Creative director
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A creative director is a position usually found within the advertising, media or entertainment industries, but may be useful in other creative organizations such as web development and software development firms as well. The job entails overlooking the design of branding and advertising for a client and ensuring that the new branding and advertising fits in with the clients requirements and the image they wish to promote for their company or product. The main aspects of this role are to interpret a client's communications strategy and then develop proposed creative approaches and treatments that align with that strategy. Another is to initiate and stimulate creative ideas for and from everyone involved in the creative process.
Creative directors normally oversee creative service agencies or departments within a corporation. In advertising agencies, this consists of copywriters and art directors. In media design firms, the team can include graphic designers and computer programmers.
A creative director is ultimately responsible for the quality of the final creative work. They are often praised highly when their team's efforts win awards, but conversely, the creative director faces the brickbats when an idea goes awry, response falls short of expectations, or an important individual dislikes the idea.
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[edit] Qualifications
Creative directors are usually promoted from copywriting or art directing positions, and while all have a command of one of the two disciplines, they are more than familiar with the other, and in some rare cases they are equally adept at both. Long lists have been arrived at to enumerate the qualifications a CD should have, but the lists can be as illuminating as they can be obscure. Vindicative opponents usually help embellish the list by arriving at qualities CDs shouldn't have. CDs should be more than just masters at their craft. They also should be able managers of people, especially the charged and livewire individuals that gravitate to advertising. Nevertleless, at the very least, art directors who become creative directors should have developed an extremely fine ear for good copy, just as copywriters who become creative directors should have an educated eye for design.
David Ogilvy once advertised for creative directors for his agency, and called them "Trumpeteer Swans." This may highlight the difficulty of finding consensus on what qualifies a creative director. There isn't an easily understood qualification similar to an MBA for creative people. However, the management schools and independent advertising schools do graduate people with their own degrees and diplomas.
[edit] Traditional qualifications
Art directors usually possess a communication design or fine arts degree. Copywriters may have degrees in journalism, language arts or may develop more emphasis on writing while pursuing a communication design degree. The discipline of creative directing may be a minor study while pursuing a communication design degree as well.
Many creative professionals arrive at advertising from a variety of other professions with no formal degree. While mere experience in other professions may seem as non-advertising-career-related experience to those unfamiliar with advertising, it's generally seen within advertising as qualification for having "lived a life", enabling one to empathize with consumers, at whom advertising is directed anyway. Knowing the demographic of the person one is selling to is fundamental to advertising. The insight into the consumer is a much desired or insisted-on trait.
Beyond degrees and experience as art directors or copywriters and a track record of good advertising, the qualifications for creative directing are more subjective. Communication designers lack well-known standards that telegraph and establish their training, experience or capabilities. Complicating the validity of traditional qualifications, many communication designers have gravitated to advertising from the unlikeliest careers. Salman Rushdie was a copywriter, as was Lawrence Kasdan. Ridley Scott was an advertising film maker before he began directing films. Tarsem Singh was a highly acclaimed television commercial director based in London, shot the very arty "The Cell" with Jennifer Lopez.
[edit] Management experience
The advertising process itself may help throw light on this. Since the advertising agency exists to produce advertising, the creative director is called on to be the key participant in, and contributor to each and every part of the process that results in the advertising. Within most agencies, the creative director is a key part of the formulation of the brand and advertising strategy, the formulation of the brief, the actual process of creating the advertising, the presentation or selling of the advertising to the client, and its execution.
So essentially, a creative director must be qualified as a "manager", very nimble and astute manager of people, in harmony with the business plans of the company. This is a tremendous challenge for anyone. A precious few creative directors excel at all points. Besides needing to have the requisite aptitudes: he must have the force of personality to prevail over the process. Part protagonist and part mediator, the creative director must pick his way between currents of differing ideas, personalities, and agendas. The advertising process can be fraught with people with different agendas, and creative directors must have their way with force and grace when contrary views are expressed with fervency.
A creative director's lot is a complex one: there is also the matter of credit and blame: while clients and awards can be won or lost for a great many reasons, the win is frequently attributed to a great many reasons but a loss can be place quite squarely on the creative director's doorstep. Creative directors are more often than not a lightning rod for the ire and blame game that can follow. It is not too infrequent for an entire creative team to be fired when an agency loses an account and when that happens, many a creative director has realized that his own team also looks at him askance.
[edit] Awards and portfolio
One aspect that deserves mention because it rules not just the fate of creative people but also the agency is the matter of advertising awards. For good or for worse, awards have become a ubiquitous way to "rank" a copywriter or art director, and of course, a creative director.
Mentioning awards in the context of advertising may be pulling the pin on a conversational grenade. As much as advertising agencies desire awards, they are all painfully aware that the winning of an award can be as capricious and accidental a phenomenon as any. The noted international award shows get entries in the thousands from all over the world, and the ones that win have sometimes been known to engender a storm of controversy. (The judges at these shows are, more often than not, Creative Directors.) Since winning a handful of awards is not considered enough, agencies are forced to enter in multiple shows. To host an awards show can be a very profitable thing for the hosting body, and to be invited to judge can be a marked indication of the industry's acknowledgement. To compete in the awards circuit requires not just labour and time, but a staggering outlay in entry fees. Many creative professionals chafe at the fact that the individual within the agency with the power to refuse to sanction entry fees for awards (more often than not, the General Manager) is the individual with the power to censure a creative person for not winning awards. And that censure can be professionally fatal: it can cost a creative person a raise, a promotion, a wasted year, and the acknowledgement of his or her peers.
[edit] Criticism of awards as qualifications
A curious aspect of advertising awards is that many awards are given for the "creative" quality of the work, with little regard to whether the advertising worked for the brand or not. This is in many ways the result of the fact that the awards shows are themselves profit making exercises, with very hard-headed profit motives. This has led to many cases of extremely charming and compelling advertising winning, but it was advertising that did not have to prove itself to client or consumer because award show organizers may only require that an entered advertisement have appeared at least once (read just once) in major media. Cases have occurred when surprised and annoyed clients have written to the organizers and juries of prestigious award shows protesting that the awards they gave for advertising, bearing the client's name, was neither commissioned or released by the client. In fact, advertising agencies spend surprisingly large amounts of money creating 'scam' work and entering it in multiple award shows. The upside is that a handsome awards total at the end of the year makes it easy for agencies to win new business and attract and retain top grade creative talent. Many clients look the other way at scam awards, many actually pay for the 'just once' release of the advertisement because they view it as a performance-incentive to the agency. Besides, for many brand managers and marketing people in the client's office, the sheer publicity and prestige of winning a acknowledged international award while on their watch is a very rewarding and satisfying event. [citation needed]
[edit] Function versus position
Creative direction is more of a function than a position. If used properly, a creative director is given the proper authority which can equate to a higher position within that company. However, it is possible that members who hold the position of a creative director are (either accidentally or purposely) stripped of creative authority, in effect forcing them to function as art directors, copywriters or designers, while some one else arrogates the 'creative calls', regardless of their function or qualifications. Likewise an art director or copywriter may perform the functions of a creative director without necessarily holding the title. In any case, the function of a creative director will be performed with or without the position or acknowledgment of the need for such a position within any creative process.
This is not necessarily just machinations within the organisations. Sometimes, copywriters and art directors have been in an agency so long, they just get promoted to the designation. What can happen is that people around them recognise that the position has not been earned by talent, but by 'seniority', and in a roughhouse enviornment like a creative place, a polite mutiny can occour. Sometimes, the principal 'driver' of a business may not be a creative director - the client may have an excellent equation with a business head and prefer to deal with him, and trust his judgement. Sometimes, the client disagrees with a Creative Director's view of the brand, and pointedly makes his disapproval of the individual clear. Whatever the reason, there are many causes of a Creative Director ending up as anything but.
Very large agencies have multiple Creative Directors, and they all report in to an Executive Creative Director or a 'Chief Creative Officer'. Some agencies have both, with the ECD reporting in to the CCO. There is no hard-and-fast pecking order here, and instances have been known where a company featuring both positions has found that it gives the potential to strip functioning authority from either position.
[edit] Distinguished creative directors
Many creative directors have distinguished themselves by rising to the ultimate executive office to run the entire agency. Many, having developed a keen idea of what kind of agency they would rather work in (and quite dissatisfied with the agency they have worked at), have started one. Possibly the best known of these would be David Ogilvy of Ogilvy and Mather, Bill Bernbach of Doyle Dane Bernbach. Others have come from careers aside from advertising. Neil French was manager of the rock band Judas Priest and a bouncer at one time.
[edit] Controversy
Advertising corporate history is also rife with legends of creative directors who disagreed with the agenda or the brand strategy of the agency they were working at, and bolted with the account to start their own shop. This act requires collusion with the client. In the opening months of 2006, Frank Lowe created a stir by severing his association with the IPG Group (who had bought out his agency a couple of years ago) and set up his own shop again, with McCannErickson London's largest client, Tesco (a £60 million billing business). A flurry of legal activity followed and as of 2006 has yet to be concluded.
