Provocative or invisible. Great ideas still start with people. And advertising is always dying, which is exactly why it never does.

Murphy was the kid forever drawing and forever in the art room. His father, tangentially in marketing and, by his own admission, an uncreative man, saw a practical use for the talent and gave him a gentle push toward advertising. He remains grateful for it.

Work now has to be interesting. It just has to be provocative and strike a chord. Even 10 years ago you could pay your way into attention. In today's overcrowded world, unless you have a point of view in your work, nobody pays attention, and that is increasingly the story of the whole business.

The most interesting conversations are now happening before the brief, with creatives invited into strategic discussions at a high level. Murphy senses a real return to focus on the idea, and a fresh appreciation of the irrational and illogical things people actually remember. People confuse scale and efficiency with impact, but 1,000 times zero is still zero: spread something everywhere and it still fails if it was never interesting.

His early signal is human and simple. When he hears a great idea, his first instinct is to rush and tell other people, coworkers or even family. AI lets you test things quickly, but promise still shows up first in the reaction of the people in the room.

In a big business the enemy of speed is stakeholders. The job of the Chief Creative Officer is to focus the group of decision makers and make sure the right voices decide. The smaller that group, the faster you move and the more point of view the work keeps. Invite the inputs, but be clear who is actually deciding.

Large groups average work out, it is basic maths, the more people comment. The lone-visionary creative is not the world we live in, and work has often gotten better for different opinions in the room. But averaged work is safe work, and that is a total danger.

The best ideas ultimately come from people, and if you want to move people you have to start with people. Murphy warns against letting scrolls and feeds become your single input of cultural inspiration, and pushes creatives out into the world, to museums, to films, to real life. Feed your brain good stuff and good stuff comes out.

The defined art director and copywriter roles have given way to multi-hyphenate, multidimensional thinkers who make things. The democratisation of tools has opened the industry up again. His daughter is in film school surrounded by scrappy young makers, and among that generation records, CDs and 35 millimetre film are back. Craft, he insists, is alive and well.

There is pessimism everywhere, fear of AI, fear about entry-level jobs, fear about the industry's future. Murphy told a group recently that advertising is always dying, get used to it, because it has been declared dead every year since he entered the business. He calls advertising a cockroach that always finds its way through, because the need to promote brands never disappears, only its form. Young people, used to a steady drip of doom, responded to that.

When Murphy started, people bemoaned Mac computers and Photoshop and argued that ideas not drawn by hand had lost the purity of the business. That was never true. It comes down to taste: what held for Photoshop in 1994 holds for AI now. In the hands of someone with no taste it can be dreadful, but with taste and something to say it can be amazing. You see the same thing with iPhones, uninteresting for most people, breathtaking for the right one.

A bigger agency brings new perspectives that should improve the work. The risk is losing the heart of it, because the bigger you get the more fearful you become, since the scale and the cost of failing are both larger. The task is remembering the soul of the organisation while inviting the new perspectives in.

Creatives long for the days of a few weeks to think, but the demand for everything now is not going away. Murphy does not sugar-coat it: you have to learn to think and work fast, and that is the reality.

Murphy accepts the conversation that Cannes has become an ad tech festival with the creative soul lost. But having served on a jury last summer, he says that in the jury room and the palais the great ideas remain great ideas, making you jealous, inspiring you and revving you up for next year. Many now come and never step foot in the theatre, which is exactly where he goes to recharge.

Awards turn dangerous when the awards track drifts away from real client business into a separate thing agencies do called Cannes. At its best, awards culture sets a north star for the industry and gives creatives something to shoot for. The goal is solving real client problems while doing work that is bold and brave, and the best work here does both.

His advice to newcomers is deceptively simple: half the battle is pure excitement and loving the industry and your potential in it. The young people thriving at his agency bring an infectious energy that every creative director wants on their accounts. Talent, taste and vision matter, but nothing can replace that energy, and once you see it the rest can be built.

Murphy points to Coca-Cola work like The Last Coke in the Desert and Thanks for Co-Creating, which celebrated the imperfect hand-painted Coke signs small grocers make. The brand relinquished control, but it could only do so after building a recognised brand for years by being strict about what it was. That discipline is what earns the right to loosen the reins and let people tell your story for you.