How To Avoid Becoming A Disappointing Failure To Your Family By Remaining A Successful Creative Director In Advertising.
I’ve been a CD for over 17 years. During that time, I learned lots of unsavory things I deeply regret knowing. But if you aim to stay employed as moderately successful creative director in advertising (or in most industries), then I have the following horrible 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 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. 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 adwords and social posts were invented. But that was when smartphones were clay tablets.
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 the leadership team.
Win every award, every year. Your value as a creative is only measured in the past 10 months. Anything older means you simply aren’t creative anymore and have lost any ability to solve problems in delightful and surprising ways. Someone will be around shortly to drive you to a farm upstate, where you will frolic in open sunny fields until you snuff it from the poisoned cheese we put in your farewell gift basket.
Always embrace every new technology. 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.
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 super excited about mediocre ideas. No matter how far along the project is, or how contradictory, ill-considered or unoriginal those ideas are, you must enthusiastically entertain all of them. Remember, your decades of generating tens of millions in earned media and record sales, is no more valid than the off-hand comment from the summer intern on their first agency call.
Embrace anthems. Be very good at rousing, inspiring manifestos that congeal all the internal misaligned divisions of an organization into a vague but unified position that everyone can feel mildly enthusiastic about at the semi-annual stakeholders meeting in Reno.
hashtag#advertsing hashtag#creativedirector hashtag#CCO hashtag#career hashtag#availableforwork