Most advertising conferences feature tightly choreographed presentations in which the speaker toes a line, gives little away, and seeks to evidence a linear success story.
Not Orlando Wood, the mercurial presence who serves as research agency System1’s chief innovation officer. At EffWorks (October 2021), he treated the audience to paintings by Albrecht Dürer, Hieronymus Bosch, Giorgio de Chirico, Picasso, El Lissitsky, and invited it to “look out”.
He hadn’t just chosen the famous ones. Wood’s interest centres on the periods of intense creativity witnessed in the Renaissance, when the invention of the printing press sped up the rate of textual...