BBH founder John Hegarty is now into online dating—in a manner of speaking. Hegarty has signed on as chairman of Genie, a service that uses artificial intelligence to match freelance creatives with agencies and marketing companies looking for talent. Genie, which he says can be described as “a Tinder for the creative world,” plays into two current trends: the growing distributed workforce and the move toward project-based work.

“It’s like having a creative department in your pocket,” says Hegarty, who is currently co-founder at startup incubator The Garage Soho, but Genie is not part of that investment group. Rather, Genie came to him, he says, as it was “I will use that awful word—pivoting—from a headhunter company to going online.” Genie’s founders include Nicky Badenoch, Nick Grime and Bonnie Harold, who were partners in London recruiters LIZH.

Given the pandemic, the timing was especially good for Genie, a bot that operates via a messaging service to liaise with clients and talent. Clients pitch a brief and the algorithm does the matching with creatives, who become part of the service via invitation only. (Creatives do not pay to be part of the listings). Genie counts among its users Saatchi & Saatchi, Virtue and Droga5 and says its talent base includes creatives who have worked on projects from Adidas’ “There Will Be Haters,” to ING’s “The Next Rembrandt.”

Genie uses technology to “apply intelligence to creativity,” says Hegarty, whose initial goal will be to migrate pay-as-you-go users of the service to switch to a subscription model. 

Oddly, in some ways Genie is similar to Marcel, the AI system used by Publicis Groupe, to which Hegarty and his partners sold BBH in 2014—though, as Hegarty points out, Marcel is proprietary to the holding company and works across all disciplines rather than simply creative.

Creativity is a topic Hegarty is very much connected with, and although he is no longer with BBH, he still builds brands via Garage Soho and has some strong opinions on the current state of advertising, which he says has become “more pervasive than inspiring.”

“The industry as a whole has resorted to stalking as a means of acquiring and talking to their audiences. They stalk [consumers online] rather than inspire them to come to you,” he says. “They find people through data and shove an ad in their face … it’s not particularly good, but that doesn’t matter.” Those practices, he says, “annoy your potential audience and degrades the value of advertising.”

Nor is he a fan of merging legacy ad agencies. “It is a sign of weakness, trying to paste together a company that isn’t doing well with a company that might be better,” says Hegarty. “You can’t put two cultures together, especially if one is sick. In science, if you introduce a bad culture into a good culture, you will weaken both and the same thing applies to a creative business.”

Creating client-specific intra-holding company teams drawn from shops around the parent company also doesn’t work, he says. “It is complete shit. On paper it sounds wonderful,” but in reality it is a flawed idea. “If I am at BBH, it is because I believe in something at BBH, so why sit down with somebody at Leo Burnett?” says Hegarty.

"These ideas are “constructed by management people who don’t understand creativity," he says. “The irony is the [advertising industry] is supposed to understand brands and the people running these companies don’t understand brands.”

That said, Hegarty does not regret selling to Publicis—”eventually you have to go, you can’t stay somewhere forever”—and when asked whether he still considers himself a black sheep (BBH’s logo is a black sheep and the shop’s positioning is that it zags when others zig), Hegarty laughs. “I hope so,” he says. “Zagging is good fun.”

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CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story stated that Genie can sort data by gender and ethnicity. The company has since clarified, saying, "The diversity data Genie collects is entirely separate from its matching algorithm. Talent divulge their personal information on the basis that it remains confidential and anonymous and separate from the matching algorithm. By gathering the data as talent onboard onto Genie, we are able to share live data on the demographic makeup of the talent pool as a whole which ensures that clients know that they are fishing from a pool of talent that has diversity of thought."