The Way I See It: Nick Law

As a child, Nick Law’s “limited ambitions” included playing rugby for Australia, but he soon graduated from tackling mates in the yard to tussling with typography, design, client briefs and ultimately the very definition of what makes a modern creative agency.

During his 16-year tenure at R/GA as Bob Greenberg’s right-hand man, he’s masterminded such innovations as Nike+ FuelBand and Beats Music for Beats by Dre, overseen the agency’s rise from a “poxy little digital production company” to a multi-award-winning creative powerhouse and one-time Cannes Lions Agency of the Year, and powered his way up to vice-chairman and global CCO. Put the former feral kid from Sydney’s Northern Beaches in a scrum, and he’ll always come out on top...

I was born in 1966. 

I’m from Sydney, but my accent has pretty much been destroyed. Soon, I’ll have spent more time outside Australia than inside it. 

My earliest memory is of a house party, and adults peering over the crib at me. I remember them trying to calm me down, with cocktails in their hands, and then disappearing, and my frustration at my inability to tell them to stay. 

My mum’s a nurse and my dad was a political correspondent for the ABC, Australia’s version of the BBC. He was a painter as well as a writer, so I suppose I got my creative [streak] from him.

The best way to describe my childhood would be 'feral'. I grew up in the Northern Beaches [the northern coastal suburbs of Sydney] – a working-class area, though it’s since become very posh. My dad wasn’t around, and my mother never knew where I was, or even cared. She worked hard and was away for weeks at a time, so me and my two older brothers would just do whatever we wanted. It was the most unsupervised childhood you could imagine. I basically went to the beach and played rugby and cricket with my friends. 

My brothers gave me the nickname Grot, which basically meant filthy little animal.

As a kid I had very limited ambitions, informed mostly by what was happening in the schoolyard. I wanted to play rugby for Australia because I loved going outside and tackling people. 

I don’t think either of my parents ever saw a report card. All I did when I was at school was play sport. Not once in my high school career did I do a scrap of homework. So, by that measure, I was not at all academic. But I was captain of the first XV.

My options after high school were obviously limited by my academic achievements. I asked a friend’s dad, who was a commercial artist, how do I get a job drawing? He told me about a graphic design course at a local technical college. I made up for everything I didn’t do in high school by working like a dog for two years, and I loved every second of it. 

My first job was at a little design company set up by Lun Dyer, where I spent 18 months learning how to design corporate identities and do all the handcrafts. In 1988 I left and did what all young Australians do. I travelled through South East Asia for six months before heading to London to work. I was obsessive about my craft, and London was a great place for craft, especially typography. I sent my portfolio by ship, because it was the cheapest way. But when I arrived in London, it wasn’t there. So I got a job washing dishes. Every now and again I’d ask [at the post office]: has my portfolio arrived? They’d say no, and I’d go back to washing dishes. 

When it finally arrived, I got a series of jobs in design. From 1988 to 1991 I worked in London, then I went back to Sydney and ran my own design company, Studio Dot. After two years, I went back to London to [independent design consultancy] Pentagram. It was then it occurred to me that there was this thing called advertising, where people got paid a little more. 

As much as I have a deep affection for London, I have a fiercer love for New York. I moved here in 1994 and I’ve been in the States ever since. Even after six years I never felt like a Londoner, but I felt like a New Yorker after six months. It’s a very practical city, and people care about what you do, not where you’re from. It’s more complicated in London, because of the [social] layers. Here, people have got no time for that. They just don’t give a fuck. 

My mentors weren’t people who steered me in life, but people who had such commitment to their craft, that I really paid attention to them. Alan Fletcher, founding partner of Pentagram, was a giant of design. And there was a German typography teacher at my college who brought a sort of exotic rigour to the craft. 

The first ads that made an impression were because of silly jingles. At the time in Australia, that’s what ads were. 

The most compelling piece of advertising for me was for the bubble-gum coloured iMacs. Most students of advertising would say ‘Think Different’ was more iconic, but that wasn’t what turned Apple around. It was those ads which were basically product porn: beautiful colours and beautifully shot. There was no idea getting in the way of the thing they were selling.

My favourite campaign that I’ve worked on was the very first Nike+ FuelBand, because I was personally involved as a designer on that job, and as ECD on that account. We didn’t realise it at the time, it was an inflection point – not just for R/GA but for the industry. It opened up the aperture of what agencies could do for clients: we could build products, create audiences and define behaviours. It was a more profound way of changing a company than just pure messaging. 

The biggest change I’ve noticed in advertising, in relation to traditional agencies, is that they used to be the partner for a brand. But they no longer have that singular relationship with the client that they used to. They boxed themselves into that relationship because of their obsession with the Bernbach model. Which has become less influential overall.

It’s astonishing that the last time the creative structure was innovated on was in the 50s, by Bernbach, when he combined art direction with writing. A model that was created mostly to make print ads better still persists today in most agencies. But the number of channels and what you can do with media has completely changed, and the idea that you can apply the same organising principle to today’s media environment is absurd.

I don’t think I was a dickhead in the early days of my career, but I was obsessive, so it would have been difficult to work with me if you wanted to go home on time. Having worked across three continents and three different industries, there’s one common thread and that was the sad soundtrack of the trash truck pulling up at 3am while I was still working. 

Before starting at R/GA 16 years ago, I’d never stayed in any job for more than 18 months. I kept flipping around. When the dot-com bubble burst, I was working at this start-up in Atlanta and came back to New York to interview with this freak, Bob Greenberg. I’d seen R/GA’s work at the Whitney [Museum of American Art] and I was very impressed. It was clear to me that the web was going to be where everything ended up, so the fact that R/GA was starting to do websites was very intriguing to me.

There was a hundred of us at the beginning, in an office in Hell’s Kitchen, and we built websites. It was more of a systematic task, very different to what traditional agencies were doing at the time. After the dot-com bubble burst, the internet didn’t go away: it started to become more ingrained in people’s behaviours. That’s when R/GA started to get connected to other things, like marketing, product, services. 

We went from doing websites to building a customisation engine so that people could customise their Nike shoes. We also did a basketballers’ network for Nike before social [media] actually existed. That got us thinking about communities and people connecting with each other, as opposed to just the company. Then Nike+ came along and we realised we were building services that could enable behaviours as opposed to just telling people what the product was about. So the web went from being a brochure to a tool, to a connector and then it became the place where all the good stuff happened. 

R/GA’s never been on the defensive. We’re always making these bets on the future while we’re simultaneously doing the things we’re doing really well. When we win Agency of the Year, or we’ve had our best financial year, that’s the right time to make big changes because you can afford to. When your business model is starting to shrink, how are you going to be able to afford to make changes?

My relationship with Bob is this: Bob is prepared to do the things we, as an agency, need to do to succeed and to go through that discomfort, and I’m prepared to go through that discomfort with him. Bob’s bravery is the thing I admire the most. He has a great systematic mind and understands how things should be structured, but more importantly he has the resolve and courage to implement that.  Since being promoted from global CCO to vice-chairman, I spend a lot of time with Bob and Barry [Wacksman EVP, global chief strategy officer] thinking about the future of the agency and the bets we’re making on the future. It’s design applied to a company, in a way. I’m still involved in the work, though Taras [Wayner] and Chloe [Gottlieb] have taken over a lot of the day-to-day running of the US, so I can concentrate on our global expansion. 

From an analogue point of view, creatives have always been better when they’ve got more data. In the course of your career you ingest and synthesise all of the mistakes you’ve made and the things that have done well. That’s data. Going to galleries, museums, keeping up with what’s going on the industry – it’s all inputs. Creativity isn’t this thing that comes out of vapour, it’s a result of you synthesising experiences and information. To me, that’s the relationship that data has with creativity, and to say you don’t need more data is like saying “I don’t need any more experiences.” But unless you have the courage to take an intuitive leap off that data, then you’re going to end up with tepid, mechanical, hollow work. 

I want to work with anyone who is really good at what they do. There’s just so much interesting talent around the world because of the democratisation of tools. It could be someone like Jony Ive, or a teenager from Chengdu, China. But I’d never work on cigarettes, or armaments brands. Or anything that’s connected to a religion, because it’s difficult to be inclusive.

The best piece of advice my mother ever gave me – and I’m paraphrasing here – was “Harden the fuck up.” 

Listen and learn, but don’t let others define you, is what I’d tell anyone hoping to enter the industry. Creative people are very susceptible to being puffed up by praise and crushed by criticism. The only way you can stop yourself from going on that rollercoaster ride is if you have a good idea of yourself. It doesn’t mean that you can’t inform that idea of yourself by listening to people’s criticism and praise, but you can’t define yourself by that.

Knowing about your own skillset, for creative people especially, is important. As creativity has transitioned from pure narrative advertising to a broader definition, I’ve found a lot of creatives trying to do things they were not very good at. Knowing what you’re good at and being honest with yourself is the most important thing.

The best day of my career was when R/GA won Agency of the Year at Cannes [in 2015], because it was a culmination of a lot of hard work, and I was surrounded by the people who I had been working with – in some cases – for decades. Also [I liked] the fact that a poxy little digital production company had all of a sudden become this powerhouse. The worst day was probably when I got sick on a pitch for an automotive client a few years ago. I remember the stress of trying to hold it together through sheer will. 

The other side of the coin to “Harden the fuck up” is that people close to me often think I’m insensitive. Creative people are actually very sensitive, and how much you show that is down to how you’ve been socialised. I had such a feral upbringing I wasn’t socialised to show gratitude or love openly. You associate that with vulnerability. But I’ve got better at it as I’ve got older. 

If I could time travel I would go back to the age of exploration in the Pacific, in the days of Captain Cook or [British botanist and explorer] Joseph Banks, before the world was completely known. Of course, it didn’t work out so well for all of the native peoples… but it would have been a lovely adventure.

I don’t believe in work-life balance: I think you need to like your work enough that it’s a part of your life. This idea that these worlds have to be separated and protected – it’s just not how I live. 

Historically, money hasn’t been very important to me; I haven’t based my decisions on it. I have more responsibilities now, so I wouldn’t go off and be a trapeze artist because all of a sudden my kids wouldn’t have shoes. But I’m also not mercenary. I think that’s one way to kill creativity.

Harm to my children, if it happened, would be my biggest fear, but I don’t think about it.

I last cried when my wife’s dad died last year. People passing away makes me cry. Although most of the people I know and my family are really fucking stubborn. They don’t seem to die. 

I’ve never thought my life was in peril even though I grew up completely unsupervised in a very dangerous country, chasing yellow-bellied black snakes down the stormwater channel, and going out in huge surf and wondering how the hell I was going to get back in.  

The best moment of my personal life? It’s pretty hard to go better than watching another human being being extruded from your good lady wife. 

I’m a true mixture of introvert and extrovert. I was a painfully shy child, but as an adult I have no fear of public speaking or going on stage. It goes back to not worrying about what people think of you. I’m social on social occasions but I don’t seek them out.

My heroes are Terry Gilliam and Dr Zeuss. My favourite filmmaker is probably [Japanese animator] Miyazaki [below]. As a parent of four kids I see a lot of Pixar-type animations but none of them are as magical as his. They capture beautiful human moments and are a bit idiosyncratic.

Arrogant and selfish people make me angry.

I don’t Google myself because I’m not interested by what’s on there: it’s basically trade stuff. [Creatives] are not really public figures. The great mind-trick about Cannes [Lions] is that people think they’re actually famous, but in reality they’re the most famous plumbers of the plumbing festival. 

The greatest human invention is language. The worst human invention is weapons. All that energy put into thinking how to make a bullet explode.

I’m unusual in my political leanings because I’m a social progressive but a fiscal conservative. So, if I was the US president for a day, I’d make people take responsibility but also be inclusive and accepting of different ways of thinking.

I don’t have any hobbies. Work. I like watching sport, I read a lot – history, non-fiction – but somehow it always doubles back to informing my work. 

My ambitions? To get through this week. 

I really don’t care how I’m remembered. As soon as I keel over, it’s not going to matter to me. I don’t even care how I’m disposed of. The singular thing I’m most proud of doing, and which may help our industry, is the re-thinking of the atomic creative team. Instead of art and copy, it’s stories and system. Getting these two different ways of thinking, working symbiotically. 

At the end of the day, other people are really all that matters. We are social beings. We don’t exist outside our collective.