Taste, Tech, and Transformation
All Executive Creative Directors can make great advertising.
Fewer can build the agencies and teams that make the best work happen across the board.
Fewer still understand how GenAI reshapes standards, speed and the creative edge.
That’s my Venn diagram of capability.
Think of it as a tribrid of taste, tech, and transformation: Award-winning creator. GenAI leader. Agency builder. All proven at scale.
Executive Creative Director & AI Creative Systems Leader
OK, the main feather in my cap is that I spent eight years transforming the creative reputation at OLIVER UK within The Brandtech Group. From delivering the first Gold awards to the first AI category podium, from winning global brands to designing an AI accelerator that turned creative sceptics into specialists.
It’s also where I got serious about AI, and chose to redirect my career right into it…
AI is the new M.O for creativity
For me, AI is already the modus operandi for creativity. Whether the stack is Pencil, Adobe, or a node-based kit bash of the best platforms, the new creative leadership skill is about AI orchestration without killing taste or originality.
And for creatives, crucially, it means they’re never just in the loop – they’re firmly holding the leash.
What got me here
I grew up in Wellington, landed in London, and have built my career building brands through integrated advertising campaigns. AKA brand response, 360 thinking – or performance advertising. I’ve got Cannes Lions & a swag of other awards on my shelf, 25 years of conceptual creative and copywriting craft behind me, and large-agency department leadership under my belt.
After twenty years inside WPP and Omnicom networks – including Ogilvy, Harrison Troughton Wunderman and Proximity BBDO – OLIVER came along in 2017. Back then they were known as “the home of in-house” – very good at building efficient, embedded teams, less known for standout creativity and effectiveness.
They hired me as UK ECD. I led near 400 creatives and built embedded agencies with the likes of Barclays, The Guardian, Boots, Ford and Danone.
Of course, I still love shipping signature campaigns, and bringing the best out of talent. And I’ve been fortunate to win awards on every client I’ve directly worked across.
But, I’ve learned that the real work is partnering with brands to build the talent pods, workflows, playbooks and creative culture that raise the ambition and effectiveness across thousands of performance-driving pieces. Awards follow and, gratifyingly, it’s often more from getting the system wiring right, than random sparks of genius.
That system, allied to my creative experience and brought to life within AI, forms the blueprint that I’m now bringing to other brands and platforms.
What I do now
I’m here to make the creative work better – and the creatives work better. And I use the same principles and methodologies I’ve honed for getting the best out of creative talent to successfully train, ingest and instruct AI platforms and end to end workflow processes as well.
I work directly with AI platforms and ambitious brands with serious in-house capability – or serious intent. Ideally, that’s leading a UK or EMEA AI creative lab from London, or modernising an embedded operation with GenAI in the engine and the creatives to make it fly.
I’m not the person you hire for fireworks and no follow-through. I’m interested in creative ambition tied to operational reality – ideas that can survive brand challenges, legal guardrails, platform rules and budget cycles – and still feel fresh and unexpected when they hit the world.
I haven’t kissed goodbye to agencies, it’s just that the frontier I’m most excited to be chasing is where AI creativity goes beyond advertising communications and takes brands into new products, services and experiences.
And I’m as happy discussing this in the room with Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) and engineers as with Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) and creatives.
If your organisation wants to fire up the quality of your creative product, or ramp up your pivot to AI- powered creation, then that’s the conversation I’m here for:
Let’s chat
Find out what I can do for you.
Use the form, or hit me directly on robkavanagh(at)gmail.com
Locations:
London & Virtually