5 Minutes with… Nick Pringle

Adobe XD is a proud supporter of LBB. As part of the sponsorship of the ‘5 Minutes with…’ channel, we spend time with some of the most innovative and creative minds in the industry.

Today, we hear from R/GA’s CCO for EMEA, Nick Pringle. A multiple Cannes Lions-winning creative leader, Nick has built his reputation on the back of head-turning work for the likes of Samsung, McDonald’s, AMEX, and others. Over the years he’s won 16 Lions, 8 OneShow pencils, and 7 D&AD pencils for work including Samsung’s Fornite Galaxy Skin, Volvo’s Highway Robbery, McDonald’s AR app: TrackmyMaccas and Volkswagen’s Nightmare Parks campaign.

Here, he reflects on both his own past and what the industry’s future might hold. That includes his remarkably daring path into the world of advertising, and why - unlike the metaverse - talking about AI isn’t going to be like “farting in an elevator” for some time yet… 

LBB> Nick, let's start at the very beginning. What kind of a kid were you growing up, and at what point did you start to think of yourself as a creative person? 

Nick> My Mum would say I was quite difficult. I was bored, fidgety, and harboured an overly active imagination. Of course you can look back now and say I was being ‘creative’, but in practice I simply had a high amount of energy which contributed to a habit of getting myself into trouble. 

It wasn’t until much later in life that I even became aware that a career as a ‘creative’ existed. I grew up in the countryside, and it was a somewhat sheltered lifestyle. I was one of six kids, and so nobody invited us anywhere for obvious reasons! I remember being told in Careers Advice that, if I really knuckled down and applied myself, I could manage the local bank branch. That was the world that I existed in. 

LBB> I’ve read that you were inspired to get into the industry by ‘Ogilvy on Advertising’. So how did that come about? 

Nick> Ha, yes that is true. I was studying Geography at University at the time, because that was my best A-level result. Not a good result, let’s be clear - just my best. I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to do, and that was a problem given that my Dad was regularly going on at me to get a plan for my life together. 

In the summer holidays I worked at a factory packing books. And, by sheer chance, I found myself packing about 20,000 copies of Ogilvy on Advertising. I liked the look of it so, being completely honest, I nicked one. It looked like a much more interesting world to work in than anything else I’d been exposed to, so I took it home to show my Dad and told him “this is what I’m going to do”. 

I applied to about 20 internships as a result, and one of them came back accepting me. That’s how I got my start. The funny thing is, I never actually read the whole of Ogilvy on Advertising - it was just my get-out-of-jail card! 

LBB> Fast-forward to modern times - you recently wrote that talking about the metaverse at Cannes was like "farting in an elevator". Just one year after it was the talk of the town, should we consider the metaverse as a failed idea? 

Nick> I stand by that comment, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s a totally failed idea. I think there is now a branding issue with the term ‘metaverse’, given it has unfortunately become tied to the collapse of crypto last summer. 

But we are still getting requests from clients related to helping people move between physical and digital worlds. So that aspect of it is still relevant. I just think that, during its initial hype cycle, the metaverse became focused on a select few platforms which were really interesting but ultimately more relevant to investors and technologists than they were to the mass market. 

The conversation around digital worlds is going to continue, however. I’m sure of that. 

LBB> Meanwhile, AI is the big new buzzword and focal point for industry chatter. You've suggested that the tech might spark a switch from ads being 'attention-driven' to 'intimacy-driven'. What did you mean by that, and why would it be desirable for brands and/or people? 

Nick> AI is a buzzword, but it’s substantiated itself in a really significant way already. There’s more utility and financial gain connected to AI - it’s easy to see how it can make savings for businesses, for example. 

From an advertising perspective, we’ve spent a long time now operating in the attention space. It’s been a question of shouting louder than anyone else, and over time this has become more personalised and programmatic. But given how AI has mastered language models, you can now have very human, realistic, and intimate conversations with a piece of technology. The implications for our relationships with Nike, Patagonia, or any other brand you might want to insert, are huge. We will soon be able to have an intimate conversation with a brand that can be delivered at mass scale. 

The story of the last ten years or so in this industry has often been about trying to deliver that kind of mass personalisation and, a lot of the time, failing. But the level of interaction and dialogue you can have with an AI is so sophisticated that brands can be having a zillion conversations with a zillion people at the same time. 

LBB> But if we’re in a world where brands are saying different things to different people simultaneously, what does that mean for brand building? How can you maintain a consistent brand voice? 

Nick> That’s a good question. It is still going to be important to maintain a coherent brand. It feels like we’ve been forever saying that brands need to “be clear” and “be singular” but that takes on a whole new level of importance once the media landscape has fragmented down to an individual level. 

You need to be able to train an AI to be a reliable ambassador for your brand. That becomes much easier when you have clear brand data points and information to feed it. If you do that, then these AI language models will be able to build your brand through every single interaction they have. 

LBB> So at Cannes 2024, will talking about AI be like farting in an elevator? If not, what's the difference? 

Nick> I don’t think so. I hope I’m not wrong about that - and we can come back to this conversation if I am - but as I say there’s so much more utility on display already from AI as opposed to the metaverse. 

We can’t overlook the potential for cost-saving. That’s always a great driver for uptake in technology. Whereas the metaverse was asking people to add more, hire more, and learn more, AI is offering us a chance to work more efficiently. 

And I think this is a good thing for creatives, by the way. Because if AI can take away some of the busywork - translating ideas into different assets on different platforms, for example - then that only gives agencies more time to do the kind of top-line thinking that really matters and excites us. 

LBB> Have there been any ads released which have caught your eye and perhaps exemplified the potential of AI in our industry? 

Nick> That’s tricky because, as I say, I think some of AI’s most profound impacts are going to be felt in the back end in terms of how work gets made rather than in the end product. 

Having said that, there was good work on display at Cannes. The Stella Artois probability, for example, was a great piece of creative thinking. However they tended to be linked to AI for the sake of PR rather than because it was an intrinsic part of the campaign. 

I don’t think there are many use cases in our industry yet of AI creating something that’s of genuine value to a client or customer. I think we’ll start to see that next year. At R/GA we are using it a lot to help our workflow for image creation for a number of clients - including one project I can’t quite talk about yet. But watch this space. 

LBB> Finally, imagine you had a time machine and the ability to travel back and give your past self some career advice. What advice would you give, and why? 

Nick> I’d say to understand how this business makes money. Perhaps that’s a bit of a dry answer, but I came into this industry incredibly green, naive, and not thinking about this sort of thing. If you understand how a business makes money, you’ll see the opportunity. So I’d encourage myself to figure out how the machine works earlier on. 

Oh, and actually read Ogilvy on Advertising! There’s probably a lot of useful insights in there…