The Sandbox Rule: Creativity under pressure

“So Dad, what exactly do you do?”?

It’s a question some of us parents can dread, especially if what it looks like what we do is just sit at a computer and talk on the phone all day, every day. And I got it from my 11-year-old daughter last week.

But like lots of questions from kids, it got me thinking. How would I explain what I do at PMI, as executive creative director, in the simplest, clearest terms?

Before starting this job, I’d spent 15 years directing my own boutique agency. Even though we worked in Manhattan, Paris, and SF, I was still used to being able to work lean and agile.?

So in 2018, when PMI first reached out to me, my agency was just 20 employees, and our work with large international clients often gave us front-row seats to the challenges they faced: lack of synchronicity between departments, redundant tasks, layers of approvals, and all the other headaches you associate with big lumbering bureaucracies. And at first glance, PMI is certainly that. A Fortune 500 company doing business in over 180 countries and with more than 70,000 employees worldwide, it also operates in a complex regulatory environment that turns those countries into pieces from different puzzles.?

But as a mentor once told me, “The more defined your sandbox, the better your creative will be.”?

Those regulatory environments gave our team a very defined sandbox.

By the time I joined PMI, the company had invested 8.1 billion dollars in R&D for smoke-free products, with the ultimate goal of replacing cigarettes wherever the company does business. The mandate: Let the science speak for itself and work with agencies and media partners to share, as simply and clearly as possible, what PMI has learned in the past decades of research.

My background and degrees are in design, so communicating visually is my go-to. The challenge was to integrate design thinking within a legacy brand, and it turned out to be a big part of how we streamlined PMI’s messaging, both internally and externally. Working in the digital space for the last 20 years enabled me and my team to look at the analytics, and it helped evolve our messaging with a digital mindset and an eye for detail, which served us well—even and especially in conversations with skeptics.

But the key was collaboration—across departments, with outside agencies, with media partners, and with each other. We were always thinking from an omnichannel POV, and that creative collaboration looks pretty similar, whether it’s at a small agency or a Fortune 500 company.

My kids would probably call it “teamwork.”?

#creativity #regulatoryenvironment #visualcommunications #management #design