Creative catch-up: Naga DDB Tribal's Walter Teoh

When generative AI can produce ideas in seconds, what separates one creative from another? For Naga DDB Tribal's executive creative director Walter Teoh (pictured), the answer lies not in the tools, but in the ability to notice what others miss.

With years of experience shaping campaigns in Malaysia, Teoh believes creativity today is less about making things and more about observing people, collecting experiences and developing the kind of perspective that cannot be automated. From photography and travel to people-watching, he says the strongest ideas often emerge far away from the brief itself.

Teoh started off his career as a visualiser and art director at Leo, before taking on senior art director roles at various agencies including Naga DDB, DDB Singapore, and TBWA\ Kuala Lumpur. He then spent three years as creative group head at RAPP KL, before returning to Leo Burnett for nearly a decade. 

Find out more about Teoh's creative philosophy, why he believes taste is becoming advertising's biggest competitive advantage, and what he thinks the Malaysian industry needs more of.

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

When I started, I thought creativity was about making things. Then AI started making things too. Which was mildly humbling.

Now I think creativity is about noticing things. Anybody can generate a hundred ideas before lunch. Very few people notice the old couple at the hawker centre who haven't spoken in twenty minutes but still order each other's food without asking.

One of those observations is worth more than a hundred generated ideas. The longer I am in advertising, the more interested I become in people.
People are infinitely stranger. And thankfully, still harder to automate.

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

Everybody has the same tools now. The same AI. The same trends. The same LinkedIn prophets predicting the future of creativity every Tuesday morning. So, what separates one creative from another?

Taste.

Taste is accumulated experience. It's the films you watched. The music you obsessed over. The mistakes you survived. Things you couldn't stop caring about even when nobody paid you to care.

Two creatives can receive the same brief and arrive at completely different answers. Because one references advertising. The other references a Wong Kar-wai film, a forgotten Japanese horror gem and a conversation with his grandfather.

Creativity is still personal. That's what makes it valuable. And annoying. Because there's no shortcut.

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

Data is useful. So is Google maps. But if you follow Google maps, blindly long enough, eventually you'll drive into a lake because a robot politely suggested it. That's how I feel about marketing sometimes. Data tells us what worked.

Creativity is usually interested in what hasn't happened yet. I protect intuition by spending less time looking at dashboards and more time looking at life. Photography. Music. Travelling. People-watching. Getting mildly obsessed with things that have absolutely nothing to do with advertising.

The best ideas rarely arrive during the meeting. They arrive later. Usually when you're doing something you're not supposed to be doing.

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

All the time. Creative fatigue isn't when you stop having ideas. It's when all your ideas start wearing the same outfit. Everything begins to feel familiar. Every brief starts sounding like the previous brief.

You become productive. Which is often the first warning sign. When that happens, I leave. Not permanently. Just long enough to remember there's a world outside Google slides.

I take photographs. Doodle badly drawn cars and weird beings. Watch films. Read things that won't help my career.

Creativity needs fresh ingredients. Otherwise, you're just microwaving leftovers and calling it innovation.

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?

Most of my best ideas have arrived immediately after I stopped looking for them. I once spent days trying to solve a brief. Whiteboards. Research. Post-it notes. The full ritual sacrifice. Nothing good came out of it. Even worse, it was utter shit.

Then somebody told me a completely unrelated story. Not about the product. Not about the category. Just a small human moment. And suddenly the answer appeared. That's happened often enough that I've stopped believing great ideas live inside the brief.

Most of them are hiding somewhere in real life. The brief is usually just where you file the paperwork afterwards.

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

I've learned that feedback is often directionally correct and technically wrong. People are very good at sensing when something feels off. They're less good at explaining why. Or suggesting what to do next. So, I listen for the discomfort.

Not necessarily the solution. Sometimes feedback improves the work. Sometimes it turns a racehorse into a committee-approved camel.

Part of the job is knowing the difference and occasionally pretending you're okay with 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?

The biggest shift is that agencies have become incredibly efficient. Everything is faster. More content. More deliverables. More meetings about reducing the number of meetings.

We've built an industry obsessed with productivity. The problem is that productivity and creativity aren't the same thing. One gives you more work. The other gives you memorable work.

The irony is that as AI makes production easier, the things that become valuable are deeply human: taste, judgement, empathy, curiosity. That's what I believe in. It's what Naga believes in. Not competing on volume. Competing on perspective. Believing in curation and humanity. This is because eventually everybody will have access to the same technology. The difference will be who paid attention to life while everyone else was staring at dashboards.

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?

More weird people. I mean that sincerely. Malaysia is already one of the richest cultural melting pots in the world, but somewhere along the way we've convinced ourselves the interesting ideas live somewhere else.

They don't. They're already here. What we need is more curiosity and less imitation. More experimentation and less optimisation. That's a big reason Naga exists.

Not to produce more content. To protect curiosity.

In a world where everybody has the same AI tools, the only thing that remains truly valuable is perspective, and perspective comes from interesting humans living interesting lives.

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