Ad legend Dani Richa on AI, risk taking, and how advertising has changed

0:00It's only humans that can do things that have never been done before. we spoke about risk. It's only humans that can decide the level of risk they want to go into. Welcome to Leadership Next, the podcast about the people and trends that are shaping the future of business. I'm Diane Brady. And I'm Kristen Stoller. Hi, everybody. Welcome to Leadership Next. I'm Diane Brady. And I'm Kristen Stoller. This week, Kristen. Danny Risha. Yes, he is the chairman and group CEO of Impact BBDO International. Now, Diane, I have to admit, I had no idea what BBDO even was. I think that's very ignorant of me. And then I Googled it and I was like, oh, it is the firm that Mad Men is based on.

0:44Okay. Yes. Yeah, it is. It's an iconic advertising firm actually there. And that obviously goes back decades. But more recently, you might remember the Snickers, remember those Snickers commercials or not? They did that, Have It Your Way, Burger King. So they were the OG really sort of advertising agency that to your point, Madison Avenue, Mad Men. But now, of course, it's a global agency. It's also one that really, if you're looking at where are the growth pockets in the world, it's the areas that he's overseeing, Africa, Middle East, etc. And I think that's what makes Danny the most interesting, right?

1:22Because he has the unique challenge of advertising in regions where it's a lot stricter and the culture is very different than where BBDO primarily operates. So he is making advertisements and campaigns that have to fit in boxes that no one else has to do. Well, and he's also operating in a part of the world that is the fastest growing consumer market, which is Africa. And, you know, by 2050, one out of four people on this planet are going to be African. So if you're looking for where to grow in the world and how you market to those people, I think you'll enjoy this conversation with Danny. So we'll be right back after the break.

2:00In the spring 2025 Fortune Deloitte CEO survey, 42 % of CEOs said they're planning to cut costs. Leaders are shifting away from traditional cost-cutting measures to more growth-oriented cost optimization strategies. Jason Gerzatis, the CEO of Deloitte US, is the sponsor of this podcast, and he joins us now. Jason, great to see you. Great to see you, Diane. So what's driving leaders to adopt this approach? What are the benefits? Yeah, I think a couple of things. I think all businesses are endeavoring to get to a cost leadership position because it gives you maximum flexibility to deal with other variables and effectuate performance through cost leadership.

2:46But growth-oriented cost leadership is made possible today because technology and other business model innovations allow for it. Jason, could you give us some examples of growth-focused approaches to cost optimization that leaders are actually using? And what are some examples of how they've been successfully implemented? One is, you know, we have many clients that have legacy technologies that they can now integrate different technology and data sets into that legacy technology that allow them to create additional insights. So, you know, think about a core legacy ERP system that can then be augmented with point-of-sale data or supply chain data that allows for different types of insights to be gleaned and operations to be managed in a more effective way.

3:34Another example is, you know, today there are many opportunities to leverage third-party relationships to create different synergies. So you can take what had been fixed costs and make them more variable. I think it's more proof that we're entering a whole new era of innovation. Thanks, Jason. Dani, thank you so much for joining us here at the Fortune Global Forum in Riyadh. We are in your home region. Thank you for welcoming us. You run Impact BBDO, which is a subsidiary of Omnicon, and you're in charge of all the Middle East and Africa. But I want to start by getting a sense of you. Can you tell us about the campaigns that you are the most proud of?

4:14Look, there are many campaigns that we've worked on that are really dear to me, but one that has consistently over the last few years been like received the maximum number of several Grand Prix's at Cannes year after year. So that consistency. And that's something that I encourage clients to do is to really stick the course and not just do a one-off and continue. So it started with, it's for NNHAR. It's a newspaper in Lebanon struggling back then as most newspaper newspapers are this time in a country with problems and economies and wars and all that. And they got tired publishing the lies of the politicians.

4:56There was a country in a standstill with no government, nothing's happening. So the first campaign was really inviting them to publish the first ever blank edition from cover to cover. And it was a shock for the market. They thought that they actually went out of business, and that's it. That's their last edition. So your advice to the editor was publish a blank edition. Blank edition with no advertising revenue, no nothing. And then a few hours later in a press conference, we invited people to write with their own pens on those blank editions what they wanted the politicians to do, how they wanted the country to be fixed, and it called like fire in social media and really it created a movement.

5:45It was a big success. And it actually helped trigger Get Back a Government in Place. The second one, and to do justice, I'll invite the audience maybe to check these out. The second one, the year later, you know, that same, there was a parliamentary election and they were using as an excuse the economic problems to say they didn't even have money for paper and ink for the ballots. So we, again, took another brave stand, and the newspaper said, okay, we will not publish that day. We will donate the ink and the paper for you to do the ballots. The RELA campaign. The ballots for the... And again, it was almost...

6:31Really, people liked it. They created movement, created a lot of noise, and ended up having an election. And one following year, there were like six publications that really, you know, unfortunately had to close down. We took the six newspapers that were out of business and gave their editors a full page or two full pages. So it was a newspaper inside the newspaper. You'd open a Nahar, you'd find another newspaper, you'd find another newspaper. Six newspapers that had closed were brought back to life. So it's the impact. and were able to create. I mean, and then the following year, we - I'm going to stop you there because I feel like you've had so much impact that we're going to be up to the present day.

7:17But let me ask you, because as you're talking, it is a reminder to me that BBDO, you know, which you're part of, was the original Mad Men ad agency, right? And so it's like the Don Draper, the creativity. What you're talking about is the kind of old school creativity that frankly, I don't associate with ad agencies anymore. Am I wrong about that? Obviously, you just gave us some examples. Old school in trying to do things that matter, that move people, that create positive change, but totally new in the means that we're using them in the technology that's available. A lot of what I explained uses digital and social like never before to amplify those messaging.

8:06So, yeah, I mean, look, the basics, and as hopefully we'll get to talk a bit about AI and how important it is to stick to the basics because at the end of the day, with all the texts that's happening, one constant will always remain is the need for big ideas, big ideas that touch people, that move people, and that move businesses. And that never changes from the days of the madmen, maybe for the next 50 years, who knows? Well, Danny, the ideas you described are so bold and also kind of risky. in the regions that you operate. So how do you convince clients or governments to take on these ideas that they may be a little shy to do for reasons of being scared or geopolitical reasons?

8:49Cultural. Yeah, cultural reasons. How do you do that? Look, one, you gotta find the right partners, those who share your passion to do change and to take calculated risk. We once asked the client, we did quite a bold campaign with that client, and then we went after the campaign was really successful. I'm not going to talk too much about the campaign. And thanked the CEO for taking that risk. And then the CEO said, what risk? What do you mean? The biggest risk I would have taken is not doing that campaign. Disrupt or be disrupted, right? And again, risk is a relative term. I was in a discussion with one of the biggest developers in our region, and part of the discussion with the CEO was, what's your risk appetite like?

9:42Because we want to know. And he said something I really liked, and I said, I'm going to borrow that. He said, there is no risk. There's just extreme optimism. And if you see this region and how fast it's developing and the projects that they're doing, I mean, yes, obviously there's risk, but it's extreme optimism. And it's believing that if you build it, they'll come. And if you look at places like the UAE, if you look at Saudi where we're sitting here, in Qatar, the kind of projects, the ambition is unbelievable. And if we went back 20, 25 years and we said we're going to be here today, a lot of people wouldn't have believed us.

10:23So, yeah, I mean, risk is important. Why it's important? Because you want to do something for the first time. You want to do something that's never been done before. Well, you're in a creative profession. There is no benchmarking. There is no benchmarking. There is no safety nets. There is, you know, you're taking a creative leap. But we do that with a lot of, you know, insights, a lot of data. We make sure that it's founded in a real human truth or a business truth. So you don't just kind of, it's not art for the sake of art. It's, I mean, there's a part of it that's really scientific. And then that's why you know you're taking risk, but it's calculated risk.

11:00The science of it in today's day and age, is it to go viral? How do you look at virality? How do you think about virality? Do you like going viral? Well, I don't like the term viral. It sounds like a virus or a disease or an illness. Look, you never intend to go viral. you intend to touch people in a meaningful way in a way that resonates with them to the point that they want to share it with their loved ones they want to share it with their friends and then if you strike that emotional chord that's when it goes viral that's when people want to share it talk about it but you never it's never an objective to go viral the objective really is to to get the message to the right people at the right time.

11:46Before we go into the future of marketing and advertising, I want to go to the past and just ask what made you want to be an ad guy. Look, I come from a family of architects, and I went to France to study architecture, and I ended, by mistake, watching a night of the ad eaters. It's a, in France, they call it La Nuit des Publivores. Is that a horror movie? No, no. They take a movie theater, and they run ads back-to-back from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. in the morning. You know, back-to-back ads from around the world. People normally go for half an hour, watch a bit of ads, and then go have some popcorn and go have dinner.

12:26So you willingly stayed overnight? I stayed from 8 to 8. Like, I did a whole night. In the morning, I called my dad, God bless him, and I said, look, I'm sorry, I'm not going to be an architect. you know I don't want to be limited to building with stone glass steel this world is you know the world is your canvas and then I got into it and never looked back my first job actually was an art director at a very good agency it was back in the days where you were still drawing the storyboards one by one and frame by frame and had the chance to work on some fantastic brands And then a bit later, I joined BBDO, and there I had, again, the opportunity to partner with some of the most exciting clients where we did some great work over the years.

13:18I want to turn now to AI because I think that's such a big part of the space, your story, what you're doing next. Can you just give us an explanation first of how you're using Gen.AI, if at all, in your campaigns? I mean, look, it'll be a real missed opportunity. It would be really silly not to use Gen AI. And the way we use it is in the creative process, there's a starting point. And the starting point, AI, what does AI do? It gives us, there's so much data out there, and AI allows us to make sense of that data at a speed we could have never been able to before. So really making sense of the data, finding the right insights that we would build our strategy on.

14:04So that's fantastic. I think that's the before. Also, part of the ideation, you know, I encourage my creative team to brainstorm with AI. I don't know if you know, but the O in BBDO came up with the brainstorming concept. So brainstorming is really important for us. But use AI, not to get the best out of AI, but allow AI to get the best out of you. So kind of like a bouncing board, have AI kind of challenge your ideas. and we've developed tools, for example, the BraveBot. It's the Gordon Ramsay of creativity. The Gordon Ramsay of creativity. Of creativity. We taught that large language model the best ads, the most effective ads from the last 20, 30 years.

14:51And then when you're discussing ideas, it benchmarks against them, and it kind of challenges you based on that. It's not your typical, you know, chat GPT where it's comparing to everything that's out there. This is comparing to the best that's out there. And it's really so you get to test. Is it making sense that you can't plagiarize others or two? In a way, but it kind of, you know, kind of a Golden Ramsey in a way where it criticizes the hell out of you. Like that's bad. Tears your ideas apart. And then sometimes it suggests some fixes. But you're the one coming up with the idea. So between getting the right insights because you want to build it on something that's meaningful, using AI to partner with AI to get the best out of you, and then validating the work, that's the starting phase.

15:37Then what AI has done is as creatives, we've always had a problem of time. We've almost had it producing the work. Producing it. We'll get to personalization. That's there. actually producing the work took a lot of time, the cost, and what AI does, it frees us from that. We can produce at speed, we can produce at low cost if need be. So that's actually producing the work. Doesn't it free your customers to do that as well, though? I mean, because being in the creative space ourselves, there was a point where every company thought they could be a media company. Now every company thinks they can be an advertising company because they have these tools themselves.

16:16Yeah, I mean, I'll tell you, it's like, yes, you have the tools. It's like giving everybody a camera, but giving the best photographer a camera. You're not going to get the same pictures. It's more difficult to judge a good idea than to come up with one. AI is going to give you tons of stuff. And the ability to work with AI and to pick the right message, I mean, it takes a lot of experience. It takes a lot of creative judgment. and unfortunately not everybody's equipped to do that. So what we put, and it's a good question because, you know, some clients tell you, yeah, but, you know, this took you an hour to do.

16:55Yeah, it took me an hour and 30 years of experience to not just the problem but to between the different outputs that you get to select, to reiterate, to work, to fine-tune. So to help produce the work is definitely, I was playing a great role, and then the after, which is the personalization, being able to reach the right people at the right time with the right message. I mean, at first, we were kind of, you know, we used to broadcast, you know, have one message, two millions. Then we got a bit more sophisticated and were able to personalize. So, for example, in your feed, if we know from the algorithm that you're interested in SUVs, you'll be served in SUV.

17:35If you know that you like red, you'll be getting it in red. But what AI allows us to do now is not just personalizing the messaging. It's engaging it to a stream. Yeah, I know it's very engaging. Where people give feedback and get part of the storytelling and not even the offering, even changing the product, suggesting. And then the ability to listen in real time, the ability to respond in real time, to give customers tools to play around. I mean, you look at Nike, they're co-creating designs with people, and based on the outcome and the testing, some are actually produced at masses. How transparent are you with the client, the customers, anyone who's seeing a campaign about this is produced by AI or fueled by AI?

18:27and what's the feedback been like? Because I know we talked a lot previously about AI slop and how I feel like my feed is constantly all these generated videos and I'm like, oh, I'm so exhausted with all this AI-generated stuff. How do you talk to investors about it? One guy here is producing 10 ,000 a day. Yeah. So look, there's work that is fully produced with AI. There's work that's co-produced with AI. So you do some shooting, and then AI kind of does the backgrounds, and then there's work that's completely shot by humans. It's a bit like handmade versus machine-made. Yeah. And there's a big value.

19:07Artisanal cheese versus, you know, mass-produced. And there's value on handmade. And the ability to use all of that. I mean, we have the opportunity to use all of these tools that are available to us in the Horses for Courses. When you need something that cannot be done or can be done more effectively using just AI, you do that. When you need something more raw, more authentic, a real-life story with nothing beats the emotion you get and the eyes shooting somebody who's telling their own story. I don't think AI can. A human, right? Yeah, you always remember those. That's why you win the awards.

19:44But let me ask you, because you're doing the Middle East and Africa, Those are a lot of different economies at different stages of development. So what have you gleaned in terms of what does connect with consumers? I know we're talking about one-to-one marketing, but you get into the front lines. Tell us a bit about how those markets are developing and what's changing there. What's beautiful, and I also had the chance to look after Europe as well so I can compare. Oh, so you go old, young, in between. Old, young, you know. And one of the things, I mean, we try to do is in all these countries, especially Africa and the Middle East and the subcontinent, we look at some of the tension points.

20:29I mean, we, for example, in Pakistan, there's a huge – cricket is like crazy. Pakistan, part of Mbiya? It's part of Mbiya. Oh, okay. And it's a, you know, cricket is massive. It's the number one sport. And it's frustrating because the women there want to play cricket. And they can't because it's reserved to men. And mostly it's reserved to men because the equipment is expensive. And they have no access to equipment. So we partnered with women's soccer in the U.S. We partnered with women's soccer. All they need is a ball. I know, I know, I know. There you need. They're not a fair, not a fair. So we partnered with one of our clients, Pepsi, and we did a huge billboard.

21:18And in that billboard, you had women, you know, posing, playing cricket. But we actually put the equipment in the billboard. So people could actually pull the equipment, play with it, and then return it in different fields around the country. And they loved it. And they started playing, and the coverage was fantastic. So in these different countries, depending on the needs, depending on the challenges, the tension points, you do things that are relevant. Sometimes when you're doing regional campaigns, it becomes more complex because you don't want to do a film or a campaign for each country. And here you look at the communities and there's so much more in common that we have than differences that sets us apart.

22:01So you do look at differences. some of the multinational brands, they tend to find the human truth that connects, you know, a mother in Egypt is not that different from a mother in Saudi Arabia or a mother in London. Some of the values are the same. Some of the aspirations are the same. And we kind of focus on those. I want to go back to your word truth, because I've read a lot of your interviews and you consistently say, you know, trust is built on honesty. It's built on truth. Was there ever a time where you had to tell a client an honest truth and maybe you lost them, maybe it was a challenge you had to get through.

22:40Was there a time you had to do that, and how did you work past it? Look, I mean, the starting point is choosing partners and choosing partners that share your values. And so once you've chosen, we've said no to many partners. You know, we won pitches that we chose not to continue because we felt the chemistry wasn't right, the values weren't shared. So often the clients that we work with would never ask us to tell something that's not true or to exaggerate. I mean, I remember an experience. It was many, many years ago, a product claim that was a bit ridiculous. I mean, it's like it was a disinfectant that you clean the surface with that repelled the flies.

23:28And we tell the client, well, it repels them. Where to? They don't land on the table. They land on you, on the children, on the food. I mean, and they said, no, no, no. And we said, look, sorry, we can't do that. It doesn't make sense. I mean, it's an overclaim. It doesn't make sense. And we lost the business. The client launched that product at millions and millions of dollars, and it completely failed. And the team behind the team. No, we didn't feel good. No, I'm just kidding. But we felt, you know, that it was the right thing to do. So, yeah, I mean, we would never. And if I feel I had an experience with one of my colleagues who were doing a campaign.

24:11It was like a real-life experiment, and we did it. It was beautiful, very touching, very powerful for Alzheimer's. and basically it was, we found out that people have, the short-term memory is gone, but the long-term memory is still there. So they wouldn't recognize their own children, but they would recognize them from when they were young. So we did an experiment with a Hollywood makeup artist and made up their children look exactly the way they were 15, 20 years ago and tried to see whether they would recognize them. And we shot it, and it worked, and it was so emotional. It's so powerful. That's incredible.

24:50Yeah. And then one of the creative guys tells me, yeah, I mean, I said, are you sure these are older children? He said, yes, yes, yes. He said, but just one because she was a lousy actor. And we killed the project. We dumped the project because one of the people wasn't a real person. And it was meant to be a real experiment. And we threw away quite a lot of money. The whole thing? The whole thing. Wow. Did you redo it or you were just like, we're done? No, no, we gave up on the project. Wow. Because we felt that, you know, and then he was a great guy, tried to convince me, you know, it's an enactment, we can put it in the same way.

25:28I said, no, absolutely not. Yes, many journalists have been felled by such things too, right? You cannot, once you lose trust, you don't get it back. But let me ask, how has this region evolved, both in terms of the marketing messages and as it's like many fast-changing parts, Africa, Middle East, et cetera, has that changed the nature of advertising itself here? Look, this absolutely. I mean, the reason I chose to came back is I found, and as you can see in the last two or three years, so many companies are coming here, so many global companies are coming to establish their regional headquarters in the region, one, because of the growth potential, but two, because of the development that's happening.

26:15So I came back because I found potential of positively impacting and accelerating that change that's to come, that's coming. And the nuances are huge. I mean, if you look back 20 years ago, television, some of the television stations in this region, you couldn't show, for example, a man and a woman in the same commercial. you had to have children around them to say that this is a family. Yeah. We would do a shampoo commercial without even showing women's hair because we weren't allowed to show an unveiled person. All this has evolved and changed with first satellite TV and now the Internet and all that.

27:01But more importantly, people became more open and more welcoming and more with a global kind of vision to everything. So the change has been unbelievable, and it has impacted the way we talk to these customers and the way brands engage with these customers. I want to reframe it a little bit, too, because I used to live in China, and one of the things, when you grow up in a culture, you grow up in France, you have an appreciation of fine cooking. It's like America, to me, is a place that's always kind of rewarded creativity. when you're in a place where people have not grown up with that how do you actually free them up has that been a challenge almost teaching them how to be creative when they've had this script that's not allowed them to think that way look they were they were creative in literature they were creative I mean poetry is really big in this part of the world so I would never say they weren't creative I would just say they were cultural restrictions The cultural restrictions kind of limited them.

28:09I mean, we had, you know, back in the day, we had a section for women to work in in the office and a section for the men to, and they never interacted. That's not the case anymore. You look at our agency, one of our agencies in the region has 90-plus nationalities. So you can imagine the kind of melting pot and the exchange of cultures and all that. there were certain professions that were not allowed for women, and now that's not the case anymore. So it's more through this great leadership and the transformation that's happening, it's more freeing them to be creative rather than them not being creative.

28:49They were always creative in their own way. I remember when Swiffer, there was a story that it went to Italy, they had to take the value proposition and turn it upside down because Italian women didn't believe a Swiffer could clean their floors. They put in scrub brushes. And the reason I mention that is the cultural nuance. Like at the heart of it, marketing is the science of how we buy, what we buy. And give me some sense of how customers are behaving because a lot of the assumptions that even women had as to what they could and couldn't do are now changing. Are you helping to drive that through marketing or give us some insights on that?