What makes a great Creative Director?

A few months ago I started to write this piece, and to avoid some sort of back slapping self referential rhetoric I thought I’d ask around. I asked a fairly wide spectrum of people, acquaintances, mates, senior people, a few people I’d even hired as juniors. What came back was interesting, for different reasons. I was amazed by the humility of some, who I had previously put on a proverbial pedestal. Most of them, appeared to share my reluctance to talk about it, presumably because you leave yourself wide open. So, here’s more of a splurge than an article, I’ve bottled it too.  This is something for creatives/designers to look out for, or aspire to. Maybe just a bit of a check-list for Creative Directors in general. It’s kind of a lot to start talking about really, maybe even a book’s worth or at least a chapter. So I’ll kick off with the obvious: like any position of authority you will have to have character aspects outside of your job description – politician, parent/teacher, nurse, midwife, shrink, salesman etc, however: fundamentally a Creative Director ought to be a balance of a creative person, and a director. It’s a bit like taking charge of the question AND the answer. I don’t think it’s enough to sit back and ‘mark’ the work of a team, as many great CDs are charged with, in an urban legend way. You need to be able to first and foremost take charge of your role, which is to lead and inspire, not dictate. Your responsibility is the work, and so you should be able to deliver, whatever happens. David Ogilvy many years ago talked about ‘building a company of giants’, recruiting people with better potential than oneself, and I totally agree. A great CD is always looking to take on raw talent and nurture it. People that worked with John Hegarty at BBH talked about him sharing his ideas, by the hour, every hour. Not being precious with ideas, giving them away to your team, and helping create a generation momentum was a universal must. Sharing, collaborating, involving, making things, together is something that came up a lot. I would also say you need to nurture the ideas of creative people and get behind them. You need to build the two way street of trust, helping ideas to work, whilst giving credit where it’s due – but ultimately taking responsibility. As a team, you need to share the success and failures, together. Hopefully more successes, but no finger pointing. 

Infectious enthusiasm goes a long way, but couple it with knowledge and talent – It needs to be backed up. I don’t think anyone wants to work with a morose Jack Dee type CD, but here’s where time and experience will help give equity into people’s working relationships. I once worked with someone who tried to mentor me into giving the team the “shit sandwich” approach. When reviewing the work, tell them something good, then bad, then end good. I didn’t adopt this on principle, and instead worked towards clarity of the brief up front, therefore easier to see the teams thinking in response. Being a realist and the ability to be unbiased is a charge, too. The ability to look beyond the white walls of the meeting room and think about how things work in the real world. I think in design agencies, Creative Directors are often asked to take on more managerial roles, too, or at least into the Executive level role. For me, that is more about being able to solve a brief faster than anyone, but keeping that in reserve, really supporting the wider team. So, nothing new there then, really. Apart from one last thing, I found it really refreshing that some of the amazingly talented people I talked to – still looked upwards, or were reluctant to talk as a CD, preferring to be seen as a creative. Maybe these people would or do actually make the best creative directors. Not the ones worrying about who they are. They’re busy making things and enjoying what they do. 

 

Special thanks to Graham, Ad, Adam, Verity, Claude, Tony, Katy and Yann for your thoughts and help.

 

Where’s the fire?

They used to say if you were a woman, being attacked you shouldn’t shout ‘rape!’, instead you should shout ‘fire!’ to get people’s attention. The trouble now is that everything is shouting for attention, maybe the advice should be shout ‘buy one get one free!’. Don’t get me wrong, I love my city, but as a Londoner, I’ve long suspected that our city is a mess.

It appears now that everything wants to branded, or has a ‘brand experience’. There’s saturation that occurs when everything is vying for attention, things become homogeneous. Branded content and advertising often just adds to the soup of communication assaulting our senses. Then there’s social media, more assumed interest or audiences desperately trying to get you to “like” them, whether biscuits, butter or Barnado’s. This leads me to one of my biggest bug bears, stuff that doesn’t or shouldn’t need a brand – or even to be advertised. I often hear in defense of the drivel out there: “Oh, it’s the client’s fault”. I may well have blamed them myself in the past, who hasn’t? But isn’t it time for a war on crap? Can’t we stand up to the clients, authorities, or whoever is in charge. They need to be stopped!. If in trouble, companies should not be shouting ‘brand!’ when actually they mean ‘help’. Branding people maybe need to learn to collaborate with advertising people, and recognize they’re not the same, even if they keep calling themselves the ‘brand owner’. Even in this time of uncertainty and recession, dare I say it – agencies should be turning the work down. It’s time to get back to reputation driving revenue, not the other way around. I’ve been a Creative Director for more than a decade, but I’m still happy to be called a designer. Especially when it comes to real life. Ideas alone are not going to solve society’s issues. Basic infrastructure, needs solutions. Single minded (which is where the CD comes in), implemented by experts, in the appropriate areas only, not always 360° media channels, not always fucking Facebook. London underground for example – why does it need a shop or ‘brand extensions’? Why not run on time, as good as Tokyo metro (It manages it to the second). Why advertise itself, on itself? i.e. posters on the underground – just because it can? Back to the fire! – why do the Police feel it necessary to have a strapline? Met Police currently use “total Policing”, before that it was “working for a safer London”. Every little initiative has a ‘Project’ name. Fine for internal reasons, but why use it to “PR” the ‘audience’ of the city? If big brands can be global and have standout – McDonald’s golden arches, Starbucks, Nike, BMW etc… Why can’t the Police look the same? And the Fire and Ambulances. Even in the UK, each regional force has a different livery, probably different straplines, different Press Release.

What a waste of time, and committee arguing. Why not have a global, universal design standard? That would be effective surely? To my mind the best answer to this was done by the Dutch, years ago. Just use that. Job done, Police look cool, noone messes with them. No need for straplines or twitter or ‘positioning’. It’s the Police, they look like this, all the same, around the world, and if they come up behind you on the motorway, anywhere, you move. Maybe if we universally worked together, we could rebuild communities, real ones, not just on Facebook. That way, ‘equity’ could be brought back to such basic things such as shouting “Help!” .

Idealism is where the heart is… #home

Interesting take on an age old issue. See what happens on November the 5th then. Kalifornia is a small bunch of creatives trying to take the first step in the charity sector. The step of time, values. Branding companies call this share of mind, then share of wallet. If Charity begins at home, then these guys have decided to start there. Good luck to them.

KALIFORNIA

Bodyform on top form

The Brand Fox™

Traditional branding presentations are full of endless diagrams spouting the science of brand. At the same time, internally you’ll often hear people complaining that ideas or executions have been done before. Which, if you keep using the same methods, is hardly surprising. Forget pizzas, puddles, ripples, pyramids, triangles, onions – these are all static model methods of saying the same thing – ideas cascade and inform. If you subscribe to that thought, then the simplest way of describing a brand is a central idea that informs the areas of product, environment, behaviour and communication. Simple. Alternatively, I also think that businesses or things if they are an entity – something with personality or positioning or a point of view – then the ‘model’ ought to be considered living or organic, not static. Introducing the brand fox™ – he eats brand onions for breakfast and even though he’s taking the piss out of the powerpoint posse – he has a point. Consider brands as an entity, a symbiotic and holistic thing. You can read more about the brand fox in my book. Use him as a way of thinking differently, make your own analogy – and if you can’t be arsed with that, feel free to put him in your powerpoint, if you must.

Rule 1: Don’t Bullshit

“Beauty is truth, and truth beauty” said Keats more eloquently than I ever could “and that is all you need to know”. I’m not the kind to cry at sunsets, well not often anyway. Plastic bags in the wind are litter to me, I don’t hear them dancing to Debussy. Finding the beauty in things is important in art, and the craft of design. But, starting with design I found early on that it was important not to bullshit. Wally Olins used to say to us “Never believe your own bullshit”. To me, that implied that one may be prone to bullshitting, but actually i think he meant beware the moment you realize that you are engaging in the act. I caught myself doing it a few times when I was younger, and this week I was reminded of my rule by a young designer. I won’t name names, but this guy is actually brilliant, but still young enough to start over-rationalizing what he had done, after I had already said it was great.
Maybe we’re all guilty of it, another good friend of mine told me of a pitch where he presented a TVC to a top client. He then launched into a tirade of post-rationalism. The client shook his head and said “Mate, you had me with the ad but you’ve just blown it with all that rubbish you talked about it”. Lesson learned. For me, the need to justify things to strategy people was what prompted me as a young dude to step up to the bullshit plate.
But experience teaches you that simplicity and confidence is what is important. Truth is not a new concept in advertising and branding, everyone talks about it. Underlying truths are important, otherwise it’s just smoke and mirrors, at worst lying or simply a load of bollocks. Vison, mission and values are often ticks in the boxes. “bubbly words” as another young creative I work with calls them are unhelpful and confusing. “What, how and why?” is all you really need to know with a brand. But to some, that doesn’t seem to justify the price tag that goes with it, there’s not enough “added value” or science. If you treat people with respect, starting with yourself – big, simple, true ideas are the best.
I remember someone telling me in a meeting “I think there’s a real opportunity to get the message top of mind and celebrate the brand at the point of purchase” I think he wanted to put a poster by the till. So, remember kids, keep it simple, don’t sell to yourself, expose the truth. As Michaelangelo said “I saw the angel in the marble and I set it free”.

Facebook’s new tipping point

Facebook’s first advert.

Facebook has just reached a billion ‘people’ and to celebrate has released its first TV advert. Entitled ‘the things that connect us’ it describes Facebook likening it to ‘Chairs, doorbells, airplanes, bridges, games’. My first reaction to this was that is was condescending and unfortunate. “Chairs are for people and that is why chairs are like Facebook” sounded cricket bat in the face patronizing, and actually untrue. For me, Facebook is a guilty pleasure, I love it and hate it, I justify my use of it – more like a cigarette than a chair. Arguably being subjected to the knowledge of what people had for lunch, how many times they went to the gym or how they want to solve world peace is sometimes like being strapped into a dentist’s chair. Other people’s musings and introspective philosophic soap operas put themselves more on the virtual chez-lounge. Chairs? really? Am I missing something or is this passive-aggressive neurolinguistic suggestion at its best?. The ad is done by W+K, one of the coolest, most creative agencies in the world, and Facebook & Zuckerberg are switched on. Which makes me wonder what exactly was the brief? Facebook is a tool, so is there a need to educate or remind people of how to get a handle on it?. To lampoon or parody the ad would be far too easy (maybe that’s also a point) but to dismiss it or critique it, I think misses the point. Maybe, this is more a show of Facebook’s hand, and that’s what I find interesting. Firstly, exactly at what point do Facebook consider themselves as reaching critical mass? Have they met it already? Are they close? A billion people is roughly one seventh of the planet. A community if seen as a nation putting it 3rd most populated in the world behind China and India. So is the long game about numbers? Or have they something else in mind? Zuckerberg himself, in his own post introduces the ad thus “For the first time in our history, we’ve made a brand video to express what our place is on this earth.” Semantics aside, why a brand video? Now maybe they were damned if they did or didn’t make an ad, film, video, piece, whatever – but why not a celebration? Why not a thank you. Why now, when the product is successfully in use, do they feel it necessary to re-establish what the product is? and to express what ‘our place is on this earth’ – at this point I’m imagining Zuckerberg’s chair to be a big black leather revolving number with a white cat attached to it. What I don’t understand is who is the advert for? It feels like the lowest common denominator on Facebook or maybe a younger, naive generation. But in the digital realm, the old rules do not apply, ergo these kids are probably smarter anyway, so again, who is it for? and why?. Whatever they’re up to, it’s significant that Facebook has made an advert. (As I’m writing this I’ve just seen an ad on TV for Amazon “delivering smiles”, so it seems that maybe the vogue this month is to overplay one’s emotional and essential role in society ergo the world). But Facebook surely doesn’t need to advertise, does it? In the UK, years ago Marks & Spencer was always the benchmark brand that didn’t need to advertise. If it did, surely it would be in trouble. And so when the shares went down, ad spend went up. So is a ‘brand video’ a defensive move? Are they worried about the backlash, competition, rumours, privacy issues, or are they worried about shareholder value?. Or is it a stealth repositioning from tool to ubiquitous necessity? Hmmm? Is this the path to convergence, permissions, your friend, your facebook?
Dear Facebook, I am still confused, I have more questions than answers. I am interested in what happens next. Oh…..I get it.