China Special: Norman Tan

After winning a slew of Lions and D&AD Pencils with last year’s Human Traffic Signs for Buick, it would have been easy for Norman Tan to take his foot off the accelerator, sit back and have a well-deserved rest. Instead, as J. Walter Thompson’s new North Asia CCO and China chairman, he’s motoring ahead with his quest to drive Chinese creativity forward

Norman Tan is sitting in one of Cannes’ swankiest beach bars, sipping a cold Coke and soaking up the Riviera sun, but his mind is on other things. Deep-fried tofu, to be exact – a golden, spongy street snack sold in the hawkers markets of Singapore. In town for the 62nd Lions Festival of Creativity, JWT’s China chairman and North Asia chief creative officer is reflecting on a childhood far removed from the glitz and glamour of our current surroundings; a childhood he shared with twelve siblings (Tan is number eight) and parents who “worked very hard for a living”. His dad sold Yamaha motorbikes and ran a factory producing the very fried tofu Tan is now reminiscing about.

A disinterested student, Tan drifted academically. He “fell in love with music too early” and spent his schooldays playing drums and clarinet instead of poring over English textbooks (he excuses his ‘Singlish’ at the start of our interview). Having flunked high school, he followed his father into sales. Flogging life insurance didn’t exactly set Tan’s world on fire, though, so to counter the day-job tedium, he started an evening course in graphic design.  

That sparked a lifelong fascination with print and design, and in 1982 Tan embarked on the first leg of his 33-year career in advertising, working as a junior designer in local Singapore agency Loy Chin and then D&C, the country’s biggest local agency. Stints at bigger networks including Grey and Leo Burnett followed. It was, says Tan, something of a golden age for advertising in Singapore, and a rich opportunity to learn from some of the best foreign talent based there. “All the great people, like Neil French, Jim Aitchison and Linda Locke, were there; they were mentors to all of us, even if we weren’t working directly with them.”

It wasn’t until 1997 that Tan left his birthplace, when he was offered the role of ECD at JWT Taipei. “The brief was to raise the agency creative bar,” he explains. “JWT was the second biggest agency in Taiwan in terms of size and profitability – a big machine – but it didn’t have a reputation for creativity. They were still submitting awards by cutting out paper and pasting to a sheet!” The ‘Norman Tan effect’, as one local publication dubbed it, transformed the agency’s creative output and bagged Taiwan its first Lion in 1998, for the Banana, Apple and Grapefruit print ads for Zespri’s New Zealand kiwi fruits.    

Throwing out the library books

But the siren call of mainland China was becoming impossible to ignore. Bates China was Tan’s next stop, followed by Lowe China, where, in 2014, he scored his biggest career highlight to date with Human Traffic Signs for Buick/Shanghai General Motors. Playing to Tan’s strengths – and bucking the trend for digital, social and mobile executions – the campaign was predominantly print, but all the more powerful for it. In a series of seven haunting images, amputees posed holding traffic signs at the actual sites of their accidents: a stark reminder of China’s abysmal road safety record.

“It was actually Zeng Qiang’s [Tan’s former creative director at Lowe] idea,” Tan says, deflecting my praise. “I just made it happen for him.” Making it happen took a huge effort, however: of the hundred victims Lowe contacted, just nine agreed to take part, and it was only thanks to the team’s longstanding relationship with Buick that the idea got off the ground. “[Buick] are one of the hardest clients to work with, but we’ve been through tough times and they trust us,” explains Tan. “They were a bit worried about the shocking effect [the ad] was going to produce, but eventually they said ok. Without that relationship, I don’t think we could have sold the idea to anyone.”

The gamble paid off: Human Traffic Signs scored a gold, silver and two bronze Lions at Cannes, plus a clutch of D&AD awards, including the coveted Yellow Pencil, making it one of China’s most medalled campaigns of 2014. More importantly, road traffic accidents reduced by half during the campaign.

Tan could easily have rested on his creative laurels, yet in October last year he took up a new post as China chairman and North Asia CCO at his old agency, JWT. “Lowe has some great people globally and I learned a lot from them. But I would have gotten bored. I could imagine exactly what I’d be doing next year,” says Tan of the decision to leave. “So when Lo Sheung Yan [JWT’s worldwide and APAC creative council chairman] took me out for coffee and asked if I wanted to come back, I knew within 15 minutes that I would. [JWT] is one of the best agencies in China; it’s a bigger platform, and a lot of people I knew from before are still there. I thought, ‘That’s a challenge I would like’.”

Seven months into his new role, Tan is feeling “very positive, very optimistic” about JWT’s prowess – the agency has recently won two domestic blue-chip clients, Union Pay and Alipay – and about the standard of China’s advertising in general. But he says the twin bogeymen of censorship and traditional schooling are still impeding creative progress. “My copywriter at Bates, Ronnie Wu [now group creative director, Y&R Beijing] spent four years at university reading a library book on advertising law!” Tan recounts incredulously. “I told him, ‘Don’t ever show me that fucking book again! We’re here to experiment and to play, to do the best creative [work] possible and worry about the censorship later’.” 

Nurturing homegrown talent

Wu is one native Chinese creative who flourished and prospered under Tan’s mentorship; Zeng Qiang, Tan’s former creative director at Lowe, who has since followed him to JWT, is another: “[Zeng] is a quiet guy, really good but a bit shy, so I thought I needed to help him.” For Tan, nurturing domestic talent is essential for China to achieve its full creative potential. “You have to be grounded and work with the local people, grow with them – that is the most important thing,” he concludes. “You can’t be a selfish person just coming in, making money and leaving. You have to try to create something for the industry.”