The Creative Director's A-Z

A is for AI. I’ll make a bold prediction. There will never be an AI creative director. The plagiarism machine might get better at spitting out creative ideas scraped from the internet. But it’ll never be able to spot an idea that’s completely original. It will never learn how to discriminate between a good idea and a great one. It will never summon up the human passion needed to sell an idea in a pitch. It won’t have a clue how to make a creative team believe they’re capable of greatness. Creative directors, your jobs are safe.?

B is for Brutal. You set the creative bar in your agency. That means you can’t afford to sign off work that’s merely good. You’ll get no thanks from your creatives for telling them their idea is ‘not bad’ or ‘quite nice’. If you soft-soap your feedback, your agency’s creative reputation will gurgle down the plughole. Put average ideas out their misery fast. Take them round the back of the shed and shoot them in the head. Explain why they’re not right. Tell the team “You know you can do better than this.” Watch out for creatives who can’t cope with negative feedback. They say “Yeah but…yeah but..” a lot. Or they say nothing but you can see them turn to stone in front of you. Keep an eye on creatives who don’t listen to your feedback. The fact they aren’t talking doesn’t always mean they’re listening; they’re just getting their answer ready.

C is for Credit. Before you become your agency’s creative director, you’ll probably be their best creative. You’ll get the best briefs. You’ll win more pitches and awards than anyone else. You’ll get the credit for your agency’s best work. If you’re anything like I was, you’ll be a little bit up yourself. But it’s a bad look for a creative director. The minute you get that job title you need to kiss goodbye to taking the credit. If you come up with a lovely idea while you’re reviewing a team’s work, your job is to give it away to them. Not every creative director is able to do that. One of my creative bosses used to make tweaks to my scripts and headlines then say “If that wins an award, I want my name on it.” Once he twiddled with my script and when the client bought it, I found out I wasn’t even invited to the shoot. When the commercial won a Clio, the bugger flew out to New York to pick it up.

?D is for Deadlines. There will be times when even your best creative team gets stuck. The deadline’s up their bum like a proctologist’s finger and they still haven’t cracked it. Account directors come out in a rash when they have to ask the client for more time. And it’s all your fault. This is why you earn the big bucks. Because now you need to step in and crack it yourself at the eleventh hour. You can only do this on a regular basis if you believe in yourself. I remember working on a beer called Tennents Velvet. The client meeting was at midday in Glasgow. We still had no ideas at our 9am creative review in Edinburgh. The Big Chief was flying up from Burton-On-Trent to see the work. The suits all turned to look at me. There was no hiding place. In desperation I looked at the word ‘Velvet’. It’s a material, I thought. Who uses material? Seamstresses? Comedians! A line popped into my mind: ‘Tennents Velvet. You’ve got to have the right material.’ There was a funny show running on the telly called ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway?’ where comedians would get a prompt and then improvise round it. I thought, why don’t we turn up with no scripts and tell them the idea is all about comic improvisation, kind of a ‘Whose Beer Is It Anyway?’. ?We’d give the team a pint of Tennents Velvet and film them live as they improvised. A lot of clients would have run a mile. What, no scripts? Credit to @Gordon Brown and @Mark Hunter, our client at Tennents, they bought it lock, stock and barrel. Soon enough we found ourselves on a Hollywood sound stage, filming live improv with Ryan Stiles and Colin Mochrie. Another time we had to come up with an ad to promote Northern Ireland’s Suicide Helpline. Advertising isn’t normally a matter of life and death. This time it was. Maybe that’s what made my best creative team freeze like rabbits in the headlights. By Friday evening they had nothing. The meeting was on Monday. I worked my weekend but I was stuck too. What saved me was the one-hour commute from my front door to the office. I had sweaty palms and a squeaky bum on that drive. To calm me down I stuck on a mixtape of relaxing songs. Halfway through it, ‘Everybody Hurts’ by REM came on. The hair went up on the back of my neck. The first minute of the lyrics were a letter to someone who felt like killing themselves.

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“When the day is long

And the night, the night is yours alone.

When you’re sure you’ve had enough

Of this life, well hang on.

Don’t let yourself go.

Cause everybody cries.

And everybody hurts sometimes.”

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I knew if we could get the track, we could build a film around it. REM gave us the song for peanuts. They said “We don’t feel this is our song any more. It’s for everybody.” Every time the ad ran, the switchboard lit up. Desperate callers, mostly men, were able to talk to trained listeners. Here’s the ad. Creative teams will get stuck. It’s your job to dig them out of the hole.

?E is for Editing. Junior creative teams have no idea how to edit their work. In the days before decks, when we drew up our ideas in black marker pen on sheets of layout paper (I realise I’m talking a strange language here), my juniors would paper all four walls with their ideas. I knew I had to teach them how to tell a good idea from a bad one. So I always gave them first go at pulling the duff stuff off the wall and throwing it in the bin. More often than not they’d leave some terrible work on the wall and I’d have to fish some of their better ideas out of the bin. A good idea is something you feel in your gut before it hits your brain. A bad idea gives you a sinking feeling. So as a creative director you sometimes won’t know why an idea’s wrong. You’ll just feel it. When a team read me a script, I’d ask if I could read it again just to buy myself time. All the time I’d be asking myself “Why don’t I like this? Why don’t I like this?” Giving negative feedback is uncomfortable but the last thing you need in a creative agency is a culture of toxic positivity. Bite the bullet. Grasp the nettle. Speak the truth.

?F is for Firing. Hiring new creatives is one of the nicest parts of the job. But every so often you’ll get it wrong. If you do, it’ll show up fast. And if you let things fester, your colleagues will start saying unpleasant things about you behind your back. Firing someone is a solemn moment. It’s probably the worst part of the job. But it’s usually the best thing that can happen to the individual concerned. I would always make a point of saying this. “You’re not going to believe me right now but when you look back, you’ll see that this was a real turning point for you.” I once had to fire a guy whose previous job was as a sniper in the Cypriot Army. Yeah, I was nervous. Making someone redundant is even worse. Losing a big account means losing people. At some point, you’ll be the person who has to pull the trigger. You need training to do this properly.

?G is for Getting Fired. I’ve been fired twice. The first time was my first job, selling classified advertising space for The Scotsman newspaper. Tiny little ads the size of postage stamps. I lasted three months and my boss didn’t pull his punches. “You’re not making your targets. You’re sitting in the office half the day writing headlines. Your hair’s a mess and your suit’s a bit shabby.” I’d just turned 23 and I was married with a mortgage. I left the room a shell of a man but I remembered to ask for a reference. I opened up the envelope on my way out the door. It was short and to the point. It said “Gerry’s probably the worst salesman we’ve ever hired but he may have some future as a copywriter.” The second time was worse. I’d joined The Leith Agency in 1987 and been creative director for 27 years. Some of my senior creatives were ready to do my job. I’d just re-married. I came into the office the day after the honeymoon with two cups of coffee and a bacon roll for myself. I’d been planning to ask my boss if he didn’t fancy getting away from big-agency politics and starting a little place from scratch with me and our Head of Planning. I didn’t get that far. He said “I’m ambushing you. We’re getting rid of your creative director position here. I didn’t see it coming. Two months before, I’d been given a pay-rise, a bonus and a brilliant appraisal. “Things have changed” he said. I was angry. I threw my half-eaten roll in his bin. (Bins have played a big part in my career.) Then I got a hold of myself. Looking at the bin, I smiled. “So is that the end of my roll?” “Yes,” he said and now he was smiling too, “we’re making your roll redundant.” When you reach the dizzy heights of creative director in an agency there’s only one place you can go next. And it isn’t up.

?H is for Headspace. The worst decision I ever made was turning the creative department open-plan. Creative teams need headspace. If there are no walls round them they make their own. They put headphones on and listen to music to block out the noise. They hide behind enormous Mac screens. They talk less. They get stressed faster. And account people come and stand over their shoulders to comment on their work. (A mortal sin in my book.) A creative director should be able to walk into any creative team’s room, close the door and chat to them with no-one else listening. Half the job of coming up with ideas is being able to switch right off when you need a break. There’s more chance of interaction in a department where every team has its own room. If you’re happy to see your workmates, you leave your door open. If you want peace and quiet, you shut it.

?I is for Intuition. You never know where an idea’s going to come from. It could be the junior team, the traffic girl, the taxi-driver, your mum. So you need to stay open. Often it’s a glimmer of a thought, half-grasped, half-formed. I remember working on a brief to encourage people to detect bowel cancer early by doing a poo test. A very senior team were sitting on the brief and they were clearly constipated. I was coming downstairs when I heard a noise coming from the photocopier room. I stopped to listen. It was our youngest team Ian Greenhill and Jordan Laird . They were singing a funny little song to each other, making up the words as they went along. “Older folk in your family need to watch their bowel, cancer can be sneaky like a ninja on the prowl. So listen to the song and get it in your head, to make sure you don’t end up dead.”. Straight to the point. I hadn’t even given them the brief but they’d pinched a copy and they were having fun with it. I walked in on them and asked them to sing it right through. “Is this for a TV ad?” I said. “Yeah” they said “but we haven’t thought of any pictures yet and the budget’s tiny.” “Don’t worry,” I said. “Sit down with Eric (our in-house animator) for a couple of hours and make a little animatic with line drawings and paper cut-outs.” They sang it to the client the next morning and she signed it off on the spot. All we had to do was to put together a band of musicians and record it in the studio. You’ll hear me doing a trumpet solo at the end. It’s the only ad in the world to feature the word ‘jobby’. ?Here’s the ad. Another time, I’d done an ad for Tennents Lager called ‘London’. It showed a Scottish yuppie becoming so homesick in London that he jacks in his job and his girlfriend and goes back to Scotland. We filmed the ad and did the edit. But it was a bit empty without music. We hadn’t a clue what would work. We had a week to find something. We tried all sorts. Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, George Michael. Nothing worked. I had a hunch we needed a song whose lyrics read like a letter to someone you were leaving. I set up a viewing room with a big telly and invited my workmates in one by one to watch the ad. I explained my music dilemma. Finally, Laura our print production girl, a trombone player, said “I might have a tape in my car.” She brought up a cassette by a Scottish folk singer called Dougie McLean. We cued up his song ‘Caledonia’ and pressed the ‘Play’ buttons on both machines. Every word of the song matched every picture, frame by frame. We didn’t need to recut the film. We re-recorded the song with Frankie Miller singing and wall-of-sound backing vocals. Frankie was small. But he had a voice like a derelict gravel quarry. Otis Redding’s wife said he was the only other singer who could make her fill up. The song was released as a single and became a massive hit in Scotland. Ex-pats home for Christmas told me it made them cry. God knows how the ad would have ended up if Laura hadn’t had her flash of intuition. Here’s the ad.

?J is for Jack-of-all-Trades, Master of One. A creative director needs a good grasp of everything. Hiring, firing, pitching, coaching, art direction, copy, design, digital, photography, illustration, animation, radio production, film production, directing, editing, music, typography, strategy and salesmanship. If you get promoted to ‘Creative Director’ before you’ve done at least ten years as a hands-on creative, you are ill-equipped for the role. ?But most CDs are really good at one thing in particular. My own discipline is copywriting. This is handy because it means I can put my thinking into words. Handy at pitches. (Let’s face it, if you can’t do that you might as well give up and go home.) Unfolding an idea to a client demands storytelling skills. So it helps if you can string words together in a way that moves people and keeps them listening. Some of the best planners I know could wow clients face to face. But when it came to writing a compelling effectiveness paper they would become intoxicated by the exuberance of their own verbosity. At which point I’d be called in to translate their polysyllabic words of wisdom into plain English.

?K is for Kindness. There are days when it’s hard to pin a smile on your face and say something positive. When the account guy comes back and says the client hates the work or worse, tinkers with it. When your best team sit on a brief till the last minute without cracking it. When your CEO arrives late to a pitch rehearsal, scraps all the work and says ‘start again’. When someone writes ‘ASAP’ in the deadline box or ‘TBC’ in the budget box. When the client demands campaign ideas in 48 hours then takes two weeks to give their feedback. When one of your creatives behaves like a dick. When you need to fire someone fast. All these things and more will happen to you and you’ll need a heart of gold to stay kind. There’s a four-letter word I use when things go tits-up. F.L.I.P. It stands for Feel Less Immediately Pessimistic. There’s a sunny side or a funny side to every tricky situation if you make a point of looking for it. Optimism is at the root of creativity. Tap into yours and you’ll be a better CD.

?L is for Leadership. People have funny ideas about what it means to be a leader. Some folk think it’s a licence to boss everyone about. Others think it means you can take the best briefs for yourself. The closest comparison I can think of to a creative director is a football manager. You’re working with a bunch of talented people, all with their own skills and shortcomings. You can’t do their job for them. But you can fill them with self-belief. Kick their arses when they deserve it and cuddle them when they’re down. The jump from being the best hands-on creative in the building to managing all the creatives in the building is an almighty leap in the dark. Here are my Ten Top Tips for coping:

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·????? Take the least glamorous briefs for yourself. You’ll get them done faster.

·????? Get out of people’s way. Don’t do their jobs for them. But give them all the feedback they need to succeed.

·????? Set the bar as high as you can. It’s easy to find out who’s doing the best ads in the country. Share that work with your creatives at least once a month and tell them that’s the level you want them to get to.

·????? Don’t take yourself too seriously. It’s PR not ER.

·????? Get mentored. When I needed help, I turned to people who’d done the job before me. @Patrick Collister and @Sir John Hegarty in particular were tremendously generous with their time and wisdom.

·????? You don’t have to do everything yourself. There’s a brilliant book called ‘The Coaching Habit’ that teaches you the questions to ask to get the best out of your creatives: “Yeah, but what’s the idea?” “What could you do to make it better?” “What else?” followed by “Anything else?”? If they figure it out for themselves, they’re far more likely to run with it than if you just tell them how to do it.

·????? It’s not a popularity contest. The minute you get the top job, they’re not your friends any more and you’re not their friend. If you try to be, you’ll end up like David Brent.

·????? Don’t be scared to give tough feedback. For every great idea there are a thousand that belong in the bin. That’s your call.

·????? Doing appraisals isn’t optional. You’re a manager now. It’s one of the most important parts of your job. Don’t duck it. Get each person to appraise themselves in writing. Ask them to nominate six colleagues. Collect feedback on them from their nominees. (It’s called a 360- degree appraisal. We called them 360-degree reprisals.) Sit next to your appraisee, not opposite them, with their written self-appraisal in front of you both. Go through it together. Then produce their colleagues’ assessments. There’s always a discrepancy. ?After dealing with that that, focus on three things: START. STOP. KEEP DOING. In other words, “What do you need to start doing?”, “What do you need to stop doing?” “And what do you need to keep doing?” ?Make their goals as specific as possible. Creatives always say “I want to win more awards.” I always say “Which awards? The Scottish ones? Or D&AD? Or Cannes Lions?”

·????? Never give someone negative feedback in front of other people. Take them aside and tell them in private. Praise them in public, in front of as many people as possible. Say lovely things about them behind their backs. Defend them when anyone badmouths them.

?M is for Mental Health. There is nothing more important than caring for your creatives’ mental welfare – and your own. One of our clients was the Scottish mental health charity See Me. On our reception wall, in a beautiful frame, was a certificate from them saying that our agency was proudly committed to caring for our employees’ mental health. But when life got on top of me and I had a mental breakdown of my own, my boss couldn’t handle it. He told me “I’ll be the first to admit I know nothing about mental health.” He said “People in the agency think you’re acting a bit weird, you should go home.” He didn’t ask me if I was ok. He didn’t suggest I see a doctor. And when I got home, they sent me briefs to work on when I should have been resting and recovering with professional support. It wasn’t just me. Mental ill-health wasn’t tolerated. You could wreck your back or break a leg and you’d get time off work. But if your brain broke, you were sent home and expected to keep working. Advertising is stressful and the best creatives are often a little fragile. Look after them. Make sure you have a compassionate mental health policy in place.

?N is for Nicking Stuff. In a glass case in the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow there’s a magpie’s nest. It’s a thing of beauty. It looks like Christ’s crown of thorns designed by Damien Hirst. It’s made up of steel construction pins, coat hangers, Irn-Bru ring-pulls, copper wire, bottle caps, you name it. The magpies who made it nicked all sorts of shiny bits and pieces and wove them into a work of art. If you teach your creative teams to be magpies, you’ll be adding a crucial skill to their armoury. Picasso’s supposed to have said “Bad artists imitate. Geniuses steal.” There’s some truth in that. On YouTube, there’s a clip from Saturday Night Live where a couple of guys tip 100,000 multi-coloured bouncy balls down a San Francisco street. Ring any bells? It was repurposed by Fallon’s Juan Cabral for a Sony Bravia ad to make us ‘feel’ the beauty of its colours on their TV screens. Here’s the ad.

The same guy once made a short arthouse film for himself. It showed a man in a gorilla suit playing drums to the Phil Collins track ‘Coming In The Air Tonight’. Ring any bells? When a Cadbury’s Chocolate brief landed on his desk he repurposed his gorilla film to convey that dopamine hit you get when you eat chocolate. Here it is. The only rule – and the one that’s most often broken – is don’t steal from other people’s ads.

?O is for Opposite. Teach your teams to do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. It’s a great jumping-off point if your destination is originality. All whisky ads look the same. All car ads show smiling drivers negotiating urban jungles and hairpin bends. All interest-free loan ads have giant percentage signs. Don’t do anything that looks like other ads. Do the opposite.

?P is for Props. Teach your creatives to pitch their own ideas. It’s one way to squeeze better ideas out of them. If they know it’s them not you who’ll be standing in front of the client explaining their work, you’ll find their ideas suddenly get a lot better. Right now, a lot of agencies are obsessed with making pretty decks. They put more effort into beautifying their decks than perfecting their ideas. It seems to have escaped their notice that all their clients have seen a million PowerPoint presentations. For a long time, I abandoned PowerPoint completely. I’d put the ideas on boards and stand them on a collapsible aluminium easel. My workmates laughed at me. They said it was ‘old-school’. But the clients seemed to like it. Soon I wasn’t able to find my easel when I needed it. The account people were pinching it for their own presentations. A well-chosen prop can make or break a pitch. I remember pitching for The Sun. Our idea was to wrap objects that symbolised different types of news in pages of newsprint and tie them with red string for that red, black and white look - the way the artist Cristo used to wrap bridges and buildings in fabric. To represent crime news, we wrapped a replica Kalashnikov rifle we managed to buy online. The script called for the rifle to be fired in slow motion, ripping the newspaper open so we bought blank ammunition too. I smuggled the gun in a bin bag past security at The Sun’s office. When it was my turn to reveal the creative work, I pulled out the rifle, pointed it the managing director of the paper, David Montgomery, and fired a blank round. I had his attention. He was so tickled, he said “Give me that.” He swung it towards his team, squinting down the barrel, saying “I’ll be giving the bullet to a few faces round this table.” He wasn’t kidding. He went on to make some big staff cuts. But we won the pitch. One last trick I taught my creatives was to have ‘off-the-cuff ideas’ in client meetings. There was always a big white board in the room with some black magic markers. Before meetings, we made sure we had some decent creative ideas up our sleeves. At well-timed moments in the meeting, we would leap up, run to the board and draw up an ad in front of them. Our name for this was ‘rehearsed spontaneity’ and it didn’t half make a client’s jaw drop.

?P is also for Pecha Kucha. When someone invited me to do a Pecha Kucha talk I hadn’t a clue idea what they were on about. Turns out it’s a Japanese phrase that means chit-chat. It’s a style of presentation designed to make speaking in front of an audience more fun. Japan is blessed with a lot of world- famous designers and architects. Their work is brilliant but their speaking style bores the pants off people. Pecha Kucha is designed to bring the speaker down to the same level as the audience.? If you have creatives in your department who are too shy to stand up and present their work, Pecha Kucha is a great way to build their confidence. The rules are simple: a) you can pick any subject under the sun - except your professional work b) you can only use 20 slides and here’s the kicker c) each slide is pre-set to stay on the screen for just 20 seconds. So your talk needs to be timed to perfection. If it’s not, your slide will change while you’re still talking about the previous one and your audience will laugh at you – as I found out the first time I tried it.

?Q is for Quality Control. The bin is your friend. “Most of your ideas are going to be rubbish,” I’d tell my creatives. “But that’s ok. As long as you learn to throw those ones away. Until you do, I’ll be throwing them away for you.” Being a creative director is a bit like being a midwife. It’s not your job to have the babies. It’s your job to help them be born. But unlike real midwives, it’s also your job to kill the weak ones. You’re a Killer Midwife. There’s no two ways about it.

?R is for Rehearsals. It’s never too early to prepare your creatives to pitch their own ideas to the client. They know how they had the idea. They know the ideas they threw away before they got to the one they’re about to present. So they’re the best people to explain their thinking. Pitching takes confidence and that’s not in every creative’s skillset. The way to instil it is to train them to present to you without any visual aids. “Okay, look me in the eyes and tell me what your idea is.” That’s a lot harder than it sounds. But it teaches even the shyest creative to think hard about how they’re going to present their thinking. It’s actually the acid test for great work. “We see a dinghy out at sea with two people in it. The scene fades to black. Then we see the same boat again but there’s only one person in it. A voice says “Alka-Seltzer. When you’ve eaten something you shouldn’t have.” Here’s the ad.

The better the idea, the easier it is to explain. ?If it takes your team too many words to explain a 30 second TV ad, it’s not a very good ad, simple as that. Once they can present their ideas properly to you, they’re ready to do it in front of the suits and planners. If it’s a team of two, one will be better at presenting than other, so when there’s a high-stakes client meeting, get each creative to present the idea to you, one at a time. The best pitcher gets the gig. If you’re lucky, you’ll have at least one pair of extroverts in your department. Give them free rein. Let them be themselves. One team of mine pitched an ad to Scotrail, the train company. The idea was a moving line of people on skates, scooting from city to city, zipping through the traffic jams. The lads introduced the idea by roller-skating into the client’s boardroom and racing round the table.

?S is for Succession. One day somebody else will be the person doing your job and it’s your responsibility to find them and groom them to succeed you. The trick is to hire people who have the potential to be better than you. The Buddhists say “If the student isn’t better than the teacher, the teacher’s a failure.” In his best-selling book ‘Confessions of an Advertising Man, David Ogilvy says “If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarves. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants.” I built a creative department full of wonderkids by sticking to Bill Bernbach’s hiring principles: ?"We have two requisites for people working at Doyle Dane Bernbach. Number one, they have to be nice people. And number two, they have to have a lot of talent. I'm sorry for the nice guy who doesn't have talent, but that's bad for my business. And I don't give a damn how much talent a guy has. If he’s a son-of-a-bitch, I don't want him. Life’s too short." I got my own start in advertising because people took time to see me, look over my work and tell how to make it better. So my advice is, see everybody who asks to see you. Don’t tell them you’re too busy. Or you don’t have a vacancy right now. See them. Give them an hour of your time. Look over their work and give them honest feedback. It’ll give you an advantage over all those other creative directors who can’t be bothered.

?T is for Training. Creative directors are last in the queue when it comes to training. Account people and planners are encouraged to attend all sorts of courses and conferences. A creative director is thrown in at the deep end. One day you’re the talent, cracking the toughest briefs, winning the most pitches and bagging all the awards. Next day it’s goodbye to all that. You’re a manager. The people who were your workmates are now your workers. Your job is to put your ego on the back burner and try to make them as good if not better than you. You don’t have those skills at first. Someone needs to teach you. That costs money but shy bairns get nowt so don’t be afraid to ask. I pestered my bosses to send me on a course called ‘Management Skills for Creative Directors’. It only lasted a weekend but it changed the way I work forever. The most important skill I learned was how to listen. Sounds easy, right? It’s anything but. Imagine you have to deal with a difficult creative. They’ve broken the #1 rule in any workplace: Don’t Be A Dick. They’re being a dick. Shouting at the account people. Digging their heels in over a piece of work that isn’t worth dying in a ditch for. Ignoring your feedback. ?Your natural impulse is to give them a damn good talking- to. Wrong. The kindest thing you can do for somebody – even somebody who’s being a dick – is give them a damn good listening-to. Take them to a quiet room and say “What’s up?” Then shut up and listen. Create a silence in the room and let them fill it. Every so often say “uh-huh”. Or reflect back to them the last couple of words they said. For example, they say “Nobody takes me seriously, everyone’s ganging up on me.” You say “ganging up on me”? That will trigger them to keep unburdening themselves. Clear your mind of your own thoughts, just concentrate on every word they’re saying and never, ever interrupt. When you’re sure they’re done, don’t tell them what you think. Feed back to them what you think they’ve just said. “So, if I’m hearing you right, you’re saying that you feel ganged up on?” By the time this one-sided conversation has run its course, you’ll be sitting opposite someone who acknowledges their own part in the drama and has repented of their dickery. You can practise your listening skills on anyone. Your mates, your mum, your partner. It won’t just make you a better creative director. It’ll make you a better person.

?U is for Ukelele. Never sign off a TV soundtrack featuring a ukulele.

?V is for Victory. Pitching is intrinsically unfair. It’s like going to five tailors and ordering a fitted suit. Once all five suits are made, you pick one. And that’s the only one you pay for. On the other hand, nothing is better for an agency’s morale than winning a pitch. It’s like spearing a mammoth and dragging it back to the cave. Enough meat to feed the whole tribe for the next three years. Pitching is where a creative director earns their stripes.? It’s where you learn that you need to make your pitch as creative as the campaign you’re presenting. The pitch I remember best was a pan-European pitch for Honda Motor Europe. Our client Chris Brown was smart. He organised things so that he visited every agency on the roster several times, seeing their work-in-progress until he was sure he had a selection of approaches he’d be proud to share with the company bigwigs. He was keen to avoid having to translate the work across his 47 different markets so he asked us to keep things simple and visual with the minimum amount of international English. Our idea was playful. We called the car the ‘Joy Machine’ because the idea of joy was woven into Honda’s corporate philosophy. (It translated well in every market except Germany where they thought it sounded like a vibrator.) All our ads showed the car doing playful things, like popping giant bubblewrap. It was unlike any car advertising I’d ever seen. To make that point, before I showed the work I played them a montage of car ads, showing various makes of car driving round what seemed to be the same hairpin bends. I set my film to the Beatles track ‘The Long and Winding Road’. When the song got to the line “I’ve seen that road before, I made the track jump so the voice repeated “seen that road before…seen that road before…seen that road before.” The room applauded. Half of them were Japanese. The trouble with Japanese salarymen is that they work so hard they fall asleep in meetings. I wasn’t having that. So to introduce our bubblewrap idea, I ran round the room giving everyone sheets of bubblewrap to pop. That perked them up enough that they were eating out of our hands. We were the runt of the litter on that pitch, up against some of the best agencies in the world. But we won – and we made the work we presented. Your job is to build a team of creatives who want to win at all costs. That’s going to mean some late nights and weekend work. But hey, free pizza. You should have the final say on what work leaves the agency. We live in an age where some agencies create work on open Google docs. Everyone’s allowed to chip in and because they’ve contributed their thuppenceworth, they expect it to be incorporated into the work. One Monday morning an excellent creative team of mine, @Mark Davies and @MichaelKinlan, brought me an Irn-Bru script that had me crying with laughter. I knew everyone in Scotland would love it too. It had the word ‘fanny’ in it twelve times. ?Trouble is, the account directors and planners were terrified to present it. When I dug my heels in, they called me a dinosaur and a primadonna. I gave up arguing. At the client meeting, we presented all the other ideas. But without telling my senior colleagues, I’d brought along the ‘Fanny’ script. I took it out of my jacket pocket. I said “There’s one other idea but we were a little nervous about showing it to you.” Naturally, they wanted to see it. When they did, they loved it. Watch it here. If an idea is controversial, ask your team “What’s the worst that can happen if we present it?”? The worst that can happen is that the client doesn’t like it. Remind your team that your title is Creative Director. You’re the designated expert on your agency’s creative output. You should have the final say.

?W is for Whipple. Your creatives don’t need to learn everything from you. But educating them is your responsibility. I was so bowled over by ‘Hey Whipple, Squeeze This”, Luke Sullivan’s guide to making great ads, that I bought a copy for everyone in my creative department. Advertising books fall into two camps: either hilarious but unhelpful or helpful but dull. Whipple is useful and funny in equal measure. (The chapter about coping with clients who nibble away at your idea till there’s nothing left, is called “Pecked to Death By Ducks”.) Doing stuff together is great for team spirit. Every month we used to get together and watch the latest ads so we knew what we were all up against. I gave every creative a small budget to organise something we could do together, from watching a movie to doing a life drawing class. It’s amazing how many copywriters suddenly found out they could draw.

?X is for X-Factor. You’re only as good as the people you hire. When creatives are very young, there isn’t a lot to go on. Their portfolios are thin and they can’t tell the good from the bad. Often, they’ll turn up on their own so you may need to ‘arrange a marriage’ to another young creative to get the best out of them. (Beware the wannabe who doesn’t like the idea of working with anyone else.) When you bring interns in, pay them a living wage. Kids don’t do their best work when they’re eating Pot Noodle and sleeping on someone else’s floor. Treat them as fully-fledged creatives. Bring them into as many meetings as you can, including client meetings, so they can see how the business works. Give them the same briefs to work on as your best teams. At Leith, we had a ‘hot desk’. We gave a team a month to show whether or not they had the ‘X-factor’ then we either hired them or moved them on to a competitor agency.

?Y is for Youth. Advertising is supposed to be a young person’s game. It’s rare for creative directors to keep their jobs beyond their sixties. That’s a shame. In any other creative profession, age is a badge of honour. Pablo Picasso, Woody Allen, David Lynch, Vivienne Westwood, Alex Ferguson, Helen Mirren, David Bowie – their talent matured as they aged, enriched by wisdom and long experience. Steer clear of any agency with a 25 year-old creative director.’ The phrase 25 year-old creative director’ is an oxymoron. They’ll be as much help to you as a child with a beard.

?Z is for Zag. The last time I had a cuppa with Sir John Hegarty he was sitting in his office on a black sheep. It was the symbol of his agency’s entire philosophy. It came from a Levi’s poster promoting black jeans when the rest of the world was wearing blue jeans. It showed? a flock of white sheep all going in one direction with one black sheep pushing the opposite way. The headline, written by Barbara Nokes, said “When the world zigs, zag.” Right now, most ad agencies seem to be saying “Hey, we’re all zigging, come and zig with us.” As creative director, it’s your job to carve out a distinctive path for your agency. If you’ve any ambition at all, you’ll zag.