At this year’s Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, Smarts was invited to speak as part of the main programme, to explore a question we think matters more than ever: in an industry obsessed with speed, volume and efficiency, are we losing our grip on depth?
A summary of the talk, led by our Brand Futures Director, Nat Moores, alongside world record holding freediver, Kateryna Sadurska, can be found here. But the exploration of creative depth didn’t end when the session did. It became the starting point for Depth Perception — a piece of research and series of tools built to dig further into what creative depth actually means, and what it takes to protect it.
Why depth, why now
Nat had a hypotheses: the creative industry is drifting into shallower waters, and, perhaps more worryingly, is doing so without even noticing. They must act now if they truly want to create engaging brand worlds.
To find out if that was the case, she spoke to a wide range of industry leaders, creators and creative visionaries — from brand CMOs to tech leaders, poets and musicians to social creators with millions of followers — about how they think about depth in their own work, what threatens it, and how they protect it under pressure.
Nat also immersed herself in the world of freediving, where people take a single deep breath and dive down to places most of us could only imagine.
Turns out there was a lot to learn from all these worlds. And bringing them together can help change our perception of and strengthen our relationship with depth.
Explore it for yourself
Depth Perception is live now at smarts.agency/depth-perception, featuring contributions from marketing leaders including Anouk Jans (Zalando), Andy Freeman (Centrica) and Natalie Simpson (Asda), creators such as Beatrice Milio, Olaf Hernandez and Richmond Rockson, global creative visionaries such as Asma Humayan and Simon Richings, and poets and musicians such as Tim Exile and Rishi Dastidar.
Their thinking forms the backbone of a clear narrative: that Depth is a Discipline. And brands must be prepared to go deep – and resurface – if they are to produce memorable, culturally enduring work. It’s time to dive in and find out how.