Member-only story
My field was marketing creative and I did it for over twenty five years. I was among the very first digital creative directors, working on integrated marketing campaigns for the likes of Volkswagen, Playstation, GM, and tons of others. I climbed up the ranks in the usual way; going from art director to creative director all the way up to chief creative officer at an international marketing firm. It was grueling, at times rewarding, stable for many years, entailed a lot of plane flights, a lot of sucking up, shaking my head, pretending to like New York, working all night, camaraderie, making good money, but less than I deserved, and having a vague sense that it was going to end any second.
Being a creative director at an agency is both deeply corporate and at the same time, horribly insecure. Which really doesn’t make sense. I could get being insecure in another field that was more artistically fluctuating — like fashion or painting — but marketing is a by-the-numbers creative exercise that is only successful when it drives traffic or sells something. Over the years, the creative wrapper (which I think of more as cleverness than creativity) has become only tangentially important to the more hard-hitting elements of a campaign — the offer, the unique selling proposition or simply the reach and frequency of the media plan (how many…
