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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 overseeing 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. Advertising is nothing but just waste of money. ...
The entertainment industry consists of a large number of sub-industries devoted to entertainment. ...
Web development is a broad term for any activities related to developing a web site for the World Wide Web or an intranet. ...
Software development is the translation of a user need or marketing goal into a software product. ...
A brand includes a name, logo, slogan, and/or design scheme associated with a product or service. ...
A strategy is a long term plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal, most often winning. Strategy is differentiated from tactics or immediate actions with resources at hand. ...
Creative Services are a subsector of the creative industries, a part of the economy that creates wealth by offering creativity for hire to other businesses. ...
An advertising agency or ad agency is a service business dedicated to creating, planning and handling advertising (and sometimes other forms of promotion) for its clients. ...
Copywriting is the process of writing the words that promote a person, business, opinion, or idea. ...
The term art director, is an overall title for a variety of similar job functions in advertising, publishing, film and television, the Internet, and video games. ...
All Saints Chapel in the Cathedral Basilica of St. ...
Graphic design is the applied art of arranging image and text to communicate a message. ...
In computing, a programmer is someone who does computer programming and develops computer software. ...
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 shoulders the negativity when a project goes wrong, response falls short of expectations, or an important individual dislikes the idea.
Qualifications Advertising Creative Directors are usually promoted from copywriting or art directing positions, and while most 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 enumerated the qualifications a creative director should have, but the lists can be as illuminating as they can be confusing. It is agreed, though, that creative directors should be more than just masters of their craft, they should also be inspired people-managers. Nevertheless, 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.
The acclaimed David Ogilvy once advertised for creative directors for his agency, and called them "Trumpeter Swans." This may highlight the difficulty of having a universally accepted set of qualifications. There simply isn't an easily understood qualification similar to an MBA for creative people. While independent advertising and graphic design schools do graduate people with their own degrees and diplomas, there is no known degree or diploma in "creative directing". EMBA redirects here; for the Mutation Mink Breeders Association, see American Legend Cooperative The Master of Business Administration (MBA) is a masters degree in business administration, which attracts people from a wide range of academic disciplines. ...
Academic 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 advertising copywriting while pursuing a communication design degree. The discipline of creative directing may be at best a career goal and as such, a minor personal study while pursuing a communication design degree as well. Communication design is a sub-discipline of design (sometimes referred to as Graphic Design) which is concerned with how media intermission such as, print and digital pieces of work communicate with people in a visual way. ...
Fine art refers to arts that are concerned with beauty or which appealed to taste (SOED 1991). ...
This article does not cite any references or sources. ...
Language arts refers to the class of art forms, including novels, poetry, songs and others, that focus on the creation of art works which are primarily language based. ...
Look up minor in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
The role of a Creative Director The advertising process itself may cast light on this. Since the advertising agency exists to produce advertising, the creative director plays a pivotal role: he or she is called on to be the key participant in, and contributor to each and every part of the process that results in the advertising. Good creative directors are 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 final execution for release in media. Street preacher in Covent Garden using a presentation style Presentation is the process of presenting the content of a topic to an audience. ...
While a creative director must professionally and personally be the very epitome of the idiosyncratic, out-of-the-box dynamic so essential to arriving at advertising ideas, he or she must also possess and display a healthy and clear-headed grasp of the business plans of the company, and an appreciation of its financial realities. While this is a tremendous challenge for anyone, it is particularly demanding on a creative director who must balance the chaotic and pell-mell dynamic of shepherding path-breaking ideas to fruition, but also cause it all to be profitable to his company. Many Creative Directors expend all their energies on 'creativity' and leave the money issues to the more traditional designations in the agency. The Creative Directors who can display an eye for profits can make it to the very top of the company. It is argued that an advertising agency must perforce be led by a 'creative' individual, as leaving this function to a 'non-creative' person is akin to asking the commander of a 747 to manage a theatre company. There is some wisdom to that point of view.
A Creative Director must also have the force of personality to prevail over the advertising process, playing part protagonist and part mediator, picking 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 many reasons, the win is frequently attributed to 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 unheard of for an entire creative team to be fired when an agency loses an account, and when that happens, many creative directors have realized that their own team also looks at them askance.
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, most are 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 key parts of 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 acknowledgment. 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 acknowledgment of his or her peers. Although creative professionals--people who work full-time in creative endeavors--have been a part of the workforce for more than 500 years, several events during the past decade have altered industry and public perception of these workers. ...
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.[citation needed] 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 single 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 an acknowledged international award while on their watch is a very rewarding and satisfying event.
Non-traditional qualifications Many creative professionals arrive at advertising from a variety of other professions too, which include the more mainstream professions and some not-so-usual ones. To those unfamiliar with advertising, sheer time spent in other professions may seem as non-advertising-career-related experience. However, in advertising, this kind of experience is viewed as qualification for having "lived a life", and better enabling one to be in possession of an above-average understanding of human nature (if not the human condition). This, it is believed, translates into a superior and deeper empathy with the consumers at whom most advertising is directed. While most agencies have elaborate research and consumer-profiling mechanisms that they constantly employ to arrive at a demographic and psychographic profile of the consumer, the much sought-after "insight" into the consumer is more often than not a result of an empathetic (at best) or educated (at least) guess, and creative directors are critical to arriving at an insight or at least contributing substantially to arriving at one. A demographic or demographic profile is a term used in marketing and broadcasting, to describe a demographic grouping or a market segment. ...
In marketing, demographics, opinion research, and social research in general, psychographic variables are any attributes relating to personality, values, attitudes, interests, or lifestyles. ...
Beyond mere experience as art directors or copywriters, and a track record of good advertising, a creative director's qualifications 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, the novelist, was a copywriter, as was Lawrence Kasdan. Ridley Scott was an advertising film maker before he began directing films. Tarsem Singh still is a highly acclaimed television commercial director based in London, and he shot the very arty movie The Cell with Jennifer Lopez. The examples and perspective in this article or section may not represent a worldwide view. ...
Function versus position "Creative director" is more of a function than a status position. If employed 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 mere art directors, copywriters or designers, while some one else arrogates to themself the creative judgement calls, regardless of their function or qualifications. Likewise a particularly talented or forceful art director or copywriter may perform many of the functions of a creative director, without necessarily holding the title. Because the creation of most advertising requires one final "creative judgement call", 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 organizations. A rather common occurrence in the creative director who got promoted to that position simply because they have worked in that agency for so long. What could happen then is that people around them recognize that the position has not been earned more by seniority than by talent, and in a roughhouse environment like a creative department, a polite mutiny can take place. Sometimes, the principal driver of a business may not be a creative director - a particular client may have an excellent equation with a business head and prefer to deal with him, trusting his or her judgement. It can also happen that a client may disagree with a creative director's view of the brand, and pointedly makes his disapproval of the individual clear, sometimes threatening to pull the business out of that agency. Whatever the reason, there are many causes of a creative director ending up as anything but.
Very large agencies have multiple creative directors, each taking responsibility for a giant brand, or a collection of brands, and they usually 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 universal hard-and-fast pecking order that is followed, 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.
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 far removed from advertising. Neil French, the internationally renowned copywriter and advertising personage, was once, among many things, the manager of the rock band Judas Priest and a bouncer. Cover David MacKenzie Ogilvy (June 23, 1911–July 21, 1999), was a notable advertising executive. ...
Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide is an advertising agency that has a worldwide presence. ...
Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ...
Doyle Dane Bernbach is an advertising agency that became famous in the 1950s and 1960s for its innovative campaigns for Volkswagen (Think Small), Avis (We Try Harder), and other companies. ...
Neil French is a British advertising executive widely credited with bringing the creative revolution to Asia when he was associated with The Ball Partnership in Singapore. ...
For other uses, see Judas priest (curse). ...
Controversy Advertising 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. The most recent of such an incident happened in the opening months of 2006. Sir Frank Lowe, an internationally regarded figure in advertising, created a stir by severing his association with the IPG Group (one of the large international communications holding companies, who had bought out his agency a couple of years ago) and set up his own shop once again, with McCannErickson London's largest client, Tesco (a £60 million billing business) as his first client. A flurry of legal activity followed, with IPG saying he violated terms of contract and severance, and as of December 2006, the entire issue has yet to be concluded. Look up collusion in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
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Tesco plc is a UK-based international grocery and general merchandising retail chain. ...
See also Look up Creativity in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...
Inspiration in artistic composition refers to an irrational and unconscious burst of creativity. ...
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