I never planned to work in advertising. I wanted to be a politician. What pulled me into this industry was a graphic design job for a musician in 2008. It was an accident, not a calling. I mention this because I think it explains something about how I look at creative work now. I have never fully trusted the idea that creativity has a proper method or a right way in. It found me sideways, and the best work I see today still arrives that way.

This year at Cannes, I watched a lot of work try to arrive the "right" way instead. They were technology-first, AI-forward, built to impress a jury that has seen a thousand AI showreels this year alone. But most of them forgot the thing that got me into this business in the first place, that an idea does not need permission from its tools. It simply needs a truth to stand on.

Technology Serves the Idea, Not the Other Way Around

The strongest work in Cannes this year led with what people needed, and then allowed technology to quietly do the unglamorous work of making that happen. You almost could not see the tech in any winning work, which, I would argue, is exactly the point.

I think about this every time someone pitches me an idea that opens with the use of AI. My instinct is always to lean back to understand what human problem this can actually solve, and would it still be a good idea if the technology were not available at all?

We built Hear in Hijab this way. The insight for us was not technological. It was that Muslim women who wear hijab and experience hearing loss are underserved by hearing aids designed for a world that assumes uncovered ears. The technology followed the insight, and the results is a discreet, brooch-like hearing device worn comfortably under the hijab. If we had started with "let's do something with wearable tech," we would have simply built a gadget. But because we started with the woman, we built something she would actually wear to prayer. That distinction, a tool serving an idea versus an idea serving a tool, is not a philosophical nicety. It is the whole purpose.

Doing Something Beats Saying Something

Increasingly, and rightly, our industry is rewarding creativity that can do something real. I have made this argument to younger creatives on my team and I will make it here: awareness is not an outcome, it is a hope. A billboard hopes you notice. A film hopes you feel something. But utility does not and should not hope, it must change someone’s day.

I spent time inside an e-commerce marketing team before I came back to agency life, and it recalibrated how I think about "creative work." Nobody in that building cared how beautiful an idea was if it did not move a number. That was uncomfortable for a creative director's ego, and it was also the best education I have had.

Take Scholar Panel, a project we built with Samsonite. Students near Jakarta’s Soekarno-Hatta International Airport were learning in classrooms loud enough to threaten their hearing. The easy move would have been to make a CSR film about the problem. Instead, we built a wall by transforming 2,000 discarded suitcases from Samsonite’s trade-in program into acoustic panels that reduced classroom noise by up to 40 decibels. The government liked the idea enough to support its expansion. We didn’t need a single line of copy to convince people that noise pollution is a problem. We just made the noise stop.

That is the shift I mean. In fact, the work I am proudest of now shares one thing and that is that someone's life got measurably easier not because they were aware of the brand but because the idea existed.

Deeply Local, Universally Relevant

The third thing I keep coming back to is that the most talked-about work this year was not work that took a global platform and dressed it in local costume. It was work that could only have come from the place it came from, built from a community truth so specific that it became, almost by accident, universal.

This is where I get most stubborn as a creative leader in Indonesia. For a long time, the creative instinct was to localise a global idea. To me, that instinct is now actively a liability. The work that travels today is the work that solved a problem so instinctively local that its specificity became its passport. Universality, in this case, is not achieved by sanding off the local detail, but instead achieved by trusting the detail enough that everyone recognizes the shape of the truth underneath it, even if they have never lived the specifics.

That is not a Cannes lesson. That is a lesson that I learned from this region, from this country. Cannes just happened to be where the rest of the world caught up and started agreeing with us.

What I Actually Believe

None of these are new ideas. They are the same conviction, said different ways. Creativity that centers itself on the tool, on the message, on the global template, is just but decoration, while creativity that centers the person in front of it is a force.

I did not walk into this industry with a plan, and I do not think the work I respect most was built to a plan either. It was built by people who took a real, local, inconvenient truth seriously enough to solve it properly, and let everything else, including the AI, the medium, sit in service of that.

^{This article was originally published in Campaign Indonesia: https://www.campaignindonesia.id/article/ketika-kreativitas-datang-dari-arah-yang-tak-terduga/1965278}