Last November I had the chance to Interview Jose Miguel Sokoloff @ Creativity 4 Better 2024. Mr. Sokoloff is the President of the MullenLowe Global Creative Council and after so many years spent in Advertising he still seems in love with his profession. I addressed him some questions and I was absolutely impressed by his strong and direct answers.

an interview by Marian Costache, from #ForTheLoveOfIdeas series

How did Advertising come into your life and how come that you’re still in love with it?

Advertising came into my life pretty much by chance. It was not something I had planned for. I started in engineering and then moved into business. So, it was not something that I had planned for. However, I understood the value of advertising in entrepreneurship and in business.

So, I thought I’d get into an agency and start learning about advertising from the inside – and then I never left. I never left because I was given the worst job they could give me. I don’t think they wanted me in that agency, so they gave me the worst job. At the time, the job was to get magazines, cut out different ads, and compile them into books.

This way, you could send the compiled ads to your account executives and say: „We have a water client – here are all the ads today about water” or „Here are all the ads that ran today about banking.” My first three months in advertising were spent surrounded by ads, by horribly bad advertising, most of it boring, horrible stuff, which is most of the advertising in the world.

But every now and then, there was a good ad. There was a beautiful ad, a beautiful photo, a funny or a very intelligent headline that brightened my days, literally. I started to fall in love with the possibility of brightening people’s lives, at least the people with my job, or, you know, brightening my own job.

They say most advertising is bad, but there’s so much opportunity here. I remember the ads that are good. I forget all the others that are bad. And I kind of fell in love with that process. And I said I would like to see if I am any good at it.

For many years you planned and realized ad campaigns, on behalf of the colombian Ministry of Defense, to persuade FARC guerillas to demobilize.  How did you come up with the idea of ​​planting Christmas trees in the jungle? Winter in Colombia is different than in traditional Christmas pictures. How did you know it would work?

First of all, I think it’s important to make the distinction that this was not a pro bono campaign. This was a paid campaign with a real client and a real brief. And we actually got paid for this. We didn’t offer it up. So I think that already starts being a little bit different. It isn’t something that we wanted to do, just because we thought it was cool. It was something that we were hired to do and we did it because we believed in what we were being added to do.

Usually what we did every Christmas was that I sat in my office and all of the teams in the agency came and we looked at the ideas that we were going to do over the year. What the ideas were and how we were going to affect and different teams had different ideas.

A couple of creatives walked into my office and said, and I think I’m quoting them word for word. They said: “ Soko we have this idea of dressing up Christmas trees, because what is the most recognized symbol of Christmas, not only in Colombia but universally? The Christmas tree. And what are there a lot of in the jungle? Trees. So let’s do Christmas trees in the jungle. That’s it.” „This sounds very, very weird to me, keep going.” And then they said that we’re going to put lights and a banner that says “If Christmas can come to the jungle, you can come home!”

And I said that’s the idea we’re doing! And they went and did it and it’s there. But it was very simple, it was a very simple process. They came up with it. I think the logic was impeccable. They sold me on the logic, I had bought the logic, but then they put the emotion and the emotion was that line: “If Christmas can come to the jungle, where you are, you should be home!” and I think that was a genius and so it was the combination of impeccable logic and the human touch.

I heard that you consider Advertising as a big responsibility. Do you see this kind of approach at our younger colleagues?

I think this is not new and the treatment of advertising as a tool, without much regard to how responsibly we use it, is not new. I don’t think it’s worse than it’s ever been. I don’t think it’s better than it’s ever been. I guess we have to keep reminding ourselves about our responsibility, as managers of that tool.

We have to keep reminding ourselves and that is part of my job. Part of my job is, when I come to conference you like this, is to say “yes we’re powerful, yes we can do enormous change!”. But we have to be serious about it and we have to be responsible about it. We cannot play that we’re creating change. We cannot do that, because we lose credibility, advertising loses credibility, and we do look like clowns. So I think we have to be reminded that all times.

You believe that thinking outside the box is overrated, but what about AI? Is it Advertising the box suitable for AI?

There is one of the smartest persons I know, is a guy called Alex Hess. And he said to me: „AI gets everybody from 0 to 7.” So if you think of advertising, quality of advertising, on a scale from 1 to 10, today you see advertising that’s 3, that’s 4 that’s 5 – people don’t put a lot of effort into it, the production is probably bad, and you have the whole spectrum.

With AI everybody can get to 7. Everybody! You can prompt AI and you can have advertising that gets to 7. So to stand out, you have to be 8, 9 and 10, and that’s much harder. It’s much harder to stand out in a world where everybody’s good, is good enough, than in a world where some people are good enough and some people are terrible, so you kind of stand out a little bit, more easily.

This will happen because AI uses all the information there is and uses all of the parameters that are set and create something, within that parameter. Artificial intelligence essentially stays inside the box, but it stays inside the box in a very linear way. And if you ask it to go outside the box, it will go outside in a very obvious way.

It is the magic of humanity that keeps us thinking well inside the box, without transgressing everything, but making it look genius and relevant. And it is humanity inside the box that will get us to 8, 9 or 10.

I know Cooking is one of your hobbies. Did you ever get interesting insights for Advertising campaigns, from this great passion of yours?

The answer is no, but it’s a complicated answer, not from cooking, but I cook for people. I cook for myself, to feed myself, but I also cook for my children. I also cook for my guests. So when I put food on the table, we have conversations. We talk about things. I learned, I learned from my kids. I learned from my friends. I discovered things. We have conversations.

So the fact that I can provide something that we can all talk about or something that fuels a conversation – sorry for the bad pun, but that feeds the conversation – has taught me an enormous amount of things and has put me in contact, in very in a very different way of contact, with other people. Usually you go out and you have dinner at restaurant and it’s kind of formal. But you bring them home and you cook for them and you have a completely different relationship. So from there I have learned enormous amounts.

What is your ambition, professionally speaking?

Ambition changes. Ambition morphs. Right now, our industry is going through an existential period. Nobody knows what it’s going to look like, in a few years, or what role that AI will play. Nobody knows what jobs we’re going to have. We’re always questioning, we’re going to end up without jobs?!

I don’t think so. I think we’re going to have different jobs or our jobs are going to encompass completely different things. But it’s not going to not create job. It’s going to continue to give us something to do. It’ll just be different.

My ambition today is to make sure that in the future of advertising humanity and the value of human creativity are never lost. And I want to help create an industry that recognizes that and that gets properly rewarded and properly compensated where we actually make a difference. And where we make a difference is in the idea.

This industry has kind of deviated and the idea is seen as something that we don’t pay for. The money is made in the media, money is made in different places. I would like to bring it back and to realize that media can be done by machines, many things can be done by machines but not the idea, and that’s what we need to get paid for. So that is my ambition!