Creative catch-up: M+C Saatchi KARSA's Darren Lee

For Darren Lee (pictured), creativity has evolved far beyond chasing the next big idea. Today, the CCO at M+C Saatchi KARSA believes the best work comes from translating human truths into ideas that people can genuinely feel, rather than simply inventing something new.

Having spent years navigating the changing advertising landscape, Lee has also seen Malaysian creativity become more confident in embracing its own cultural identity. From the role of intuition in a data-driven world to why agencies need more interdisciplinary talent, he shares how his thinking has shifted over the years, and what he believes the industry needs to keep moving forward.

Prior to his return to M+C Saatchi KARSA (previously M+C Saatchi Malaysia), Lee had been the chief brand officer of Bitazza in Thailand. He was also a creative director at &samhoud, an associate creative director at Naga DDB Tribal. He also spent some time with AdVantage and Ogilvy. 

Find out more about Lee's creative journey, what fuels his thinking, and why specificity still beats trends.

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A+M: What does creativity mean to you today, and how has your definition of it evolved over your career?

When I started out, I thought creativity was about the idea that made the room go silent. That "aha" moment when you present something nobody has seen before. I chased that feeling for years. I thought creativity was invention, an artistic expression of a business objective.

Then I had kids.

My daughter, she's eight now, and she has this way of describing the world that always stops me. She once told me that the moon looked "tired tonight." That's not a metaphor she learned. That's just how she saw it. But it was the way that she described it that changed the way I saw the moon that night. Similarly, looking at a problem everyone else sees, but solving it in a way nobody else would, now isn’t that what we do?

So, my definition has shifted, and I think it will continue to evolve. However, I believe one thing remains — Creativity isn't invention. It's translation. It's taking a human truth and translating it into something people can feel.

What's also changed for me is the scope of what I consider creative. Early in my career, a creative person was someone who made the thing — the ad, the visual, the line. Now I think the brief can be creative. The business model can be creative. Creativity is a posture, not a department.

A+M: What makes creativity truly unique in your view, especially in an industry where ideas are constantly being shaped by trends and constraints?

Trends are the enemy of creativity dressed as a friend. We're in this era where everyone is scrolling the same feeds, watching to the same shows, and attending the same industry conferences. The result is an industry that keeps making the same shape of work. You can always tell when a campaign was born
from a trend deck rather than a human insight. It feels borrowed.

What makes creativity unique is specificity. The specific truth about a specific person in a specific moment. That cannot be trended into existence. I don’t mind constraints actually.

I'm a gamer, so I understand that constraints are just the rules of the level. A tight budget, a difficult client, cultural sensitivities — these are just the level design. The magic is what you do inside them.

A+M: With marketing becoming increasingly driven by data and performance metrics, how do you personally protect and develop your creative intuition?

I get asked this a lot and I think the framing is slightly wrong. It's not a balance but rather a conversation. When performance data emerged, creatives thought numbers killed the magic. And we’ve seen how it swung completely towards optimising everything, A/B testing every headline, treating the performance dashboard like a creative director. Both extremes are wrong.

Data tells you where people are. Intuition tells you where they could be. We need both. I remember working on a campaign targeting urban Malaysian women in their thirties. The data told us this segment was overwhelmed, time-poor, and highly functional in their media consumption. The numbers told us to create short-form, utility-led, tactical ads. But creative intuition told us that these women are exhausted and nobody is talking to them like human beings. So, we made something slower and more emotional than the data would have recommended. It performed way above benchmark.

A+M: Do you experience creative fatigue? What does that look like for you, and how do you navigate through it?

I think creatives get fatigue not from making too many ads, but from not creating enough outside of your day job. You can get inspiration from the problems we solve outside of advertising. Whether it’s a side hustle business you have to bootstrap or a community group you’re trying to get people to join, if you solve it creatively it will fuel your drive for the next brief. So, go out and create more.

A+M: Can you share a personal moment where you were stuck on a brief, and eventually found a breakthrough idea in an unexpected way?

Still looking for it.

A+M: Creativity is highly subjective. How do you personally process feedback or criticism when it challenges your work?

When you're young and you've made something you believe in, criticism feels like an attack on your identity or your intelligence. What I've learned is to separate the idea from the execution, and the execution from my ego.

Feedback on execution is almost always useful. Someone saying "I don't get it" is genuinely important information. It might mean the execution failed the idea. It might mean you haven't shown enough. It might mean the room doesn't have the context yet. All of that is actionable.

However, feedback that's trying to kill the core truth of an idea, now that's worth defending. And there's a difference between defending an idea and being defensive about an idea. Defending means you can explain clearly why the truth you found matters, and you can bring evidence. Being defensive means, you're just protecting your feelings. I also try to remember that clients and stakeholders usually aren't wrong, they know the product/brand/service inside out.

They know every facet of the problem and every consequence of not solving it, while we’re focused on that one problem in the brief they handle every other aspect around it. But sometimes the feedback is just agenda driven. In those cases, you document your recommendation, do your professional duty, and move on.

A+M: Looking back at the Malaysian creative industry, what shifts have stood out most to you, both in the work and in how agencies operate?

When I started, Malaysian advertising looked to the West for validation. We were chasing awards. We were making work that was trying to pass as international,
scrubbed of anything too local, too cultural, too Malaysian. And some of that work was technically excellent but culturally hollow, because it was made for a jury in Cannes rather than a family in Subang.

What's changed is the confidence. I see a generation of Malaysian creatives who aren't apologising for who they are. They're making work rooted in Mak Cik Bawang (the local auntie grapevine), the in the kongsi lorong (back alley), in the kopitiam (coffeeshop), in the way Malaysians code-switch between two languages in a single sentence. That specificity is what makes work resonate with the everyday Malaysian.

What I've also noticed is how content creation has democratised the industry in both good and disruptive ways. There are content creators doing more culturally resonant work than some big brands. That should be a wake-up call; stay close to culture, or culture will leave you behind.


A+M: Beyond your own experience, what do you think the Malaysian creative scene needs more of right now to grow in a meaningful way?

Two things.

First: more friction in the work. We are still a very risk-averse market, and a lot of that comes from clients who've never been shown the business case for creative bravery. Agencies need to do better at proving that bold work performs. And clients need to build internal cultures that recognise safe work as stagnation for the brand.

Second: more interdisciplinary creatives. The best ideas I've seen in recent years have come from people who don't think of themselves as advertising people. They're designers who understand code. They're writers who understand business funnels. They're strategists who can direct. We need to stop producing people who only know one instrument, because the music being made now requires an orchestra.

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