Creative catch-up: GrowthOps' Adzam Bahrin

Creativity is often talked about as a process, a skill or something that can be measured against results. But for GrowthOps Asia's Adzam Bahrin, it's much simpler and much stranger than that.

Adzam is currently executive creative director at GrowthOps Asia, where he oversees creative across Malaysia and Singapore. He previously served as the agency’s regional creative director, having joined GrowthOps in 2022, and has held creative leadership roles at Naga DDB Tribal and VML. His earlier career also includes stints as senior art director at M+C Saatchi Group and art director at GSW in New York.

In this edition of Creative catch-up, Adzam reflects on the habits that keep ideas alive, why he thinks trends can make creatives lazy, and the surprisingly effective art of "gaslighting yourself into being creative". From creative fatigue to feedback that never gets easier, he shares an unfiltered take on what it really means to make ideas for a living.

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

I’ve always thought of creativity as an innate ability to look at a problem through an infinite number of perspectives. A good “creative” is someone who will never run out of new ways to say “hello”.

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

A good idea to me is always the idea that’s new. And some would say a great idea is one that feels both familiar and brand spanking new at the same time. While trends can bring value as reference points, I can’t help but find ideas built around them to be lazy in nature.

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

I don’t think there’s anything to “protect”. We’re all swimming out into the open sea together, hoping we make it to land. While I do have my share of secrets, one strategy I think everyone should employ is to read and write more. Just the steady act of inputting and outputting thoughts through your neurological system is a key exercise.

There’s a scene in an old Gus Van Sant movie, Finding Forrester, where the main character, an aspiring writer, retypes a printed article on a typewriter over and over until, eventually, he starts typing his own original prose by pure instinct. I think about that scene a lot. Sometimes you just have to gaslight yourself into being creative.

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

Everyone gets creative fatigue, unless you're an AI. When it happens to me, a non-AI person, I go and bother colleagues, friends, strangers, my wife… especially my wife, with trivial conversations to get a rise out of them. You have to be an energy vampire.

And then after that I’ll try the typewriter thing.

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?

It would be weird not to get stuck on a brief. In fact, a pet peeve of mine is when ideas are shouted out immediately after a briefing, sometimes before the brief is even finished. Whenever someone says, “The best answer is the simplest answer,” they’re usually not the ones staying up late all week clicking through 'Love the Work' links.

I don’t really have a specific answer to this question, except to say, as creatives, we can always remember and laugh fondly about all our ideas that didn’t make it, but never about the ones that did.

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

Sorry folks, but dealing with feedback and criticism never gets any easier. As creatives you just have to keep working hard and grind though it until you become the ECD and hopefully encounter less of it.

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?

It feels like our industry is much younger now. When I first started out, the people running the industry were a lot older than me, but now they’re my age.  Jokes aside, of course it’s technology, and everything about it. We’re becoming increasingly reliant on it to both validate and optimise our outputs. It can be yes, a little troubling, but only if you think about it too much. What are we going to do, not use it? Are we digging our own creative graves? Will we one day be as obsolete as toll booth operators?

See? It’s best not to think about it too much.

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?

A return to bigger interior design budgets for our creative offices. I’ve joked a fair bit during this interview but on this, I am dead serious.

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