Darcy Keely’s Creative LIAisons wrap-up: Primitivism, Persuasion, Power in Numbers

Darcy Keely, Creative Tinker at Thinkerbell, won a trip to Las Vegas for the Creative LIAisons coaching program at this year’s London International Awards after taking out the MADC x Creative LIAisons 2026 Young Creatives One Page Pitch Competition. Here, Keely looks back on a week of big advice, split rooms, AI debates and moustaches.

What’s with creatives and moustaches?

Before I even got to Vegas, two Aussies clocked me at the airport purely because I “looked like I was from Melbourne.” Go on, read me to filth.

Then it was into the city of lights, cigarette smoke, and young creatives trying to ride the bucking bull. You had to hold on pretty tightly not to get nauseous by the end of the week. Although, to be fair, that could have been the alcohol.

The advice came thick and fast. Fill up the well. Push harder. Stay curious. Make things. Burn yourself out, but, you know, productively.

The idea of “filling the well” came up a lot, and it’s probably the one I kept mulling over. Because filling the well really means getting out there and connecting with things. People. Places. Weird little observations. Anything that isn’t another late night staring at a deck. Late nights, incidentally, seemed to be a fairly common occurrence among the young group.

I’ve changed industries enough times, and fought pretty hard for my right to get out of the office, so thankfully I feel like the well is still reasonably deep(ish). But there was an interesting contradiction running through the week: push yourself as far as you can, while remaining a person worth being around.

There was, inevitably, a lot of talk about AI. The threat of it and the opportunity of it. Whether the machine will eat the industry whole or simply become another thing we complain about while using every day (I vote the latter!).

One of the more useful perspectives came when Alexandra Taylor spoke about the introduction of photography and the noise that brought to advertising. Later, Kaleeta McDade talked about the arrival of the iPhone and the panic that accompanied that. The world kept turning.

Sometimes the room was properly split.

‘SOS POS’ versus De’Longhi’s ‘Tiny Coffee Shops’ managed to divide us almost cleanly in half. A pretty neat illustration of where the industry seems to find itself: the desire to do some good in the world on one side, and the desire to push back against AI in defence of craft on the other.

Taste was another word thrown around constantly. Is that a great differentiator now? Or have we all just saved the same 400 images to slightly different Pinterest boards?

In another role I spent a lot of time desperately trying to become the best DP I could. I found myself in the jury room for Production & Post Production and started seeing all the trends, compositions and visual tricks I’d been chasing reflected back at me across the work. Suddenly, I didn’t want them anymore. I wanted to go looking for something else.

Taste is a goal you never quite arrive at. Someone called it a divine pursuit, how silly. Your taste keeps moving slightly faster than your ability to execute it. You spend your career trying to catch up with the version of yourself that can already see what the work should be.

Maybe, in the age of AI, primitivism becomes the new vogue.

Not fake mistakes. Not an intentionally misplaced comma or a double space designed to prove a human was here. I mean making the work simpler. Maybe it’s one execution instead of fifteen. One thought communicated so clearly it doesn’t need an ecosystem around it. Something that feels made rather than generated. If AI gives us infinite possibility, maybe our response will be to want less.

Let’s see what the next few years of cave drawings get us. Primitivism, thanks Sbu Sitole for my new favourite buzzword.

But for all the conversation about AI and the power of the idea, the other notable buzzword was persuasion.

Big ideas only become big pieces of work if somebody on the other side of the table is willing to take the swing with you. And that takes a relationship. Trust built slowly enough that, when you eventually ask a client to do something slightly insane, they know you’re not doing it just to entertain yourself.

It was also reassuring to realise the people at the top don’t appear to have fully solved that line of dialogue either.

They still have the same thoughts kicking around their heads in the afternoon that the rest of us do. The same doubts. The same little internal arguments. The same occasional desire to kick the sheets and wonder if you’ve completely lost it. Good.

There were other little cultural fault lines too. Topics I wouldn’t have thought were especially polarising – work-life balance, the protection of animals, where the line sits between an inconvenient production problem and something genuinely consequential – could suddenly change the temperature of the room.

Advertising is global right up until human beings get involved.

The industry can also be as self-serious or as completely ridiculous as you want it to be. Some of the best speakers seemed perfectly capable of obsessing over an idea with intensity and then admitting the entire thing was, fundamentally, a bit silly.

Magnus Jakobsson put it more simply: “Let your freak flag fly”.

But for all the CCOs, jury rooms and talks from people whose names tend to sit in very small type underneath very large award counts, the highlight of the week was probably my two new Spanish friends.

God, they were funny. I loved how outrageous they were, and how outrageous being around them made me. For a few days, the world really did feel like my oyster. Or ostra.

Strangely, that did more to make the industry feel enormous and full of possibility than any CCO could. The industry can actually take you anywhere.

After all the talks, debates, drinks, the minor crises over moustaches, the real pleasure was simply meeting the other 127 people.

127 bold, strange, talented young people from everywhere, all worrying about roughly the same things. It’s a great industry. Silly. Serious. Occasionally embarrassing. Occasionally excellent.

Yikes. I’m one of us.

VIEW THE PRINT MAGAZINE + PAST ISSUES ONLINE. SUBSCRIBE NOW.

Register for FREE HERE and receive the Campaign Brief Daily Bulletin and/or the global Best Ads Best of the Week Bulletin.              Subscribe to Campaign Brief Magazine.

#More Creative News   #No paywalls   #No annual membership fees

Subscribe to Portfolio & Reel for current listings of Australian and NZ ad agency and production company leadership and key personnel