Nils Leonard: Living dangerously

What early influences or experiences in your life led you towards a creative career? 

The very first one was growing up in a creative house. My father was a tattooist and a musician and had his tattoo designs all over the walls. My parents were kind of hippies, and album art was a big thing in our house. I’m named after Bruce Springsteen’s guitarist, a guy called Nils Lofran. 

It was a really an interesting bedrock for a lot of creative spirit. We had lots of weirdly dressed people in and out of the house all the time. What my upbringing didn’t teach me, however, was that you can make money from creativity.  

I don’t know how many of us give ourselves permission to believe that you can still properly live creatively, as opposed to just [being creative in] the day job. 

I think, if I’d believed and understood that you can make money from creativity, I probably would have just tried to be an artist. But I was also desperate to get out of where we lived, so I went into advertising.  

Early in my career, I was lucky to work around very inspiring people. I was following creatives like Michael C. Place, Peter Saville, the guys at Spin, Jonathan Ellery at Browns from a design side, and I pushed very hard to work with Paul Belford.  

Above: Nils Leonard. 

What was your first step into the industry? 

I had no idea how to break in. I was due to potentially go to university, but I was nervous about it. No one in my family had been to uni.  

So, in the summer I went to the job centre and asked, “Have you got any jobs in advertising?” They were like, “We’ve never had that request before, but let me have a look.”  

There was one job, at Lintas in London, as a junior in the production department. I turned up two-and-a-half hours early for that interview and managed to get it. To this day, that’s probably the luckiest thing that’s ever happened to me. It changed my life. 

It was an interesting lesson about fame, about how to generate it, how to put yourself out there, and that the more you can do yourself, the less dependent you are on others.  

Do you have any creative practices outside of advertising?  

I love fragrances and people’s relationship with them, and I’m learning how to make candles. I cook a lot, and I’m obsessed with experiences. By that, I mean the experience of a home or a space.  

I draw, and I’ve got these notebooks that I’ve had since the start of the studio. I take all our notes in them with a brush pen, and I keep them all. Documenting is also a creative process. 

I’ve always believed that a great life is one where you can genuinely live creatively. I look at my heroes like Peter Saville, and it wasn’t just Peter’s work that inspired me. What inspired me was the way he lived, the way he dressed, the energy he created. 

I don’t know how many of us give ourselves permission to believe that you can still properly live creatively, as opposed to just [being creative in] the day job. 

Above: Uncommon created The Angina Monologues, a stage show with the British Heart Foundation about female stress with Victoria Wood.

You’ve seen the industry from multiple angles throughout your various jobs. Which roles or projects shaped how you think about creativity the most? 

It was at Abbott Mead Vickers, where I started to move from being a designer to being a creative.  

I remember reading Creative Review and thinking, “Fuck, I want to be in there”. I was making all this work in the background, doing fashion shows, doing whatever, and I thought, “I’m going to make some ads for Atomic Type”, which is a type foundry. 

I made these ads with Max Oppenheim. I designed them, made them, printed them all out and we made these posters. I later rang Gavin Lucas at Creative Review and was like, “You don’t know me. I’m sorry to call out of the blue. I’ve made these things. Do you like them?”  

I think most creatives want to matter and they want their work to matter. I don’t think any of us want to believe we’re making temporary landfill content. 

A month and a half later there’s a double page spread in Creative Review with all four of my ads on it. A guy at AMV storms downstairs and goes, “What is this? Who do you think you are? You didn’t mention our name.” 

I was like, “Well, I didn’t do them for you. I did them for me.”

It was an interesting lesson about fame, about how to generate it, how to put yourself out there, and that the more you can do yourself, the less dependent you are on others.  

Above: Uncommon's Britain Get Talking campaign for ITV was the biggest mental health campaign in the UK, with over 100 million conversations. 

What pushed you to start Uncommon and what did you want to do differently? 

I think most creatives want to matter and they want their work to matter. I don’t think any of us want to believe we’re making temporary landfill content. 

When I started to think about the fact that nobody in the real world has any conception of any of these advertising companies, I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be amazing to run a studio that people in the real world might go, “Fuck, I love those guys”? 

I was watching the Nick Cave documentary and the titles rolled and I heard someone in the audience go, “Oh, fucking Uncommon.” It was the best thing that had ever happened to me. 

I think trying to matter, and believing that a company could matter, and deluding myself into thinking we might be something that really did make a difference, is what I’m in pursuit of. 

There’s never been a bigger reason to try to make something original. I hope people pursue that. 

Is there a campaign you’ve worked on that didn’t get the recognition you felt it deserved? 

There’s one that haunts me from before Uncommon that I made at Grey called The Angina Monologues with Victoria Wood. It was a stage show with the British Heart Foundation about female stress. It was performed at an amazing theatre and broadcast on Sky. It won a British Comedy Award. 

What’s insane about that is most of our industry at that point didn’t even understand that we could have made that as an agency. They were like, “What did you do for it, the logo?” And I was like, “No, you don’t understand. The whole fucking thing.” 

I genuinely think we were guilty of doing it far too early, to the point where people just didn’t understand what we were doing. I was probably guilty of not following it up with equivalent work afterwards. 

There’s also work we’ve done here that I wish more people talked about. I think the Britain Get Talking work for ITV is seminal. That’s the biggest mental health campaign in the UK: 100 million conversations. 

Now we’re all talking about mental health like it’s a normal thing, but it wasn’t back then. I look at that work and that partnership with ITV and think that was important for the studio. It taught us we could play at a certain level.