About

My name is Ben Keenan. Teaching others how to generate strategic and stronger creative has always played a huge role in my creative career.

I led digital creative for Clemenger BBDO Melbourne at its creative peak, when it became the only Australian agency in history to be named ‘Creative Agency of the Year’ at Cannes and D&AD in the same year. It was a time when modern brands were not constrained to merely running TV ads and good advertising began behaving more like culture.

We called it Circuit Breaking. Putting the whole team in a room: creatives, strategists, devs, accounts, and gathering up our insights, little nuggets of truth, trends, useful tech. The stuff that gets shared in inspirational group emails, but rarely found it’s way into the work.

This approach led us to hacking hold music systems , creating human tests out of ticketing systems, as well as the two most gloabally awarded and effective non-traditional campaigns of 2017 with The Snickers Hungerithm and Meet Graham. Groundbreaking Ideas where you couldn’t attribute the credit to one singular person or team.

Looking back, the thing I was most proud of, were the collaborative sessions where all the genius in the room multiplied. This is what birthed The Creative Class.

Aside from facilitation, I am also a practicing creative director, writer, and strategist. I have presented at SxSW interactive 2017 and 2018. I was nominated by peers to chair the digital jury of the Award Awards. My collaborations have been recognised for their creativity and effectiveness over 200+ times across 30 projects. Some of these awards include the only two Australian wins at the first Twitter Awards, a D&AD pencil, 21 Cannes Lions, a One Show Interactive Gold, multiple Webbies, Effies and more.

In 2016 I created an app that solve a first world problem, and prompted the design director of IDEO (The inventors of Design Thinking) to tweet “Look Birdy: an app of simple brilliance for parents”. I later licensed this IP to a multinational dog food company.

Since 2017, I have led a global collective of thinkers, makers and doers via my consultancy The Thought Police.

I’ve since taught this approach to Melbourne University, RMIT, AWARD, The Creative Council, Accenture Interactive, The Victorian Government, Transport Accident Commission, Worksafe, The World Wildlife Fund for Nature, and countless international agencies, brands and comms departments.

The creative class is designed to demystify this process, take the anxiety out of creativity and provide you with a practical process to tackle any brief - no matter how small or ambitious.