What is a Creative Director?

What is a creative director? It's a question I've been asked again and again, by clients, by email, through social media, on my Facebook and even in conferences at universities.

Being such a vital position for any advertising agency, design studio, or creative office, anyone would think that the concept is more than understood, however this just is not the case.

What is a creative director? To answer this question Phil Johnson, CEO of PJA Advertising & Marketing, wrote an article for AdAge, that ingeniously parodies the constant repetition of the question, called: What the hell is a creative director supposed to be?

Here is the article:

"Looking back on my agency career, I find it horrifying that in the early days of PJA Advertising I was the creative director. If I say that to my current staff, they would look at me incredulous and probably burst out laughing. But there was a time when I wrote the copies, proposed ideas to the clients, built the creative organisation and approved all the work that came out the front door. This is not always good. Like anyone, I was limited to my particular tastes, my style and value judgments. All this was making it increasingly clear that we had to hire a creative director to expand our range.

From that moment forward, it could be said that I have been searching to define the ideal role of a creative director, and to build an organisation that remains open to creative possibilities. It is not surprising that my thinking has been changing and evolving with the growth of the agency.

I came to the conclusion that the job of creative director is bigger and more important than any other in an agency. More than the person who has the best ideas, or the person who best judges the good job, or the person who can best manage the creative process, a creative director is someone who needs to shape the creative brain of the entire agency, and build in it a creative consciousness. His influence extends far beyond the creative department. This conviction has made me question many of the traditional expectations about a creative leader.

For example, when we were a smaller agency, I thought it was essential that the creative director produce the highest profile work. This went hand in hand with our player-coach model, in which managers are expected to put their hands in everything. Also, we could not think of a creative director who was not producing billable work. I still think this is a good thing, but to a certain extent. However, when a certain measure of agency is reached, a creative director becomes more valuable when he sees the importance of creating the conditions for other people to do a great job. The transition between both approaches is hard.

It is natural that the best creative directors become stars. When that happens, one runs the risk of building an agency around the cult of a creative personality. I have nothing against superstars, but it is even better to find a creative director with the talent to develop a whole team of superstars.

At another time I was evaluating a creative director as someone who can oversee all the work of the agency and be the arbiter of what is good and what the final version of a job does. This creates another dilemma. As the only authority voice, the creative director thus becomes a creative director. No matter how talented it may be, when all the work goes through a single creative filter, interesting voices and ideas are lost along the way. What drastically reduces the creative range of an agency, and finally produces a unique tone and style, which is the quickest way for an agency to go from being considered innovative to being seen as stereotyped.

By the way, someone has to make the decisions. There are misconceptions and bad ideas that need to be nipped in the bud. But more than being the only sheriff of a city, the creative director must extend that responsibility among a group of reliable people. When you have a lot of talent in an agency, there is rarely a simple better idea; instead, there are lots of good ideas that are simply different. That's good, and it's one of the benefits that customers get from working with an agency like that. A creative director needs to keep that diversity of ideas alive.

I went through stages in which I thought that the most important role of a creative director was to be an experienced manager. When you have accounts that grow and are struggling to handle work across multiple offices and geographies, you are desperate to have a creative leader who can protect the quality of work and make trains run on time. It is, of course, important skills, and in key moments can save an agency from a disaster. But they are not capable of leading it to greatness.

In my evolutionary view, the most valuable contributions of a creative director occur outside of day-to-day operations.

That person needs to cultivate an active debate around what a good job develops, so that diverse ideas flourish and many people have the power to choose the best direction to aim for.

You need to shape an environment that attracts creative people, and that makes the rest of the staff more creative than ever.

Difficult as it seems to be, that person needs to make people believe that they can do the impossible and create experiences that never happened before. That is what opens the door to great advances in creativity.

The creative director's job does not come with an instruction manual. I was fortunate to have worked with a couple of creative directors who have the gift of operating at that level. And it takes a lot of guts, because when they succeed they shoot a creative force bigger than themselves. It is a bold move for someone whose career is based on a creative reputation. If you can unleash the creativity around you, that is the highest point of the game."