How do creatives get to the top?
According to recently elevated chief creative officers, the best way is not chase the title.
This is the view of creative duo Avish Gordhan and Mandie van der Merwe who joined Dentsu Creative six months ago as the agency's first chief creative officers.
Despite holding an executive creative director role together for almost four years, the pair told AdNews they were cautious about the next senior move.
"There is a lot of advice I can give young creatives but my best advice - which sounds rich coming from a CCO - is don't chase the title," Gordhan said.
“This career isn't a sprint, it takes a long time to develop a title like CCO.
“Our advice is to stay in a position for as long as possible, when you make the work, because the moment you get into a senior or leadership level you are measured by a different metric.
“Instead of being measured by the work you create, you’re looked at for the [work] environments you create.”
Before accepting Dentsu’s CCO position, the duo turned down five creative director roles.
“We've always planned for a long career because we look at the bigger picture," said van der Merwe.
“Whenever we change jobs we don't just think about the role we’re stepping into, we think about this move and the next one.
“This way you can see how many moves there are left in your career.”
Now holding the most senior creative roles within a formal agency structure, Gordhan admits "it's a difficult job" to foster the entire creative environment for an agency.
Despite this, the duo’s goal is to "create the most attractive creative department in market."
“If our people are not being poached and attempted to be hired by every other agency in the country we are not doing our job,” Gordhan said.
So what’s their plan?
At the heart of the duo’s leadership is a push for staff to have varied experiences outside of work and get involved with projects beyond the industry.
“Creativity comes from being interested in humans and being an interesting human yourself - so we push our team to go to the theatre, find a hobby, do volunteer work, watch new movies or travel,” Gordhan said.
“But then bring those experiences back into the office, the creative process and the work.
“Because being creative means you have to be interested in more than just advertising.”
And inside the office, Gordhan and van der Merwe's leadership puts accessibility and honesty at the core.
For example, "to break down accessibility barriers" and provide quick guidance to staff work the duo for a very long time have sat next to or opposite to the most junior people in their department.
“Honestly when checking in with the team there's no point in just being a cheerleader, instead it's about giving realistic feedback,” van der Merwe said.
“We encourage our people to not go into client work with preconceived ideas, but to keep an open mind and approach with empathy - the work is still going to be creative, it's just going to be more grown up.”
Particularly since most juniors struggle with maintaining client expectations and their own creative intuition, expert support is crucial.
“The truth is client and agency relationships are built slowly and with education. So [our team] have to understand what the clients are asking for against what the client's problem is," Gordhan said.
“I think that's often one of the things we focus on when feedback comes in. Sometimes creatives come up with really creative solutions, but they don't necessarily solve the client problem - the way to navigate that is to not look at the client feedback or the top-line idea.
“But to ask what is the actual problem and what are the problems the work is solving? And will the client's request for changes actually solve that?”
On a one-to-one level, Gordhan’s best advice to very junior creatives who want to climb the agency ladder is to focus on portfolio work.
Come and Say G'Day campaign one of the many pieces featured in Gordhan and van der Merwe's portfolio.
“We look at a lot of portfolios and I think one of the challenges is that portfolios are not a complete summary of all the work someone has made - it's actually just a showcase of the best ones they've made,” Gordhan said.
“So we get our teams to put one piece of proud work into their portfolio every year that they will never want to take it out again.
“Then after 10 years they've got 10 pieces of work, which is a very big portfolio and suddenly it's a really robust explanation of who they are and what's happened to them creatively.
“It's a very tangible way of defining yourself as a creative but also defining the type of work you want to make and the type of thinking that you're capable of.”
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