Creative catch-up: BLWN's Mark Lee

For Mark Lee, creativity begins with rejecting the obvious. In an industry where familiar formulas are often mistaken for effective work, he believes the real challenge is finding ideas that surprise people while staying firmly rooted in business objectives.

Drawing on experience spanning both marketing and agency leadership, Lee sees curiosity as the antidote to creative complacency. In this edition of Creative Catch-up, he shares why intuition should come before data, how collaboration is reshaping Malaysia's agency landscape, and why the creative industry must do more to earn, and demand, the professional respect it deserves.

Mark co-founded BLWN in 2023. Prior to that, he had been the head of marketing at Sime Darby Property for over a year, out of his total six years spent with the brand. 

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A+M: What does creativity mean to you today, and how has your definition of it evolved over your career?

Creativity, to me, is the refusal to accept the obvious answer.

The obvious answer is always there. It's the safe route, the proven format, the idea that ticks every box without making anyone in the room uncomfortable. And in this industry, it's remarkably easy to mistake that for good work. Real creative work happens when we dismiss the obvious answer and dig deeper into being different without losing sight of the objective. The more confined the space, the harder it is to find something nobody's seen before. And the more it matters when you do.

For me, the clearest sign that something genuinely creative has landed is when I catch myself thinking: huh, I've never thought of it that way. That moment of surprise is the marker.

A+M: What makes creativity truly unique in your view, especially in an industry where ideas are constantly being shaped by trends and constraints?

What makes creativity unique is that it's both subjective and time-sensitive. Apply the same creative thinking to the same consumer problem today versus ten years ago and you would get a completely different answer. Not because the fundamental principles have shifted but because people and cultural behaviours did. Their references, their attention, what actually lands with them.

Weirdly enough, I studied accounting for my degree. The fundamental principles there hold through the test of time. Debits are debits. Credits are credits. The fundamentals don't move with culture. Creative work does. It demands constant learning, constant recalibration. What works today may genuinely not work tomorrow. Which means experience without curiosity isn't an asset. Over time, it becomes the opposite.


A+M: With marketing becoming increasingly driven by data and performance metrics, how do you personally protect and develop your creative intuition?

I start with intuition. I'm a human being. That's the starting point. Then I use data to pressure-test it. Not to form it. Here's the problem with starting from data— everyone has access to the same numbers. If your process begins there, you'll arrive somewhere near where everyone else does. Closer to the end of forming an idea, I run one final check in my head.

If this campaign ran tomorrow, would someone I know— someone as close as possible to the ideal target audience— actually stop and pay attention? Not "would they appreciate it." Would they stop. That's the filter. It cuts through a lot of noise, very quickly.

A+M: Do you experience creative fatigue? What does that look like for you, and how do you navigate through it?

Of course. Anyone who does this long enough hits it.

The irony of experience is that the more you know, the more you know what doesn't work. Slowly, without realising it, you start operating in a narrower space. Your instinct for 'safe' sharpens. Your tolerance for risk quietly shrinks.

When it hits, I do two things. Take a cold shower. Then ask myself: if I had to tear this up and start again today, what would it actually look like? And then I run the same test - would someone I know, someone who looks like my target audience, actually stop for this? Or scroll past?

Sometimes that question is all you need to find the way back in.


A+M: Can you share a personal moment where you were stuck on a brief, and eventually found a breakthrough idea in an unexpected way?

The one that comes to mind is a recent property developer campaign. I spent years as a head of marketing in the property industry before this. I know the property playbook at the back of my hand - what works, what lands, what gets approved and why. That's the problem. When you've seen enough of what works, it's easy to default to it.

So, I asked myself one simple question: do people actually want to see what a developer wants to show them?

Honestly? No. Nobody is scrolling their feed hoping someone interrupts them with a property USP. People care more about what interests them. Their life. The version of themselves that might exist inside a space like this.

Instead of leading with the property, we built the campaign around personalities - anchored on room types, on how different people actually inhabit a home. The brief didn't change. The product didn't change. We just stopped talking from the developer's side of the table and started sitting on the consumer's side instead.


A+M: Creativity is highly subjective. How do you personally process feedback or criticism when it challenges your work?

I start with one question: why?

Not defensively. Genuinely. If someone pushes back on the work, I want to understand where that reaction is coming from. Because when you dig deep enough, it almost always traces back to a consumer insight, a category truth, something with logic underneath it.

When that's the case, the conversation stops being about taste and becomes about logic. That's a conversation I'm comfortable having. I've been right many times. I've been wrong just as many. What I've learned is that there's rarely a clean absolute in creative work. Which is the most maddening thing about this industry, and also the most liberating.


A+M: Looking back at the Malaysian creative industry, what shifts have stood out most to you, both in the work and in how agencies operate?

The biggest shift is from competition to collaboration. Not long ago, agencies kept their walls up. You protected your clients, your process, your positioning. Information was leverage. That model is too slow now.

The landscape has fractured - freelancers, boutique studios, big integrated agencies, hyper-specialised shops. Clients are demanding more because consumers are harder to reach than ever. What it takes to create a genuine moment of resonance has multiplied.

Not many single agencies can do all of it well. BLWN has been one of the founding members of SAMA — the Strategic Asia Marketing Alliance — a regional network of independent agencies built on exactly this conviction. And locally, we've worked alongside these agencies on work that none of us could have done as well alone. The edge belongs to the ones who collaborate.


A+M: Beyond your own experience, what do you think the Malaysian creative scene needs more of right now to grow in a meaningful way?

The creative industry needs to be taken more seriously - as a profession, not just a service.

Here's what happens consistently: a company tightens. The first thing cut is the marketing and sales budget. The expectation of output? Exactly the same. And somehow, that's accepted as a reasonable ask.

No other profession operates like this. We don't tell our lawyers to bill half the hours and deliver the same brief. We don't ask our auditors for a full set of accounts at a discount because the quarter was rough. But creative work on the other hand - gets treated as compressible.

The industry needs clearer standards. A professional baseline that protects the quality of the work, the integrity of the process, and the people doing it. Until that exists, we'll keep having the same conversation about why creative work doesn't get the respect it deserves.

The honest answer is maybe, we have to demand it ourselves first.

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