Part 2: The most important job of a Creative Director is to get great ideas sold

The success of a Creative Director should be gauged by the amount of great work that gets produced by the agency under his stewardship.

If he manages to generate a high volume of great work, everything else falls into place. Big ideas improve a client’s business by increasing sales and brand awareness. They also make the client famous (which means they’ll be eternally grateful to you). Not to mention they make the agency famous. Which helps to attract new business. In addition to that, the best people in the industry start to knock on your door to be part of this success. Which means you have the resource to produce better strategy and even better work. Which leads to a continuous upward cycle of prosperity.

On the other hand, if the Creative Director doesn’t manage to get great work into the market, the opposite can happen.

Clients start to lose confidence when their campaigns get a poor response from consumers. The blame (regardless of where it really lies) gets placed squarely on the shoulders of the agency. Eventually, those clients start to fire you. Morale within the agency starts to sink and good people begin to leave. It then becomes hard to recruit good new people because of your plummeting reputation. So you have to hire average people instead. New business pitches become harder to win so you have to engage in more of them to meet your quota.

So people work longer hours for less pay. And before you know it, you’ve become a bucket shop.

Once you reach this stage, you embark on a downward cycle that is hard to break. No-one enjoys themselves because they’re under so much pressure to scrape in the pennies. Professional pride becomes almost non-existent. And eventually the agency begins to lose money like a leaky bucket loses water.

In other words, the agency implodes.

So it is the number one mission of any Creative Director to ensure great campaigns make it into the market. Because when they do, you get happy clients and happy employees. You also get talked about in trade magazines and blogs. And may even pick up the odd Gold Lion.

Great work is the best way to keep great people, existing clients – and is a magnet for new business.