tmp, a global B2B marketing agency which serves clients including AWS, T-Mobile and Thomson Reuters, recently announced the appointment of Dylan Bogg as its new Chief Creative Officer (CCO).
Bogg joins tmp after more than 15 years at The Mission Group and brings a proven track record of creative leadership. He also co-founded Big Communications in 1995.
New Digital Age spoke to Bogg to learn more about his latest role and his thoughts of the year ahead…
Tell me about your background and what led you to your new role as CCO of tmp.
I started out many years ago running an agency in the Midlands, Big Communications. We were lucky early on with some really interesting clients. WKD was probably our flagship. We eventually sold the agency to The Mission Group and I spent the next couple of decades there, through mergers and changes, ultimately as a PLC board director and Chief Creative Officer.
Moving wasn’t an easy decision, but tmp felt interesting and challenging. The sector is in growth, which is unusual for our industry right now. There’s a great client list and a real opportunity to do something meaningful.
What sort of activity takes up the bulk of your time?
On a day-to-day basis, a lot of my time is spent with creative directors, strategists and clients – coaching, mentoring, and getting involved in the direction of the bigger pieces of work.
Because this is a new role for the agency, there’s also a real focus on setting a creative vision. I’m bringing all the creative directors together to establish some guiding principles – how we want to work and the standards we want to set.
Ultimately, it’s about getting the foundations right. Once that’s in place, it becomes much more about working closely with clients and CDs to deliver great work.
Professionally speaking, what are your priorities for the year ahead?
Client work shouldn’t be bland. There are huge opportunities in this sector to do work that really stands out, yet there are very few campaigns people actually talk about or remember.
A lot of marketing has become too logical. We need to do more emotional work, by which I mean work that makes people feel something and stays in their mind. It won’t be right for every brief, but when you can do it, it’s incredibly powerful. If we can get brands hitting people in the feels, we’ll be in a very good place.
What are the key creative priorities of your clients right now?
Even when you see what could be considered a decent idea, it’s rare to see it filter through every piece of communication. Too often it becomes bland further downstream and loses all connection to the original thinking. Consistency matters, but you only get that if you start with a big, emotionally led idea that can live everywhere, not just in one moment.
Does the increasing fragmentation of the media marketplace create a challenge for brands from a creative point of view?
Creative-first media thinking has been lost a bit. Everything is done in silos, and you end up with media plans and messages that don’t really belong together.When creative and media are planned together, engagement improves dramatically. That’s not rocket science. It just makes sense.
Clients are starting to realise that dashboards aren’t the be-all and end-all. Some things need to be intuitive and message-led, not media-led.
What channels do you think are being underutilised right now from a creative point of view?
For me, Outdoor is a neglected medium. It might not always look efficient on a dashboard, but the halo effect it gives a brand can be huge. We’ve become so obsessed with numbers that we sometimes miss opportunities that elevate everything else we’re doing.Out-of-home gives you the best of both worlds now – strong stature for the brand and increasingly smart targeting. I still think it’s underutilised.
From your perspective, what role should Generative AI play in the creative strategy of modern brands?
I try to keep AI simple. There are three questions: what can it assist with, what can it automate, and where can it genuinely help us innovate?
AI is exciting, for sure, but we have to be careful not to lower the ceiling on ideas and craft. Creative people are editors; someone still needs to decide what’s good and what isn’t. If AI can automate the mundane and give us more time to innovate, that’s a win.
A lot of brands fall into the trap of explaining how their AI works rather than focusing on the benefit it delivers. People don’t care about the mechanics. They care about what it does for them.
The positive is that AI is the enemy of average. That’s why we have to embrace it, not fear it. The tools will change, the roles will evolve, just as they always do, but there’s still huge value in knowing what great creative looks like and how to hit emotion.
For me, the guiding principle is simple: make people feel something. I’ll be banging on about that all year.
