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In the next edition of our Sponsor Series, we spoke with Hannah Springett, the powerhouse founder and CEO behind the award-winning HLabs, a London-based creative strategy agency. HLabs designs bespoke interactive experiences and drives creative excellence, specialising in ‘no code’ design platforms.
We were delighted to catch Hannah fresh from her US conference tour, full of insights and reflections about the industry and what she’s experiencing. Hannah is a strong contender for the NAI’s loudest fan and we love that she was happy to take this time to share her valuable reflections with us!
Hi Hannah, how's it going?
Right now, I’m just really excited about what we can do together in this industry.
The best thing has been finding like-minded people who are fed up with companies focusing on cutting costs and changing designers to AI, but expecting the same amount of work to be done. No one has really been offering solutions to teams working in that space.
At the round tables, I found people that have still got the drive to fix our industry. They care. Like, really care. I want to latch onto finding those people that want to give back and help each other and go: “Ok, what are we going to do then?”
I’ve had really cool calls with people saying “I’ve got all these problems you can fix and I just didn’t think anyone was in the innovation space to try and make this better”.
How do you think the industry is responding to the current challenges?
There’s a lot of fatigue. I want to be part of conferences and talks and speaking events with authentic voices, where you give people ideas, and help each other, not just a sales pitch.
A lot of the AI conversation is about how it’s going to replace this and that, but there’s not enough conversations on how to use it to be more creative.
Meeting like-minded people has given me a lifeline to use my creativity again. We need to have spaces to encourage people to have reinforcing ideas - especially women.
Why do you think purposeful meetups are so important in the industry?
We need more spaces for people to give.
Two-way conversations and roundtables are so powerful. People have the space to say “this is my challenge”, and we can say “oh, we tried this to fix that exact thing”.
It just has more impact, and the people really level me up.
As founders, and senior leaders, we’re all seeking inspiration but the part no one talks about is exposure. When we’re in these rooms, hearing this stuff, we can join the dots. We can see the real challenges publishers are facing and see what to do about them.
But, sometimes it’s impossible to relay everything back to our teams. Hence a gap that needs fixing.
Tell me more about the current opportunities for innovation in branded content?
Within branded content, because we wait for someone to give us money for projects, it means that what’s being sold is really safe, predictable, turnkey stuff we’ve seen over and over. And that’s because it is going to get the proven results that clients want.
But innovation doesn’t work like that.
There’s a push and pull factor where there’s profit, but following just the profit doesn’t allow you to create anything new. And our businesses will die out if we don’t create new things.
You need to take the big swings to really impact change, rather than doing the same stuff and becoming irrelevant.
I think we need more spaces for people to truly push each other, be more creative and share the really big ideas!
Why do you think innovation is so challenging at the moment?
I think in the next year, some tech solutions are going to be replaced. This comes down to three persistent problems: policy restrictions, procurement, and providing successful onboarding.
Big organisations take time to integrate tech tools, and being tied into something (for say a year or two, or even three) in a changing market is really dangerous. We just don’t know what the demand will be.
This does create an opportunity for agencies, creatives and freelancers to do that creative experimentation and then go to publishers and say: “ok, well within this box we can move faster”.
Our future at HLabs is about always staying at least six months ahead.
Tell me more about that?
We want to make brand content more visual, more interactive and more engaging. This brings up issues because there are different requirements from different teams, and different abilities to onboard tools that achieve this.
There’s this rolling issue where you need to learn new tools, but they’re almost instantly out of date.
Instead, we should be focusing our teams on their ability to change, whether it’s learning AI, improving their knowledge of the tools they already have, or focusing on innovation. You need to rapidly reskill, whilst being resilient, because last month is often irrelevant already.
What does this rate of change mean for leaders in the industry?
You need to be ready for change, and you need to lead alignment on change. A lot of publishers keep it in silos, so the people creating the web aren’t talking to the designers, aren’t talking to the writers, aren’t talking to the people looking at the metrics, and everybody wants different things. The lack of alignment causes this lag in making new things happen.
As leaders in our space, we have a duty of care to the people that we hire. We have to give them exposure to what’s happening in the industry but it is also our responsibility to build their resilience so they can handle these changes, at pace.
We need to give our teams the right information, not scaremongering and not telling them AI will take their jobs, but helping them build on their skills, pivot in what they’re doing and always apply and use critical thinking.
We have to be responsible with reskilling and choosing how our company is going to get where it needs to be, once we’ve identified the places where learning is necessary.
Everyone is struggling with the same thing right now, but innovation and creativity can be the answer to drive real tangible solutions.
Meet Hannah and other members of the HLabs team at Native Advertising Days on June 11 in London. Limited tickets are available here.
