Adequately Successful Advertising Creative Directors Do These…

I’ve been a CD for over 17 years. During that time, I learned lots of useful and horrible things, many of which I never wanted to learn and deeply regret knowing. But if you are sufficiently misguided and aim to become a highly successful creative director who makes loads of money, wins tons of trophies, and gets black-out drunk at awards shows (which, to be clear, you should definitely not do at the 2009 Mercury Awards) then I have the following unsavory, and only slightly useful advice.

Be good-looking. Attractive and fit people with smooth skin and stylish hats are extremely talented and very enjoyable to have in meetings. Not being attractive means that you don’t care enough about the creative process to be attractive in meetings.

Be a famous actor. Being a famous actor means that you always have great ideas that no one else has ever had and you’re totally relevant to everyone, even all those people who lacked the ambition to become famous actors. And of course, working with a famous actor who is a creative director means that they will occasionally come to critical meetings. And this means that people get to say they met someone famous in a meeting. Which makes everyone very excited about meetings.

Wear stylish outfits. No one who isn’t stylish is at all relevant and not worth listening to. Being super on trend is a sign that you are committed to always being on trend and therefore know what is trending, which is enormously reassuring to every consumer who sees familiar trends being used as marketing tools. 

Embrace anthems. Be very good at anthems. Rousing, inspiring manifestos that congeal all the internal unaligned divisions into a vague but unified position that everyone can feel mildly enthusiastic about when it’s made into a sizzle video for the semi-annual stakeholders meeting in Reno.

Smile. A lot. Be completely easy-going and collaborative, entertaining every idea from every person during every meeting; no matter how far along the project is, or how contradictory, ill-considered, or unoriginal those ideas are. Remember, your decades of experience with millions of $ of work, generating tens of millions in earned media and record sales, are no more valid than the off-hand comment from the summer intern sitting in on their first agency call. 

Always win. People like winners. They don’t like people who don’t win. “Not Winners” are the worst sorts of people because their not-winning ideas do not align with the 100% winning goals of most organizations. Always remember: winning always wins. 

Make every hire “The best hire.” Only hire affordable people who will make great work very quickly and with very little effort. Make sure that you don’t hire people who need extra help or have any life demands placed on their time, like children or relationships with people who aren’t coworkers.

Be a managerial natural. Intuitively know what to say and do to manage an ambitious, talented, unsatisfied group of emotionally needy creatives, who both rely on you and resent you; helping them work better with each other, generating their own opportunities, and guiding them along their career path - without having a single minute of managerial training, other than the dysfunctionally toxic work environments that you lived through.

Win every award, every year. Your value as a creative leader is only measured in the past 12 months. Anything older means you simply aren’t creative anymore and have totally lost the ability to solve problems in delightful and surprising ways and someone will be around shortly to drive you to a farm upstate, where you will frolic in the open sunny fields until you snuff it. 

Always say “Yes.” Everyone hates hearing “no.” so don’t say it. “No,” isn’t the right answer anyway. The right option is the one that makes everyone happy and that’s always “Yes.” Remember, always say “no” to “no.”

Be 25-36. Becoming old is a colossal error that should be avoided by everyone in advertising. Getting older means that you obviously didn’t think being young was important enough to continue being young. Your agency and the entire micro-network of agencies that were randomly put together by the holding company, all depend upon you being young. Always remember that older people have let everyone down and have nothing to offer. Sure, they might have done something cool in the late 1900’s, before Google ad words and social posts were invented. But that was ages ago when smartphones were clay tablets.

Be right. No one likes someone who is wrong. Being wrong is bad, don’t be wrong. 

Always be upbeat. Everything is always going to be great. You’re always super excited. Everyone is going to “hit the ground running, jumping right in,” with “all hands on deck,” to work on the project, all day, every day, overnight, and on weekends; canceling vacations, Dr’s appointments, and celebrations to create something that strategically aligns with the client’s goals and is within the budget that was never defined.

Be a better business person than business people. Even though you did not go to business school, and were in no way offered business courses, and you neither wanted nor were even slightly interested in learning business stuff, you must understand business situations and jargon better than 98% of people who did go to business school and who have decades of experience being business people. 

Embrace every new technology. Who are you to decide which technologies are ridiculous and irrelevant snake oil that will only waste time and money? Functionality and relevance aren’t the point. The point is being on the leading edge of something new. New is always new. Not-new is less new and being new is always better. If you’re not busy being new, then you’re busy being old. 

Leave. Develop a persistent casual paranoia of the Machiavellian plots that are working against you. If you are a force for change, know that change causes fear and disruption. If you are a force of stability, know that people bristle against rules. There is no amount of kindness, experience, or value that will counter the inherent discontent of differing agendas. Be your own Nostradamus. Look for the unspoken expectations and the poisonous narratives. Establish key goals that will positively impact your people and the organization.

And when those are met, leave.

People are impressed by someone who creates positive change and wants to create more somewhere else. They are never quite as impressed by the “team players” who stuck around. Remember that the only team that really matters is yours.

Don’t listen. It is everyone else’s job to be a cautious realist. There are armies of people who can scale down, put up guardrails, and sand smooth every rough corner. You will NEVER be better at it than they are. In the world of worried suits, not only do you have fewer suits, you cannot possibly worry more, deeper, or longer than they can. There are countless multitudes of marketing people whose only job is making safe decisions. There’s really no talent to it, that’s why there are so many of them. And there are just as many cynical defeatists who protect their traumatized souls with negativity.

But that’s not you. Your role isn’t to embrace the nagging minutia of infinite concerns, and it’s not to give in to some defeated “realism.” Your job is to help your people make greater things. And doing something great usually means knowing when not to listen.

Even to me.