It’s Time Schools Developed Jr. Creative Directors
The advertising world has changed. The roles need to change with it.
The titles of Art Director and Copywriter might be dead. To be honest, I think they need to die for us all to move forward. The roles have evolved, but the titles haven’t. We need a title that allows more ideas to get made and more ideas to make an actual impact on the brands we serve.
Why now? Three seismic shifts in our industry:
The number of platforms and iterations has increased beyond the capacity of the traditional creative team.
AI has given creative people more tools to express their ideas than just words and static pictures.
The fundamentals of our industry are in flux, revealing fertile ground for a major evolution.
It’s been a volume game for a while now.
Facebook started it. It started there, you could no longer simply shoot a spot in HD or wider for a beautiful cinema ad. You needed it in 1:1, vertical, and horizontal. As the number of social channels grew, so did the versioning, the sizes, the shapes, and the “best practices”.
Lately, too much of a creative team’s day is taken up by debates over specs, mediums, and formats. “You can’t put the copy there, it won’t work on Reels.” Managing rounds of legal changes in copy decks, formatting 56 versions of a banner, and keeping up with the latest YouTube formats is not a good use of the team’s time. It’s not cost efficient, it’s not inspiring, and it doesn’t produce the best work. No one wins.
This isn’t to say these tasks aren’t important. I actually think the opposite, but they’re not creative tasks. And it’s not why you hired your Art Directors and Copywriters, especially the senior ones.
I believe a whole new skill set is developing that sits in the campaign process between Creative and Production. Maybe I’ll write a post about it. Or DM me if you want to hear that one.
All that to say: for most creatives, it’s tough to stay inspired through the whole process right now. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
Our toolboxes have never been bigger.
Months ago, I moved ChatGPT into the bottom four apps on my phone. For the first time since my first iPhone, I used an app enough for it to claim a permanent spot.
It was an exciting day. I moved it down because it freed my mind to dream bigger, know more, and bounce ideas off a knowledgeable source 24/7. That was huge for my creative process.
Picture it this way: I was an Art Director who couldn’t draw. If I had tried to get into the industry even ten years earlier, I would have failed. I would have been laughed out of every interview. But because of computers and design tools like Photoshop, I was able to showcase my thinking to schools, CDs, and employers.
Right now, there’s a massive wave of unbelievably creative high school students who know how to use these AI platforms to their advantage and they’ll use them to express ideas in ways they never could have without AI. Call it cheating if you want, but it’s not. It’s just new.
These students now have access to professional illustrators, animators, writers, retouchers, editors, directors, UX designers, backend developers, audio engineers, and entire sound studios. No, they’re not perfect, but with access to all these “people,” they now have the ability to mock up their ideas however they see fit.
Writers can mock up storyboards the way they envision them. Animators can create custom tracks to play over their work. Editors can have professional level guide reads in their reels, written at a high level.
Throughout history, technology hasn’t ended art or creativity, it has made it more accessible, easier for people to express themselves. The same is happening now.
I’m currently writing a fiction novel, and I couldn’t have done it without ChatGPT. Not to write it, but to be my on-call researcher, my sounding board, and to help structure it like a traditional novel. Are the words mine? Yes. Is the idea uniquely mine? Yes. Could AI have come up with it? I don’t believe so. Could I have gotten the idea out of my head without ChatGPT? No.
Recent conversations with agencies like AKQA and Zite here in Denmark show that the redefinition of creative roles is already in motion. The shift is happening, and as always, some will lead and others will follow.
The Mad Men days are over.
As sad as that is to say, it’s true. And they were over long before DDB closed its doors.
Think about it this way, back in the Mad Men era, when DDB pulled the Art Director out of the backroom and partnered them with a Copywriter, people thought they were nuts, but it worked for the last 75 years.
Many iterations were tried, but the model continued through the invention of Photoshop, Quark, Illustrator, and every other design tool. It continued through the invention of digital photography and the iPhone.
But I don’t think the Copywriter and Art Director roles as we know them will make it through this one. And that’s okay. It might even be a good thing.
AI isn’t good enough yet for final production of most things, but it has already changed how we ideate and show our thinking.
Years ago, I had an “ah-ha!” moment when one of my old CDs, Pete McLoud, told me: “Dave, you’re an Art Director. Your job isn’t to be able to do everything. It’s to direct artists.” That really landed with me. And now we’re reaching a point where the job is to direct creatives of all kinds.
So, it’s time to change how we work.
If you’ve been following along, we have an unrealistic volume of campaign elements, a wave of creatives ready to be unleashed with tools no one has mastered yet, and an industry in the midst of the biggest foundational shift in almost a century.
It’s big. I get it. So what can each of us do today as Creative Leaders?
Start upskilling your teams, right now. Give them access to as many tools as possible. They won’t all use them, and they shouldn’t, but hopefully you have a culture that allows some people to use some of the tools in the ways that work for them.
Change your expectations of your creative teams. Don’t accept “I can’t judge the layout. I’m a copywriter,” or “Copy’s not my thing. I’m a designer.” Grow the expectations of every creative person on your team. Slowly, carefully, and with empathy—but push. Today.
Which leads to my final point: stop assuming the best or fastest way to express an idea is through the written word or graphic design. Open it up to more platforms, more ways of working, and more tools.
Change the school system. We need to stop training Art Directors and Copywriters and start training Creative Directors right from day one. Change the programs to teach them how to judge a good line, craft an idea, understand pacing or comedic timing, lead other creative people, and bring ideas to life in the best way possible.
Agencies will have more flexibility in their creative teams, more flow between skill sets, more experts to rely on, some human and some agents. They’ll be able to focus on the truly creative tasks and less on the process of building it out.
Businesses and brands will feel the impact of these young minds immediately. We’ll get musicians, directors, or engineers, along with designers and writers applying for the programs. It will open the industry to new ways of working and, in turn, new ways of thinking.
The work is begging for this. The world is ready for it.
I’m excited to see the impact of the first graduating class of Jr. Creative Directors.