Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing & Innovation Officer, RPA (Los Angeles, USA)
The future of advertising is ugly. Literally. Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing & Innovation Officer at RPA, Tim Leake will convince you that ugly sells better than anything else in today’s advertising industry. He declares that high-budget productions and polished visuals are a thing of the past because the audience nowadays demands authenticity and rawness.
“We, the creatives, have been overdressing for the party for too long,” says Leake, pointing out the increasing consumer interest in ads that don’t promote unattainable perfection but are purposefully ‘ugly’. He came to this conclusion after a 20-year-long career of leveraging creativity and helping brands, including Target, Ikea and Walmart, transform their business and thrive in a constantly changing digital world.
As consumers spread content that feels raw and unpolished one meme at a time, the advertisers need to catch up and transform the swan back into an ugly duckling. Leake explores why people seem to connect with ugly much more than with beauty and craftsmanship and how to turn ugly into a creative opportunity.
Tim Leake: Ugly Sells
Expect to get ugly at DK2020 where Leake will give his provocative Cannes Lions talk Ugly Sells – he will delve deep into the connection between production value and viewer engagement and consumers’ aversion to ads that look like ads. He claims that we are training audiences to skip ads, so stop trying to sell products to people and start connecting with people through the power of ugly.