Rethinking Creativity with Accenture Song’s Nick Law
Live from the Adobe AI Forum, this episode is your front‑row seat to a creative reboot with Nick Law, Accenture Song’s Chief Creative Chairperson, Aussie expat and veteran of Apple, Publicis and R/GA.
Nick argues that the real opportunity with AI isn’t found at the extremes. It lives in what he calls the “missing middle” the space between systems‑obsessed strategists and wildly expressive creatives. It’s a space most organisations have let collapse, and rebuilding it will be the differentiator. The marketers who thrive will be the ones who can finally stitch those worlds back together.
And then comes his challenge to leaders: “Work with freaks.” Because safe work gets buried. Bold work gets shortlisted, shared and chosen. In buying groups drowning in algorithm‑generated sameness, the unconventional thinker is now your unfair advantage.
If you’re a marketer trying to make sense of the AI tidal wave, this conversation is your cheat code. And, yes, he tackles the question everyone’s whispering (or panicking) about: “How will AI affect my job?” His answer is surprisingly energising and brutally clear on what stays human.
If you want to design a marketing future where AI is your ally, not your competitor, this episode shows you how. Discover what it means to lead teams where every discipline is becoming an AI discipline, where talent lives everywhere, and where the most powerful differentiators remain value, story and distinctly human ingenuity.
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This episode of The CMO Show was brought to you by host Mark Jones, producers Niall Hughes and Kirsten Bables and audio engineer Ed Cheng. This is an edited excerpt of the podcast transcript.
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Mark Jones
When we look back through the years, one of the most interesting things about marketing teams is that we have this interesting spectrum. We've got innovators and doers, people who can create stuff right through to others who are creatively expressive, come up with all sorts of radical ideas. The question is, "Do you need to choose one or the other?"
Hello, Mark Jones here, and thanks for joining us again on this episode of The CMO Show. The CMO Show is brought to you by Impact Institute in partnership with our friends at Adobe. A bit of a special one today too because we are filming live on site at the Adobe AI Forum in Sydney. And the reason is we have an opportunity to meet Nick Law.
He is the chief creative chairperson at Accenture Song. He's based in New York, and he's an Aussie by birth and back here in Australia for a little while. So we had the chance to have a chat with him about all things AI creativity and how he sees the marketing world from a teams, a corporation, and also from an agency perspective. How is all of the systems and processes that we use to drive our business, but also be creative, being shaped and transformed by AI? Of course, fascinating conversation. This is somebody who can think really big picture, apply it to specific examples and tell a great story at the same time. Let's get stuck into it. Nick Law, thanks for joining us.
Nick Law
It's good to be here. Thank you.
Mark Jones
Great to speak to an Aussie from the Big Apple visiting back in Australia. Quick career summary, RGA, Apple, Publicis, now Accenture Song. Did I get that right?
Nick Law
Yep, that's right. That's recent. Yeah.
Mark Jones
Yeah, it is recent. Interesting thing, if I think about your career and imagining the tech shifts you've been through, AI quite clearly is different for many reasons, but I'm interested in your perspective. Why is the season we live in, the time that we live in so different to be a creative?
Nick Law
When I think about the revolutions that have affected our business marketing, I think there's been three big ones. The first one is the Industrial Revolution because you could make everything, and as soon as you could make everything, you had to figure out how to distribute it and sell it.
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Nick Law
And so advertising actually came out of the industrial Revolution.
Mark Jones
That's fair.
Nick Law
And then the Internet Revolution connected everything. So you had to start thinking about the experience that the interface in front of that connection machine, which was the internet and how that affected everything.
Mark Jones
Right.
Nick Law
And what AI does is it's a computing technology that actually combines everything and can operate in independently, cognitively to a human. And so it brings up a whole bunch of different questions. In each case, it affected our business, these revolutions. This last one I think affects it probably the deepest because it's a sort of essential and general technology which is going to be not just expressed in the things that we make and how people interact, but how businesses are run. Where is the value in business? Where's the value in human effort? Where's that going to land? So to me, it's the biggest paradigm shift for our industry, but because it's the biggest paradigm shift, I think, for culture and humanity.
Mark Jones
We're here for context at the Adobe AI Forum, and you presented on those ideas and you sort of showed how all of those things that you spoke about are coming together. What's the implication for you guys at Accenture Song and for those who don't know what the organisation is, what is it?
Nick Law
So Accenture Song, I like to say Accenture Song is an interesting bit of Accenture. I'm joking. Now, we are the customer-facing part of Accenture, and because we're the customer-facing part of Accenture, we have to create interesting and useful things for people. So that's where the creatives live. So all the agency people, the designers, people in customer service and sales and commerce, all the services that the end customer interacts with, you reverse engineer back into what we do.
Mark Jones
And your role? How would you describe it?
Nick Law
I've had a few titles.
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Nick Law
Creative Chairperson, I would say is probably the best, most complete title. But I look over all of those creative tribes.
Mark Jones
Yeah, nice. Like a tribal master, tribal warrior leader.
Nick Law
I'm like that. I'm like a witch doctor.
Mark Jones
The point is though, when you think about how this world is changing, it's changing your clients, but it's also changing the way that you work.
Nick Law
Yeah.
Mark Jones
And you've also been quite open about how it's changing media agencies and software, so you're kind of straddling the fence in an interesting way.
Nick Law
Yeah, I mean, my background is in design and in marketing. And from a design point of view, I've been involved in creating digital products. So there's that piece. And then I worked at Apple which is digital product company or a hardware company also. So I've been on both sides. And then there's a marketing piece, and early on at RGA, which was a company that when I joined was 100 people, and when I left 17 years later, it was 2000 people. So a lot of the sort of rethinking how to put a company together, what skillsets you need in the middle of a tech change, which was the internet was experienced. And it was there that I started to think about not accepting the receive wisdom of what a creative team looked like. So in the advertising world, the big innovation in the creative team happened in the late fifties when Burnback said, "You know what? This copywriter might need an art director. Let's get them together and see what we could create with this tension between image and copy." And that started the creative revolution, really.
Mark Jones
And that's a model that stuck till now.
Nick Law
Yeah. And that was my point. And so when I was at RGA and these teams, there were two models. There was that model, which was a legacy model from the fifties and worked really well for mass media, but the internet threw up new problems. And then there was this sort of emerging web design shop of which RGA was in the early 2000s, and the teams were structured around design technology with a tube components, and then you could add things like copy and stuff. But basically it was this design and technology and when the pipe of the internet got big enough .that the internet wasn't just a utility, but became a great storytelling medium, then you started to look over what the advertising people were doing and said some of those people might actually be able to work here, and how would you combine a team with interaction designers with great copywriters?
And then you have this whole Cambrian explosion of different creative disciplines, people that are really good at data visualisation, people that are really good at social commerce. There are all these different things. And so you needed an organising principle on top of that so that you could curate the teams to map against the medium and the problem. And so that's when I came up with this sort of idea of stories and systems. So every team of up to 150 at RGA leadership from a creative point of view of a designer and a storyteller. So it's systems and stories.
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Nick Law
And between them, they had a breadth of literacy that could then mean that they could curate the right team underneath against the problem. So that was the sort of beginning of this thinking of, if you've got this new medium, you need to map talent against that technology to be most effective, and you need to think about human capabilities almost more than the technology capabilities. The point I was making in the presentation today was that this whole world of AI is being led by people that have very deep knowledge about the technology. What they have less of a knowledge about, I think, is the thing that they think is really important, which is creativity. They all say creativity is important, but creativity is this suitcase word.
If you're in Hollywood, creativity means something different to where you're in the South Bay of San Francisco. If you're an advertising or if you're an industrial designer, if you're... These are all versions of creativity, and they're all different ways to be creative. And so understanding the technology is one thing. Understanding how to find, curate, combine different human talents on top of that technology, I think, is something that we're only just starting to think about.
Mark Jones
You also had this interesting sliding scale between ambition and taste.
Nick Law
Yeah, no, yeah. It was basically this journey from idea to execution. In the middle of that is the how, which is, "Are you going to make this thing?" So for a lot of my career the how was learning how to use software programs.
Mark Jones
Software programs.
Nick Law
And you had this sort of deck, you had to have this dexterity around the tools that you'd swear you'd translate that idea into something. Right. Now, my point that I was making there was that how is now being collapsed so that the distance between idea and the realisation of that idea is in many cases, seconds or minutes. And so where's the value? If how is not valuable anymore? The value goes to the why, which is why you're doing this in the first place.
Mark Jones
Yes.
Nick Law
And the what, which is "What's the end product?" And you should be guiding that why with ambition because only humans have ambition. And you should be regarding the thing that you deliver to the customer with taste because you need to have a theory of mind about how the customer's going to react to that thing. To me, it's like this amazing technology has to be bookended by these two human qualities, ambition and taste.
Mark Jones
I liked your contrast between Sam Altman on the more analytical systematic side through to Rick Rubin, the incredible producer on that taste thing. The interesting thing in marketing though is that particularly a lot of large organisations, it's very systems driven and-
Nick Law
That's a really good point.
Mark Jones
... Taste is subjective, at least in most people's understanding. So how do you build in taste that scales?
Nick Law
Well, if I pull on the string of what you're saying, which has become systematic, I think that sets up, I think the challenge here. So the point I was making with the ends of this continuum of creativity, so I'm talking about creativity here. At one end of the spectrum, you've got inventive creativity, which is how do I make things work? That's Sam Altman.
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Nick Law
So he's creative, they're innovative, inventive people. On the other end of the spectrum, you've got this more empathetic theory of mind creative, which is expressive. So from inventive to expressive, both important. At the end of those continuums, it becomes a zero-sum game. So the point I was making with Rick Rubin is he's got this amazing theory of mind and great taste, so he knows what people are going to like, but by his own admission has no technical skill, right? On the other end of the spectrum, Sam Altman has amazing technical skill. He has that systematic ability to hold a lot of things in his mind at the same time and understand the shape of the problem and how to make things work. But he probably doesn't have the same sort of theory of mind as a Rick Rubin, which is a sort of taste thing. Now, so why is that important? Well, systematic thinking, whether it's inventive or executional is really important in big businesses because big businesses are systems, right?
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Nick Law
And so what tends to happen is that a lot of these small creative companies are started by creative people.
Nick Law
But when they become big or they get absorbed by a holding company, the leadership quickly transitions into someone who's more operational because God forbid you should trust a scale company to someone that doesn't think systematically, right? So this is what happens in-
Mark Jones
This is the great dilemma.
Nick Law
It's a dilemma, but it's a dilemma that I think the creative community and advertising has let happen. They've let themselves become infantilized. And then there's been some exceptions, Dan Wyden, David Droga, there are exceptions of people mostly from independence. And I think that the thing is that you need both of those sensibilities. You need to be systematic, and you need to be a great, expressive, empathetic. A vision lives at the intersection of those two things. So the thing is not to, "Oh shit, we need to make sure that only expressive people are leaders or only in systematic people." It's to recognise you need both things. And so this is why at RGA, I had two head leadership teams. I wanted to balance it. In the absence of making every structure, have two people run it, you at least need to balance it. So at least recognise if you're a systematic leader. A CEO, who's really good at seeing everything all at once, but not very good at understanding how to put a narrative together or how to at least have elevate people to do that. Like Steve Jobs had Tim Cook and Jonny Ive.
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Nick Law
Jonny Ive was an empath. Tim Cook was-
Mark Jones
Operations.
Nick Law
... Was a systematic genius, right?
Mark Jones
Yeah. Yeah.
Nick Law
And so you had the artist and the soldier and working together. So don't make the false choice. You don't want to make the false choice the other way either. I think Hollywood has suffered from having not enough systematic thinkers, and so they're not trying to catch up with these technology changes. And what's interesting about these two sensibilities, inventive and expressive is that great business ideas are asymmetrical. They can start in either end. So the iPhone started with a bunch of inventions, multi-touch, all these things. So all these-
Mark Jones
Jamming lots of existing tech together.
Nick Law
Yeah, exactly. And then they put an expressive layer on top, which is an interface and an object, which Jonny Ive and his team put together.
Mark Jones
And holding it was also a creative idea in the sense of getting away from thumb typing.
Nick Law
Yeah. But then my point is that it started with a bunch of technology. So the invention preceded the expression. The expression was put on top of it, but you can do it the other way around. So Walt Disney changed cinema in, I think it was in the thirties, when he came up with Snow White in the Seven Dwarfs because he had this vision for doing an animated feature length film that had never been done before. That was naturalistic and everything, but they didn't have a technology for it. So he started with the expression and then worked on the invention. So my point is that you need both. It can come from either way, and we need to, but it can only come from either way if it's a conversation between these two sensibilities. And right now that's very rare, the conditions for that, the culture for that is very rare in scaled companies. Less so in startups, but in big scale companies.
Mark Jones
Particularly if you think about the CMO, the marketing teams, if just in that context, I'm wondering how this is going to change the way they work. And the other new role that we're starting to see a lot more of is the chief AI officer or chief strategy, risk compliance ethics person. There's somebody who's holding that torch, and I'm wondering whether there's going to be some kind of interesting synergy there.
Nick Law
Well, I think we've got to get the CMO role right first. I think what's happened, and it started with this mania for performance marketing, is that the CMOs have gone from being people that had an expressive vision, understanding of a brand to people that are more mathematical, more... Now, the thing is, again, it's a false choice. You need both, right? The way I think about it is that a lot of modern marketing organisations look like an hourglass, which is at the top. You've got brand marketers at the bottom of, you've got performance marketers, and there's nothing in the middle. The two cultures have been oil and water where the people at the top are making beautiful things that no one sees, and the people at the bottom are making really ugly things that everyone sees. And in the middle is where the consumer is making in decisions on third-party platforms like YouTube or Reddit and everything. And the middle is about clarifying value, not making people feel something, not making them act, doing both of those things by starting with clarifying value.
Mark Jones
Yeah, yeah.
Nick Law
So I think that age of ads that these metaphors that are meant to make you feel something without helping you understand the value or a banner which chases around the internet and the hope they might accidentally click on. I think that the days of that sort of thing is over. So I think that marketing organisations should actually look like an onion. They should start with, "How do you clarify the value here, and then how do we inflect that into making people feel something?" Because people are going to feel something if they know that this thing is going to make their life better.
Mark Jones
Correct.
Nick Law
And then inflect it down into more sort of transactional, but in the same place, not trying to hook them with a blinking button, but just a few simple statements on why they should give a toss. I know it sounds obvious, but somehow because of... So we're in this situation where I don't think we've even solved the marketing organisation of the internet era because of this war between these two ways of thinking.
Mark Jones
Do you think that's because we've got two carried away with MarTech?
Nick Law
Well, think-
Mark Jones
I don't mean that disrespectfully. It's just that there's so much-
Nick Law
No, it goes back to your job as a CMO is to do two things. It's to make your company interesting to other people and to do that efficiently and delivered in the mediums that people belong in. We're forgetting about being interesting.
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Nick Law
If you can't be a CMO who can make something interesting, how can you be a CMO? You might be able to lay down the pipes, but what you put in the pipes better be worth receiving. But I'm not excusing the, you need to be very literate in this technology. You need to understand it, but you also need to, it's not enough to lay the pipes.
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Nick Law
Laying the pipes is you're just pumping more sewerage out into people's feeds, lay the pipes, and then do something amazing.
Mark Jones
Well, this gets back to storytelling, right? And-
Nick Law
Yeah, exactly.
Mark Jones
... Creativity and how do we-
Nick Law
Great storytellers have a theory of mind.
Mark Jones
Right.
Nick Law
Great technologists know how to make things work. They're different skills, they're really useful. We need to make things work, but we need to make people care about the things that work. And somehow we've forgotten that.
Mark Jones
I think we've got a pretty good emerging mind here on the marketing team. Then just very briefly then, the AI people, where do they fit into all of this?
Nick Law
Well, the AI people are like anyone. It's like the broadcast people or the printing people. AI is in everything.
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Nick Law
As a creative person, I'm going to be using AI. As a technologist, I'll be helping to shape that AI. As a designer I'll be hopefully creating affordances that people so they can use AI better. So we're all going to be attached to AI. It's like at the early internet... I used to have this joke with Bob Greenberg who was the CEO of RGA. Every April 1st, we would come around and I'd say, "You know what? We should announce that we're going to hire a chief analogue officer," because all of the agencies had these chief digital officers. And if you ask, "What's your skill set as a chief digital officer?" It could have been anyone.
It's just that they were the person that presented the last slide of their presentations to try to convince clients that they understand digital. It's like there's no such thing as a chief digital officer. There's technologists that build, and then there's interaction designers that create interfaces, and there's systematic visual designers. There's all sorts of things that go to making a digital experience. So I just think what are the AI people, AI people are going to be everyone.
Mark Jones
If I think about the viewer, the listener, and if they're starting early in their career, mid-career, been around for a while, what's your advice for career marketers?
Nick Law
If I was a young creative now, I would be making stuff every day. Every day. These video models are incredible.
Mark Jones
Oh, yeah.
Nick Law
Incredible. And I actually think the future of agencies is going to be a long tail of distributed creators that have learned how to use these tools by themselves. I don't think we're going to have this sort of guild of creatives that went to Miami out school or ad school or university. They're not going to come through formal channels as much. They're going to be more distributed. You could argue that the most creative company in the world right now, or one of the most creative companies in the world doesn't have a lot of creative people in their business. And then that's Meta, right? So Meta, the reason that all of us interact with Instagram or these apps is because of the content. Who creates content?
Mark Jones
We do.
Nick Law
Exactly.
Mark Jones
We're all volunteers by the way.
Nick Law
They've all outsourced. Meta has outsourced the creativity to the world.
Mark Jones
Yes, yes.
Nick Law
And because of that, the creativity is amazing because just like in TikTok, in TikTok, there is underneath that iceberg of amazing stuff that you're seeing is hundreds of stuff that thousands and millions and billions piece of content that you're never going to see because the algorithm's not going to do it. I just can't see a future of any creative business that doesn't leverage the native brilliance of people all over the world. If everyone has access to these tools, what are the chances that the handful of people that I choose to go into an agency are going to be the best in the world?
Mark Jones
The interesting thing will be to see how we then start to value that creativity at scale, right?
Nick Law
Yeah.
Mark Jones
Whether it gets, if it remains in these big polling companies, if it remains in these big marketing teams, whether it starts become more distributed across the organisation.
Nick Law
I think there's two part, I think the talent is more distributed, but I think there're going to be plenty of examples when there's going to have to be an organisation that combines these different talents in different ways because it goes back to innovation and interesting, stylistic sort of advances happen when two ideas that exist come together and create a third idea.
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Nick Law
And so they're almost always a result of amazing collaboration. It's the art and copy or Jobs used to talk about humanities and science, that's what Apple was built on that, right?
Mark Jones
Yeah.
Nick Law
So almost anything interesting is birth between some sort of conversation between different ways of thinking, and so I don't think it'll be all these created point solutions that you aggregate. I think in many cases you're going to be curating a whole bunch of people. You'll have a platform. So an agency who should have a platform that will help connect different and brilliant people that are not like all creators. They may not even be their own brands, and it might just be amazing practitioners that have spent enough time on these tools in their dorm room or in the basement of their house just becoming brilliant. I just think I can't see that you wouldn't leverage the world's talent if you could.
Mark Jones
One of the distinctions that stands out for me, wrapping up here, is the idea that it's the ambitious versus the people who are just going to tick along, right? There's going to be a real sorting out in this marketing context, obviously more broadly as well.
Nick Law
Yes.
Mark Jones
It's that creativity coupled with ambition or the intent to then make a difference.
Nick Law
Because there are people that are using these tools now that are doing cognitive offloading, and then there are other people that are doing cognitive amplifying. And the people that are doing the cognitive amplifying, I actually think that a formal education becomes less important. You want to be an autodidact, you want to be someone that's so curious, and it's such an appetite to create that you're going to try all sorts of things, not someone that's come out of a formal education that has been taught how to do, how to think, right?
Mark Jones
Maybe that's our hiring criteria for marketing teams.
Nick Law
I think it is. I think you need people with high agency, high ambition, like you said, and agency. People that are not someone who is going to just try to follow the rules and do the next thing, because AI can do that. Humans are perverse odd things, and so we need to be more like that. The thing about the reason that-
Mark Jones
So work with crazy people.
Nick Law
Yes, our industry needs more freaks, I really believe that. And one of the reasons that I think engineering has become the first thing to get eaten by AI is that the thing that made engineers great is their ability to understand complexity within a logical system. So engineering is zeroes and ones. It's a logical system, but the ability to understand complexity became the important thing of great engineers to see it all at once. AI does that. Now, something that is complicated, but logical is one thing. Creativity is simple, but illogical and AI's not very good at that, right? So there isn't great creative thinking is it's why-
Mark Jones
Well, you actually said it was a system. You described it in system terms.
Nick Law
I did, but I think it's an internal system and a lot of the stuff that comes out has been synthesised inside of this thing called a brain.
Mark Jones
Yes.
Nick Law
And so it comes out simply, but it comes out illogically. It's not a logical thing. It's why there's been a million books on creative process. None of them you can pick up, learn, and be a good creative. It's not what makes you a creative.
Mark Jones
It's not a ten-step programme.
Nick Law
No, exactly. Exactly. It's like there's something, there's a discipline to it, but it's not a discipline that you can measure, which is why, by the way, this obsession with measurement needs to be balanced with some emotional intelligence. Some things emerge out of an ingenuity and you can't measure it until it's out there. Start with hypothesis, don't start with a dashboard.
Mark Jones
Maybe we need CFOs working with the CMOs. Maybe that's where the science-
Nick Law
What the CFOs need to do is recognise that the CMOs have got a skill just as they do. It may not belong in a spreadsheet, but it's a skill and it's taken years to hone.
Mark Jones
Now that we've poked the bear, I might stop there. Thank you so much, Nick Law, for joining me.
Nick Law
Thank you.
Mark Jones
Nick had a really great line about pumping sewage through all of these digital pipes that we're using. Of course, a lot of us are worried about all of the AI slop as well. That's another great phrase. And all of this, happily for me, lands back in the field of storytelling about creative ideas and having a big picture vision for where you want to go, how you can backfill that with all sorts of AI, digital creative technologies to make it happen. You need, of course, implementers, great tech people, and you need amazing storytellers, and you need amazing creatives, people who can think about big picture ideas and synthesise stuff. And this, of course for me, I was reflecting that's why there's such a big appetite for the humanities in all aspects of business now because we're recognising the value of creativity and storytelling. So that's it for this episode of the CMO Show. Thanks once again for joining us. Make sure you do recommend and share this with your friends. Subscribe to us on all the usual links and socials, and tune in next time for our next episode. Until then, take care.