PH
Paul Hewitt is a london-based
executive creative director + writer.
Currently
Global Head of Creative, ECD at Deliveroo & award-winning theatre and film writer.
Press
- “Go slow” / Creative Review
- “Bizarre binaries” / D&AD
- Deliveroo brand identity / The Drum
- In-house agency advantages / IPA
Selected clients: Deliveroo, Google, YouTube, Pinterest, HBO, Netflix, Sky, Virgin, Yotel, Brainloop, Benefex, Waitrose, Universal, NATS, Yotel, Motability, Le Creuset, Microsoft, Motorola, Institute of Directors.
Judging: Campaign Global Agency of the Year 2024, Creative Circle Awards 2024, Creative Review Annual 2024, D&AD Awards 2023, D&AD Shift 2023, DMA Awards 2022, Inside Out Awards 2020.
Advisory: Trustee, Mayflower Studios.
Agent: Michael Stannard at Treviem.
CV: Creative Director, Google (2017-2022); Freelance (2016-2018); Head of Content, Karmarama (2015-2016); Head of Innovation, CDD (2014-2015).
“Paul has delivered some of our most impactful work and pushes the boundaries of creativity to deliver thought-provoking effective campaigns. Paul's superpower is undoubtedly his creative thinking. He has phenomenal creative judgement and a unique talent in crafting stories.”
- Nishma Robb, Google.
On the creative benefits
of going slow.
Published in Creative Review in July 2023.
As Disability Pride Month draws to a close, Deliveroo’s global head of creative Paul Hewitt reflects on losing his mobility in his late 20s and how it taught him to value a slower pace of life and work.
Last month, I turned 30 years old. I often get, ‘Omg, you’re so successful for your age’. Maybe. The thing is, two years ago, mid-pandemic, I nearly died. Young, queer, and with no degree working in a big-ass company – feeling like an imposter, like I didn’t belong, working harder and harder to earn my place there. Through a toxic combination of burnout, dehydration, stress and sitting at my desk for long hours, blood clots formed in my leg and lungs, messed with my body’s blood circulation and left me unable to walk without aid.
And now I feel robbed – and conned. Is this really success? I’m pretty sure my generation will be boiled to death in the ocean, but we’ll still turn up to work to sell mobile phones, or burgers, or whatever. This is the success myth – and it’s a trap.
Initially, I resented the limitations of my mobility, which led to months of depression. But, what if slow is power? After I was originally hospitalised, I recall one of my first trips back into the real world. For safety, I’d begun to wait for the figure on the pedestrian crossing to turn green so I knew I could make it across the road without being run down.
It is rush hour: people backpacked and sneakered, commuters in their coats and with their coffees. Waiting alongside me are athletes in the sport of commuting. And no traffic light system is going to stop them. I watch as one after the other sprints across the road. One just misses being hit by a bus. One doesn’t see the cyclist pelting toward them. One goes for it, misjudges, and then promptly retreats. One frightens a cyclist who has a coffee in hand. It’s almost as comical as the toys in Toy Story 2 trying to cross the road to Al’s Toy Barn.
As I waited, I realised I used to do this every day. And for what? Why did I get so stressed about being at the office on time? Why did I put myself in danger like that? What is so important that you’d risk your life to get to the other side?
It’ll come as no surprise that I left that job. Now, I lead Deliveroo’s in-house creative agency. Recently we took a hit culturally and lost a few members of our team. I struggled to know how to revive our team culture. Our creative team’s time is planned quarterly. This means brief holders submit briefs for us to work on ahead of the quarter – we review, accept or decline and then map out the estimated hours and teams. Waiting to cross the road inspired me – let’s go slow for a bit.
So for this quarter, I put the brakes on. We reduced incoming briefs, reduced the team’s available capacity and pushed back deadlines. Using our newly found time to focus on upskilling, development and ideation alongside our scheduled briefs to help build our culture and knowledge. ‘Slow down’ is not what you’d normally hear at a tech company. But it became our most successful quarter of the last two years. With several global campaigns and a visual identity refresh. It confirmed a solid truth, that a happy team is a more creative team.
This is what success looks like to me. Slowing everything down gave us the space to question and interrogate, to explore and to fail – to just be creative. This wasn’t just a sticking plaster on a fractured culture, it was healing – creatively, we found our mojo again. Did we work on less volume, less quickly? Yes. But did we make the best, most effective work of the last few years? Yes, we did.
I make a point of saying no to one thing every day – it could be a task or a meeting. My therapist taught me this. It is ruthless reprioritisation. It just allows me to remember that I’m in control of mine and my team’s time and lets me be more thoughtful about where we place our energies.
Remember, it’s PR not ER. Yes, we have deadlines but no one is going to die if we have another 48 hours to refine and rethink. If stakeholders or clients were honest, they’d rather have a well thought through idea than a bunch of half-baked ideas. So, we’ll take the space to be more thoughtful about the work we are making and, crucially, about how audiences will see it – please and thank you.
Admittedly, this is easier to do with our in-house creative agency model at Deliveroo, where we’re not eyeing our bottom line. But ultimately, when I speak to our stakeholders about the value of the team, they’d prefer we were making highly effective campaigns over volume, any day.
We shouldn’t be killing ourselves to make great work. No one comes out good in a culture like that. And in some ways, this is an obvious thing to say – but this is balance, and it’s important that we remember what’s at stake if we let it tip over. People’s health and wellbeing. Believe me, I learned the hard way. Right now, I’m currently recovering from surgery on my leg, which may help improve some functions lost to my condition. But the act of being slow is now deeply embedded into my creative philosophy – y’know, slow and steady wins the race.
I’ve always been underestimated – first for being queer, then for not having a degree, and now for having a walking stick. It is a superpower to be underestimated. Use it. Use it to build better cultures, happier and more resilient teams – and ultimately inspire greater creativity. Success is nothing if you don’t have your health. When coming up with ideas, we tell our teams to look for contrasts. Asking them to pull two contrasting things together to find something new. Well, here’s an idea: in a world of now, now, now, go slow.
© 2023 pjwhewitt@gmail.comEmail LinkedIn