Sir John Hegarty’s verdict: advertising is now a product people pay to avoid

The BBH co-founder used his Cannes Lions festival session to argue that the industry’s real problem is not attention, data or AI. It is that people have stopped liking the work.

Sir John Hegarty has spent his career insisting that advertising only works when it is worth watching. At Cannes Lions this year, in a Day 4 session at the Debussy Theatre titled “Stop Working in Advertising. To Engage You Need to Entertain,” he sharpened that into an accusation. The industry, he said, has spent two decades building something audiences actively try to escape, and then acts surprised when they do.

“Brand is the most valuable piece of real estate in the world,”

“It’s a corner of someone’s mind.” Culture is what makes that corner valuable: land a brand in culture and it lifts sales, share price and the fame that pays for both. The problem is what the industry now does to get there. Data, tracking and attention-harvesting are formidable tools bolted to a losing strategy. “People are paying good money to avoid advertising,”

Sir John Hegarty

A worse product, and the research agrees

“We are making a worse product. There’s no question about that. All research points to it.” Audiences are disillusioned with advertising and say so plainly. He set that against a flat commercial truth: “I’ve never read a business book that says, to succeed, make a worse product.”

The line he drew was between what people reject and what they choose. Nobody is abandoning Netflix, or the World Cup, or anything they love. They are switching off the work that gives them no reason to stay. “They’ve fallen out of love with us,” he said.

Promotion has crowded out persuasion

From craft, Hegarty moved to economics. Advertising has quietly rewritten its own job, he argued, swapping persuasion for promotion: the difference between telling someone a thing is worth trying and pushing it in front of them until they look. He tied that to the growth problem economists have chewed over for twenty-five years. Advertising is supposed to create desire, build brands and move people to act, and in doing so to drive an economy. Take out the persuasion and the machine still turns, but it stops producing the demand that once justified it.

The lesson the industry won’t take from television

His prescription came from the business next door. Entertainment is winning the attention age, he said, because it worked out long ago that engagement depends on being entertaining, above all when the subject is one nobody asked to think about. He distilled the whole argument into a line he joked he could tour the world on: “do stuff people like.” Then he reached for recent television series, Adolescence, which turned a warning about technology and teenage boys into a drama people argued over. Mr Bates vs The Post Office, the ITV drama about the Horizon scandal, forced a twenty-year injustice into national conversation that two decades of reporting had not. A story did the work the facts could not.

The evidence, he said, is not in dispute. He cited Ipsos research showing that storytelling, distinctiveness and humour outperform the alternatives several times over, then asked why so much of the industry behaves as though it distrusts its own numbers. His answer was generational. A cohort of marketing directors raised inside the digital era knows how to launch a brand and establish it, but “they don’t seem to understand how to build the brand and go beyond the boundaries of what social media can do.” The value, he reminded them, was never in the idea or the product. “It’s in the brand. That’s where the value resides.”

He granted the industry one recent success. Adidas’s five-minute World Cup film Backyard Legends, narrated by Timothée Chalamet, earned his praise as proof that long-form persuasion still moves people when the craft holds. The reproach behind it was his own generation’s discipline: they once compressed a persuasive idea into sixty seconds and shifted opinion with it. If a toilet-paper company such as Who Gives A Crap can turn a grudge purchase into something people discuss, he asked, what is anyone else’s excuse.

Put creativity at the top, or expect nothing to change

The structural argument was the one Hegarty plainly cares about most. Walking the Croisette, he said, he found brands occupying the beach and almost no ideas on it. Fixing that means changing who runs the companies. He recalled advice from Pixar’s John Lasseter, that a creative company must have creative people at the top of it, and described the inverted pyramid he ran at BBH, himself at the bottom and staff above him, his job to stop anyone getting in the way of a transformative idea. His reform for the executives in front of him was only half a joke: rename the CEO the Creative Executive Officer.

He finished on the project he is betting on. Agenda Earth, launched on World Environment Day with the United Nations, is a band made up of endangered animals that sings about the climate instead of lecturing about it, an attempt to hold attention on a permanent crisis the calendar shrinks to a single day. It is his own reply to his own brief: entertain, and the engagement follows. On AI, which he could not get through a talk without raising, he was sharp. The tragedy, he said, is that business leaders treat it to cut costs rather than widen what is possible, a collaborator mistaken for a tool. He insisted he remains an optimist, though his closing line was aimed at an audience he thinks has grown too content to be merely tolerated. The industry, he said, will have to be loved more to succeed. Whether a business built to measure everything can bring itself to be liked is the question he left on the stage.