What survives

Every technology shift kills part of the craft and leaves part of it standing, and the part that survives is never the part people expect. In 1974 I was making marker comps by hand. The comps are gone and nobody misses them. The thing underneath them turned out to be the whole job.

I take an audience through four upheavals I worked through, what died in each one, what came back wearing a different name, and how to tell the difference while it's happening to you rather than twenty years later.

For: industry conferences, agency offsites, creative leadership groups. 30 to 45 minutes.

Talk two

Art direction is over, and it should be

I held that title for fifty years, so I've earned the right to say it.

The discipline as a separate function is finished. What replaced it is more interesting and more demanding, and most of the people arguing about AI in this business are arguing about the wrong layer entirely. This is the talk that starts fights, which is why I like giving it.

For: design conferences, art schools, in-house creative teams. 30 to 40 minutes.

Talk three

Every shift killed the middle

Cable, digital, the internet: the very good survived and the very cheap survived. The competent middle went. I watched it happen to people I'd worked alongside for twenty years, and I watched a few of them see it coming and move.

A practical talk about where you actually are in that distribution and what to do about it. Uncomfortable in places. It's meant to be.

For: creative departments, professional bodies, mid-career audiences. 30 to 45 minutes.

Talk four

Starting from the centre

At seventy-four I'm building a new body of work. Not as an epilogue to the career, as another act of making.

Most people hear reinvention and think it means becoming someone else. That isn't what happened. I let go of a lot of things that used to define me, and each one hurt, and each one freed up something. The advertising executive didn't disappear. He just stopped driving.

This is the personal one, and the least about advertising.

For: TEDx, general audiences, festivals, universities. 15 to 20 minutes.