1. If you could describe your job to a 5 year old, how would you describe it?

People will always ask you what you want to be when you grow up. Being a creative in advertising is the one grownup job where it’s better if you never grow up! To be good at it you can never let go of your inner child. It’s important that you always try to look at the world with optimism and positivity. Even better, story time is every day and you’re constantly seeking for new ways to captivate people’s attention. When I eventually grow up I want to be a barber.

2. What's the best advice you've received?

I’ve been an avid collector of great advice throughout my career, so I’ll go all the way back to one of the first bits of wisdom that inspired me. I was a Junior Creative in my very first role and was working on a Nike print ad. I really admired (and still do) Wieden+Kennedy’s Nike work as it set the gold star standard for an aspiring Art Director. So, I was really driven to do something that lived up to their impossibly high standards and I’d spent hours exploring hundreds of layouts. Eventually I asked a Senior Art Director who I really admired for their advice. Shani Ahmed looked at all the work pinned to the wall for a long time and then asked me, “How do you feel about it?”. It was such an unexpected question and after some thought I answered that I wasn’t sure and was finding it difficult to decide it if was great or terrible.

Shani’s sage advice has always stuck with me and has been a guiding light throughout my career. He said: “Not knowing if it’s good or bad is a positive thing. It means you’ve pushed yourself beyond what you are familiar with.” Shani’s point-of-view was that sticking to what you know can too easily give you a sense of reassurance because you are falling into tried and tested patterns. It’s only when you go way outside of your comfort zone that you really push yourself and discover new ways of doing things. With that come a sense of discomfort because of the inherent risk of doing something outside your set of ‘rules’. Such great advice and something I always remind myself of when I’m looking at work that makes me feel uncomfortable. And, if you were wondering what he thought of the work on the wall, his exact words were: “It’s terrible at the moment, but it’s starting to get to an interesting place; so don’t stop and keep pushing”.

3. If you can thank someone that helped get you to where you are now, who would you thank and what you would say?

That’s such a tough question! My career has been built off the back of so many people’s help and support. Singling out any one person is frankly impossible! So, I’m going to stick to the people who’ve had the biggest impact on me as a creative. I’ll start with my creative partners. I’ve been incredibly lucky to have had long partnerships with two extremely talented writers in Dave King and Hamish Stewart. They are vastly different people, but they both brought out the best in me as a creative. Working with them I did some of the best and most awarded work of my career and they helped me grow as a creative and as a person.

Next I would thank Tom McFarlane and Ben Welsh for their creative leadership at a time when I was still finding out who I was. I got off to an extremely rocky start with Tom, but he’s now one of the people I most admire in the agency world. He showed me that caring for people, having integrity and just plain loving what you do are important. Tom was recently inducted into the Australian Advertising Hall of Fame, so it’s not just me who thinks he’s a bit of a legend. Ben showed me that you don’t have to be the brash in-your-face ad guy stereo type. He’s a softly spoken, sophisticated thinker and is an incredibly good human. I’m very grateful to both of these wonderful role models for giving me the confidence to find my own way of being a creative leader.

Finally, I would thank my Dad. He was a successful self-made businessman and would have loved for me to have followed in his footsteps. But, he realised that my path was going to be different to his and was always incredibly supportive of my career choices. More than anyone he taught me that loyalty is not something you can demand from the people who work for you, it’s something you have to earn.

*Gavin currently lives in Sydney, Australia and is the Executive Creative Director at Ogilvy Sydney.*