Peter Kirk’s 2024 Year in Review: “Where are we as an industry?”

By Peter Kirk, Founder and Creative Director of Indigenous Australian-led creative consultancy, Campfire X

It’s been an interesting year, probably one of the weirdest years I’ve experienced. We had an American election, the Olympics, the incident at Westfield Bondi Junction, the Middle East descending into even more chaos, the rise of antisemitism, a cost-of-living crisis (that appears to be getting worse), the rise of homelessness, a couple of attempted assassinations, the federal government trying to pass some crazy policies, which to be honest I never really understood except for one which certainly appeared to have a strong undercurrent of censorship. Oh, and for two weeks Australians lost their marbles over a Bachelor of Arts Lecturer from Macquarie University who conducted a dance that, well no one, can seem to define. I’m still to decide whether to laugh along or feel sorry for her.

A lot happened, Sydney had SXSW (I have no idea why it’s called that, it’s Sydney not Austin), some great TV, some poor TV, two footy teams winning comps, people getting laid off, the usual outrage of Welcome to Countries, the usual outrage over Australia Day, uncertainty, housing affordability, high immigrant intake, people defending their beliefs, people getting upset when someone defended their beliefs and the usual amount of people getting offended and outraged over, well I’m not sure, I kinda gave up count a while ago. It became too exhausting.

Even closer to home and closer to the industry, Campaign Brief had its own reckoning, when a list of creatives were published and that list of creatives had very few, if any females. It had zero First Nations creatives listed (which somehow everyone seemed to not notice) and it got me thinking…

Where are we as an industry? And where are we as the creative influencers for the country? And however I cut it, I think we have gone backwards.

There’s a famous Paddy Chayefsky movie called Network, it’s from the 70s and it’s pretty cool. Basically it’s about a TV network sliding in the ratings. Halfway through the film, one of the TV presenters called Howard Beale loses it and he starts shouting to the camera “I’m as mad as hell and I ain’t gunna take it anymore!”

This is what I feel on certain days working in the industry, at some point we have all lost the reasons why we entered the game. At some point we have all lost the very essence of what is important, creativity, teamwork and leadership. At some point the industry has become scared, aspirational, transactional, but most importantly we have become greedy, that greed has led us to forget our values and that greed has led us to work so quickly, so transactionally, that we forget to slow down and be the people we once were, be the person that wanted to go into advertising in the first place.

And this greed has made us change our perspectives from a place of caring to a place of combat.

I was talking to my friend Anthony “Mossy” Moss about this the other day and he said Kirkie, it’s the brands, they screw us a lot, and yep maybe they do, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be changed. Imagine for one second all agencies downed tools and said, nope, we ain’t doing this, it’s unfair and we can’t produce our best work. Imagine for one second.

I would love to see it happen, but it won’t. It’s funny as an industry we try and set our standards but when a brand comes a knocking, we drop those standards and become something akin to any one of the scenes from Lord of the Flies. I also tend to think the industry can be a bit blinkered and selected with our outrage.

We as an industry manage to get outraged when injustices like gender inequality happens, yet we don’t seem to bat an eyelid over other injustices like environment, First Nations, socioeconomic, etc. I don’t understand this, I truly don’t. We get better by lifting people up. We get better by raising the bar, not lowering it. The more we do this, the better we will become.

“As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” – Marianne Williamson

I grew up in suburban Canberra, not in a rich house by any means. Our suburb is considered gentrified now but back then it was far from it. Things were a bit loose and yep we got into fights, fell out the back of cars, drunk underage and all had fake ID’s. We would also go to a lot of parties and I remember I would walk into a house and there would be such a diverse range of people there: the goths would be in the backyard (always), the nerds would be in the lounge room, the jocks would be in the kitchen and the mods would kinda just be floating around. The parties were great, they were diverse and everyone got on. It was a melting pot of just wonderful, crazy people all just wanting to have a good time.

I don’t see this diversity in the industry. I see the same types of people from the same backgrounds and I don’t understand how this is happening. Creativity has no boundaries, and no particular style. We need to fix this and we need to fix it quickly, but I think deep down there is no real desire. Do we really want to hire people that are so different from us they make us feel uncomfortable? In many cases, unfortunately the answer is no.

So how do we fix it? We have to change; we have to redefine our KPI’s. What does success look like? It can’t just be awards, it really can’t. We must look at ways of elevating everyone from all walks of life. We have to realise that when people feel good about their work, we feel good about our work. We must lead, true leadership is hard, it’s supposed to be, but that’s the job of a good leader. We must learn to say no, no to our clients, no to demanding work hours and no to being so outcome focused.

But I think, most importantly, we need to go back to our youth and discover the wonder and the creative freedom we first discovered when we all started out in this industry.