Transforming OLIVER
The most significant creative achievement of my career is the creative transformation I led at OLIVER UK. But, there’s no one killer picture that can capture it all. So, here are 1,000 words instead…
You may not be overly familiar with my name. But, if you know OLIVER’s in-house story, you’ve already seen the impact of my work. I was a key part of transforming OLIVER UK from production-led to creative-first, and then AI-enhanced.
From the home of in-house – to the new model for AI creativity
When OLIVER hired me as Executive Creative Director in 2017, their model was scaling fast – but the creative reputation was still catching up. If you knew OLIVER at this point, you probably thought “efficient in-house studio builders”, not “award-winning creative partner”.
We had over 50 clients and almost as many on-site agencies throughout the UK. The creative teams were embedded with clients, doing solid work, but with little connective tissue. I’d spent 20 years inside WPP and Omnicom networks and had rarely seen real cross-network collaboration happen.
At OLIVER, I saw the chance to build the opposite. A collaborative creative community, immersed with clients, connected across markets, with a unified ambition to create outstanding work.
“Rob led a period of accelerated creative growth at OLIVER UK. He inspires creatives by leading through the work – raising the bar on quality, building the systems to sustain it, and shaping a genuinely collaborative creative culture. Not just good individuals, but a stronger machine. Strong leader, strong operator.”
Creative growth, and scale
OLIVER is the world’s first and only company to exclusively design, build, and run bespoke in-house creative agencies and marketing ecosystems for brands. As such, each embedded team is its own individual agency.
My job as ECD wasn’t just to inspire and equip them to make better advertising, it was to turn a fragmented map into a genuine creative network. It was about building a creative culture capable of thriving alongside the complex, political, high-speed reality of modern business and brands.
A guiding principle was, you may not have ‘creative’ in your job title, but it’s in everyone’s job description.
My brief was simple but demanding:
Raise creative quality and establish a genuine creative reputation.
Help bring in new clients and build bespoke embedded agencies for major brands.
Turn a production-led model into an orchestrated creative network, with teeth.
And then do all this to the power of AI.
Over the years I helped set up dozens of bespoke embedded agencies for clients we’d won – each tailored to the brand’s exacting needs.
And then most recently, I helped amplify their capabilities and outcomes with Generative AI.
Let me show you how I did it.
What OLIVER gave me.
Where I’m taking it.
My time at OLIVER helped transform their creative reputation, and it transformed my core capabilities too.
I left OLIVER with three things:
• A tested playbook for inspiring and transforming creative teams and the advertising work they create.
• Deep, hands-on experience of embedded agency models, and particular expertise tech, financial services, and other complex sectors.
• A first-mover and maker advantage with AI – and a clear point of view on how it should reshape creative work.
It’s where my creative tribrid idea comes from: taste, tech, and transformation. That’s an award-winning creator. GenAI leader. And Agency builder.
The most valuable thing I’ve learned and experienced is how AI has the power to endear a brand with consumers in ways that stretch far beyond traditional marketing communications and ads. It can help transform every facet of creativity and innovation in an organisation and create entirely new products, services and experiences for brands.
That is the frontier where I want to work: with AI platforms and AI-ambitious brands, to establish, orchestrate and lead the next generation of creative systems, innovations and work that will define the next decade.