‘Repetitive, cliché, boring’: Sir John Hegarty on marketing’s failure of creativity
The advertising legend, who is set to headline Marketing Week’s Festival of Marketing next month, believes marketers are too in thrall of data and not operating in their role as tastemakers.
· Marketing WeekBy Josh Stephenson 23 Sep 2026 7:06 am
The better part of a decade ago, Sir John Hegarty marched into an interview and told Marketing Week that creativity was receding from the profession and it was the industry’s obsession with data that was to blame for it. How does he feel about those words now?
“If anything, it has gotten worse,” he tells Marketing Week. “We’re making a product that people increasingly dislike, and they dislike it because it’s not very entertaining. It’s repetitive, cliché, boring, all at a time when the ability to attract attention has never been more important.”
I was told that the 82-year-old advertising legend didn’t care to mince his words and true to form he was pulling no punches. But away from the bluster of his frustrations with the industry lies a deeper point: attention is at a premium and yet audiences increasingly don’t care for advertising.
He points to studies that show consumers see advertising as something that has decreased in value and is an irritant rather than additive to their lives.
“We’re disliked. Not valued. In a way it’s tragic because one of the functions of a brand is to become a part of culture,” he says.
What has caused such a decline? In part, Hegarty puts the blame on agencies and brands being staffed by “left brain thinkers”, people who understand a spreadsheet but “don’t really get an idea”.
He recalls a lunch he had with Pixar founder John Lasseter who told him a healthy creative industry needs creative people at the top of it. The idea resonates with Hegarty who sees people relying on data to make decisions and ignoring creativity.
“We’ve got all these people running large organisations that look at data and think data has the answer,” says Hegarty. “Data doesn’t have the answer. Data is knowledge. It’s interesting, sure, but it doesn’t imagine tomorrow. That’s what marketing should be doing.”
There will be no shortage of critics who will disagree with Hegarty’s assessment that data is doing harm to marketing. That a data-rich culture has led marketers to reach new levels of effectiveness and lower wastage. Hegarty, though, believes the fact most product launches still end in failure shows the limits that data has in creating successful brands.
“Look at how something like 95% of new product launches fail,” he explains. “Whatever the figure is, it’s something like that, and it’s been fairly consistent over the last 20 years. And you go, but wait a minute, if you’re so good and you’ve got more tools and data, why hasn’t that improved? Why hasn’t that got better?”
The ‘creative dividend’? More like creative accountingHe believes the one metric marketing has been ignoring that could make a real difference to their business is taste. Look at the fashion industry, he says, there is something entirely dependent on taste and whether it captures what the public wants at any given time.
Likewise, the motor industry. He recalls working with Audi in 1999 around the launch of its iconic Audi TT where he was ready to speak with the team about leading with technology only to be told he had misunderstood what the product was.
“It was the look that was the leap – and they were absolutely right,” he remembers. Marketing has stopped accounting for those moments, he believes, and it is to the detriment of the industry.
“They’ve got the science and the data and everything else, but it looks like shit, they’re not in any way imbued with that sense of the importance of how it looks and feels,” he says. “And in a world which is oversupplied with everything, the decision-making process often comes down to that. Do I like the look of it? Do I feel it is great?”
Taste, of course, is something that can’t really be measured. Perhaps, in many ways, that is the point. But creativity is as much about distinctiveness as it is about anything else and, for Hegarty, if everyone has access to the same data then how do you stand out? It’s a question he feels too many marketers are avoiding.
What’s old is new again
There is something of a trend in modern marketing to look back at the campaigns of the past and reimagine them for a new generation. There’s two ways to look at this: one, that brands are smartly re-engaging with old lines for nostalgia and recognition alike, or two, that a return to the past showcases a dearth of creativity in the present.
“We’ve always had that with advertising. That eagerness of when do we stop that campaign and move on to something else. I always think we move on too quickly,” says Hegarty.
Rather than chastise marketers for looking at what worked in the past, Hegarty encourages it, noting that if you had a “good relationship” with some creative in the past, it then becomes about how you “refresh that” for a new audience.
He points to James Bond as an example outside of the marketing industry, a franchise that has had the same core idea for decades, even done to the same piece of music repeating over and over, but something that is being constantly reinvented.
The Marketing Week Podcast: System1’s chief growth officer on moving creative effectiveness forward“It’s very hard to become a part of culture when you keep changing unnecessarily,” he explains. “You see John Lewis go back to ‘Never Knowingly Undersold’, never knowing how stupid it was to stop doing it in the first place. Why did you change from that? It’s a failure of imagination, a failure of understanding how brands are built, we have an industry of people who really don’t know how it works.”
Hegarty puts at least some of the blame for that on a new generation of marketers who have grown up on digital platforms and feel they don’t have to talk to people who “aren’t going to buy their product” because that makes their spend more “efficient and focused”. But this, he believes, completely misunderstands how brands are built.
“A brand is made not just by the people who buy it, but by the people who know about it,” he says. “And, I guarantee you, 90% of marketing people don’t understand that.”
How can brands begin to turn this around? For a start, brands need to start thinking like a movement. Hegarty points to the great art movements in history, from the Dadaists to the Surrealists, who had a manifesto of what they stood for.
“Some of them were pretty daft but at least they had something,” he jokes, encouraging all marketers to sit down and write a manifesto that details what they believe in and what the brand is about.
“I see lots of brands who just seem to have no purpose. They provide a need, but they don’t create a want,” he says. “How do I create want? That’s based on taste, on ideas, on creativity and on all the things that brands should be employing – but they’re not.”
Sir John Hegarty will be appearing at Marketing Week’s Festival of Marketing on Wednesday, 14 October as a keynote speaker. To book tickets, visit the website.