Hegarty thinks advertising has got worse since he last said it was in trouble, and he said it was in trouble almost a decade ago. In an interview with Marketing Week published today, three weeks before he opens the Festival of Marketing, the BBH co-founder describes an industry making a product people increasingly dislike: “It’s repetitive, cliché, boring.”
His argument has three parts. The first is that the work is not entertaining, and that an industry which is disliked rather than valued has given up one of a brand’s basic functions, which is to become part of culture. The second is that data has crowded out imagination.
“Data doesn’t have the answer. Data is knowledge, but it doesn’t imagine tomorrow,” he said, pointing out that around 95 per cent of new product launches still fail despite every tool marketers now have.
The third is about who is in charge. Hegarty, who is 82, says too many companies are run by left-brain thinkers who do not really get an idea, and borrows a line from the Pixar co-founder John Lasseter that creative businesses need creative leadership. He also makes a case for taste, the quality that cannot be measured and, in his view, the one that separates brands that last from brands that merely perform. His example of a brand renewing itself without losing its identity is James Bond.
It is easy to file this under a legend grumbling, and some will. But Hegarty’s complaint lands in a specific week. The same title reported on Friday that not one FTSE 100 company has a marketer on its main board, which is his left-brain point made in a spreadsheet, and today’s IAB UK growth study is built almost entirely on the productivity gains of AI, which is his data point made in a forecast. The industry he is describing is the one the industry describes about itself.
The awkward part is that he has the evidence on his side. The IPA databank has argued for twenty years that emotional, famous campaigns outperform rational ones on every hard business measure, and Hegarty’s own Levi’s Launderette remains one of the cleanest demonstrations of an idea working as a commercial instrument. The problem was never that marketers disagree with him, it is that a boring advert with a dashboard is easier to defend in a budget meeting than a brave one without, and no keynote has yet solved that. He will have a go on 14 October.
He plans, buys and reviews advertising for a living, and helps score campaigns on the site against the same five Crown Score criteria alongside other authors and contributors.
Opening the Festival of Marketing, Hegarty set out a simple triangle for judging creative work, blamed KPIs for a sea of sameness, and admitted he once had no idea if a famous Audi ad would work.
The IPA Bellwether Report finds a net 14.3 per cent of marketers raised budgets in Q3 2026, with main media at a nine-year high, though the 2027 adspend forecast was cut.
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