Experiments in creative success have opened the doors to a new client base

The son of a tattooist, named by his “hippy” parents after Bruce Springsteen’s guitarist, Londoner Nils Leonard was always creative. He grew up loving film, books and comics but when it came to careers, “had no real idea”.

After school he went to the jobcentre and asked if they had any jobs in advertising. They had.

He got his start as a runner in Ammirati Puris Lintas, one of the biggest agencies in the world at the time, “and that was that”, he says.

He progressed quickly from runner to junior designer, a discipline with which he fell in love. He developed a particular interest in typography, for which he credits Simon Fairweather. “I learned you could be paid for being obsessed with a craft,” he says.

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What he found particularly thrilling was that the most important people in any agency were the creative ones. Inspired by the work of Paul Belford he moved to Abbott Mead Vickers BBDO to work in the design department there.

“I learned about five years in to try to be the most valuable person in the room. Regardless of your discipline, it’s about ‘how can I be the one that unlocks it’,” he says.

Becoming that person saw him appointed chief creative officer, and then chairman, at Grey London, where he stayed until 2016, after which he went out on his own, setting up Uncommon.

“I had started to get cynical and I was doing weird things like being obsessed with money, going for a pay rise every six months and convincing myself I needed an extra day’s holiday. I was basically a pain in the arse but what I learned about myself is that you’re not really asking for that, you’re sort of saying ‘I’m not happy’ and there’s something else I’m not getting,” he explains.

Radical reassessment

The realisation prompted a radical reassessment of his life. Instead of doing amazing work 5 per cent of the time – the kind that wins awards and industry kudos, such as the groundbreaking Angina Monologues, a TV show he made in conjunction with the British Heart Foundation – what if, he wondered, he tried to work at that level of creativity 100 per cent of the time? And only with clients who would back him in doing that? “That’s the experiment,” he says.

The idea was to start an agency whose aim was not to simply “sell stuff” but to create “brands that people wish existed”, he explains.

It’s a statement of intent he put on the wall at Uncommon. More than advertising, it’s about making “reference point work”, he says, a benchmark for others.

Part of the challenge was to build a team to support that vision. Here too his standards were high. When it came to talent, good enough simply wouldn’t cut it. “We are pretty punchy here. We have a phrase, ‘no passengers’, which means there isn’t a single person in the studio that you don’t need,” he says. If someone isn’t right, they go.

For an industry increasingly struggling to attract creative talent in the face of well-paid tech jobs, that’s a challenge, particularly as the “cool” lustre the ad industry traditionally enjoyed has worn off somewhat, suggests dentsu’s Dave Winterlich, who reckons it might be time for the ad industry to turn its skills on itself.

“The industry needs to stop asking permission to be good,” agrees Leonard.

“We in the ad industry did this to ourselves. Most of us don’t make our money from creativity but from assets, content, synergy, integration, deliverables. That’s not the same thing. When we started Uncommon, we were like, I don’t give a shit what the industry thinks it is doing or selling. I don’t care what the latest LinkedIn trend is. What if the experiment was about creating a company that was known, and paid, for for being the best creative company you’ve ever worked with, and nothing else,” he says.

“Yes, of course we do assets, and of course we can talk about consistency but that’s not really what is for sale. What is for sale is the most radical form of creativity to make you matter in the world. I think that if more of the industry was selfish, it would be more valuable. It would be more sexy. I mean, what’s more attractive than not needing someone?”

Making mischief

He points to MSCHF in New York, a creative agency famed for launching the cartoonish Big Red Boots that stole the show at New York Fashion Week last year. “They are an amazing company that are now an apparel brand. They have managed to renegotiate their terms with the world, based on their output, and I just don’t think this industry is doing that,” he says.

Among the Uncommon work of which he is most proud is ITV’s landmark mental wellness campaign Britain Get Talking. “It has become a benchmark for a conversation that people weren’t having,” he says.

Its British Originals campaign for BA is another favourite, as is the out-of-home campaign for B&Q, both of which leverage humour.

At fashion week this year Uncommon debuted its own footwear, the rat boot, which secured a tonne of publicity for having stuffed rats in a platform heel.

It followed hot on the heels of work such as Dear winter, an installation made from flowers, giving winter the middle finger. He also cites the Big Gay Donation, a crowdfunding campaign it developed to get Fifa to choose gay-friendly locations for its tournaments.

Such high-profile campaigns, which it created entirely for itself, fly in the face of an industry that favours low-cost content production models above all else.

“Those things are great and companies are making a fortune out of them and fair play – but they are not creativity. So, if you are sat in this industry bemoaning the fact that it has changed, well, we changed it. And we can change it any way we want,” he adds.

“Am I worried about the ad industry? No. I’m worried about the creative industry. I’m worried about the power and the value of creativity. I think we have to renegotiate our relationship with it.”

That feeling feeds through to Uncommon’s attitude to clients. “We are ferocious about who we work with. Our experiment was about ‘what if we only worked with clients that wanted what we made?’,” he explains. “So the first question I ask everybody when they come in is, why are you here?”

Not all answers are good enough, which is why he turns down clients “a lot”, he adds.

“It’s not in an arrogant way but in a genuine way. It’s a protection mechanism. If I work with a client that doesn’t want what we make, not only am I going to make some bad work which will sully our reputation, but I’m also going to spend my time, and my team’s time, on that client,” he explains.

Time is too precious for that. Within the next five years his vision is to build a global creative collective that brings together the best creative minds across a variety of fields, from advertising and architecture, to film.

“How far could we go? How good could that be? No one has ever done it before,” he says. “That’s the experiment.”

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