When I was seventeen I was fortunate enough to get a work placement in one of Dublin’s great ad agencies, Arks Advertising.

Those three months, mostly spent making coffee, cleaning paint brushes and filing Letraset* sheets, really opened my eyes to the buzz and excitement of creating ads. And pretty much made up my mind about the career I wanted to pursue, to my father’s considerable chagrin.

I was impressed with everything about this agency. From its very own photographic studio on the ground floor to the creative department on the 3rd and 4th floors. (Arks, at that time, had the rather old fashioned system of keeping the copywriters, who occupied their own individual cubbyholes on level 3, segregated from the art directors who shared two big studios on the floor above.)

But the person I was most in awe of (and not a little fearful of as well) was Eamon O’Flaherty, the Creative Director. A giant of a man – he was at least 6’ 5” – he was also a giant in terms of experience and knowledge of the business. And while I can’t honestly say that I learned a great deal about the business from him (I was far too awestruck to actually ask him for advice), I certainly picked up quite a few things watching him in action.

For me, the ultimate goal was to acquire enough skills and experience so that one day, in a dim and distant future, I might just possibly become a real, honest-to-God, fully-fledged art director. The idea of having the title of creative director bestowed upon me was quite simply unimaginable.

The impossible dream

In those days, (and it wasn’t really that long ago) the highest possible position one could attain as a creative person was to be creative director. It was a role reserved for the very, very rare few who were not only gifted creatively but also had the ability to manage creative people. In other words, they pretty much had to be miracle workers.

Though there are now plenty of alternative and/or higher titles with the word “creative” in them: Executive Creative Director, Vice President Creative, Global Creative Director and, probably the most recent version, Chief Creative Officer, essentially that role hasn’t changed.

Alastair Crompton, in his wonderful book “The Craft of Copywriting”, gave a marvelous, inspiring and not a little scary description of what it really means to be a creative director. Sadly this book is now out of print but you might be able to buy a copy on Amazon – and it would well worth your while to do so. I shall attempt to do justice to his description here.

The hot seat

As creative director (or Executive Creative Director or Vice President Creative or Global Creative Director or Chief Creative Officer or Supreme Creative Whatever) the buck stops with you.

You are the one with total responsibility for the standard of the creative work of your team. If the work is not up to par, it’s not your teams’ fault. It’s yours. You, after all, hired them and you let the sub-par work leave your department. It’s not the brief’s fault because a) you accepted the brief in the first place and b) once the work is produced and approved by you, nobody ever goes back and looks at how crappy the brief was. All they’ll see is the crap work. Not the conditions that led to it.

When it comes to presenting the creative work to eager (or not so eager) clients, you are the man – or woman of course. Your account service colleague, no matter how passionate or well meaning, will never have the deep understanding of the work you will – or certainly should have. Nobody in your agency should be able to articulate and present the meaning of this work as well as you.

If the presentation goes well? Congratulations but big deal. You’ve done your job as well as you’re supposed to.

If the presentation was a disaster? All the fingers will sooner or later (and it will probably be sooner) point at you.

Crisis time. Your team(s) has had weeks to crack a challenging brief but not delivered. Everybody has had a go – from the most junior team to the most senior. Even your ‘star team’, the guys you can always rely on, have crapped out. And the presentation is tomorrow. Guess who has to make it good?

Somehow, some way, after everybody else in your department has failed and when all the time allotted to the project has been used up, you will be the one who has to knock the ball out of the park.

If you manage to do it, well and good. If you fail – like everybody else – it’s your screw up.

In other words, being a creative director is a pretty tall order. You not only have to be good at your particular craft, you have to be good at everything.

So, what does it take?

If you’re a writer, you need to have a good appreciation of what constitutes good (or bad) art direction. If you are an art director, you’ll likewise need to know good (and bad) copywriting when you see it.

You’ll have to possess a good understanding and appreciation of digital and social media and be able to tell the difference between genuine insights and total bullshit.

You’ll need to have the patience and sensitivity and patience and charisma and patience to manage all those instinctively rebellious, emotionally charged, attention seeking and insecure creative people who secretly – or not so secretly – think they can do a better job than you.

You’ll have the ability (and self discipline) to get your head around the most obtuse marketing strategies and obscure client products and services.

You have to be the best presenter in your agency because you’ll be presenting the stuff the clients really want to see.

And you’d better be prepared to be your absolute charming best when it comes to winning clients over with your dashing and witty personality.

You’ll need to have a 360º vision of both your industry and your company to see what’s coming up ahead of you… and what’s sneaking up behind you.

Nobody is born knowing how to do all of these things. And you won’t be able to do it after just a couple of years on the job either. (Unless, maybe, your name is David Droga.)

It takes years and years of often painful experience to genuinely fulfill the role of creative director. You really do have to have seen it all, done it all and have the scars (and wrinkles) to prove it.

The rap star as creative director

And that’s why I get pissed off when I see rap stars, pop singers, fashion models, actors and even bloody football players suddenly becoming “creative directors” of some of the biggest brands in the world.

Don’t get me wrong. Without a doubt these are very talented people. They are brilliant at what they do. And infinitely better at rapping, singing, modeling, acting and playing football than I am. (Admittedly it would be difficult to imagine anybody worse than me at those endeavors.)

But they are not and never will be creative directors. Not in any real sense of the word.

I’m sure these creative director appointments are more publicity statements than real positions. After all ‘creative director’ does sound bigger than ‘official spokesperson’ or, horrors, ‘brand ambassador’.

However, even if it is all a publicity stunt, it certainly represents a dilution of what it means to be a creative director and, as far as I’m concerned, a thumbed nose at all the creative directors (and agencies) these brands have worked with over the years.

Whose fault is it?

But then, who is really to blame for this dumbing down of the creative director title? Perhaps we need to look a little closer to home.

If my memory serves me correctly, up until the late 1980’s, the title of creative director represented the absolute pinnacle of achievement for agency creatives.

Most art directors and writers were perfectly content to remain as art directors and writers for the entirety of their careers. Their focus and interest was on the creative work itself and the idea of having to manage, hire and fire other creative people filled them with dread. And God forbid having anything to do with clients.

Agency management was perfectly happy to acknowledge the good performance of creative teams with pay rises and bonuses without requiring them to take on additional responsibilities.

But times changed. Perhaps people became more status conscious. Maybe the finance guys (who have always had the loudest voice in management) objected to giving people pay rises for doing what they always did. It could even have been that some creative directors got fed up managing creative people and preferred to lead by example rather than in a hands on way.

And so the title Executive Creative Director (ECD) came into being. It seemed to be the perfect solution. The original creative director (CD) became the ECD. And those title-hungry creative could finally ascend to the creative director throne without having to leave the agency. In fact, you could have quite a few CDs in the agency, all of them ultimately reporting to the ECD, thus satisfying the finance guys by giving a title and additional responsibilities to go with the pay increase.

Of course this was all too simple. If we can have ECDs and CDs, what about those talented creative chappies who were really good but not quite experienced enough to be CDs themselves? How do we keep them happy? Make them Associate Creative Directors (ACDs) of course! (Well, it does sound better than ‘Semi-Creative Directors’.)

All of a sudden there was an abundance of creative director titles with different prefixes floating around. But at the end of the day, there still had to be the top dog, the leading light, the creative figure head who would proudly represent all that was best (creatively) about an agency. So what could you call them?

The answer was simple and logical. Companies already had Chief Executive Officers and Chief Financial Officers. Now it was time to have a Chief Creative Officer.

In this way, a creative person entering the business could see a clear career direction: from junior art director/writer to art director/writer to Associate Creative Director (or Deputy Creative Director) to Creative Director to Executive Creative Director to Chief Creative Officer.

It certainly made a certain kind of sense… to those of us within the industry. But for people outside our little and sometimes very cloistered world it was confusing. So many titles. All of them sounding very important. Not to mention very similar.

Of course by adding more titles, it became easier to acquire them. In other words, people started becoming creative directors much faster.

How it works now

Take some typical precocious beginners. Give ‘em about a year to pick up the industry vocabulary and get their feet wet. Perhaps in their second year they win an award or two. (And in all fairness they really are quite talented – and possibly very hard to replace.) Naturally they start getting restless. They figure after 2 or 3 years they know their stuff. Now they’re impatient. They look around for other opportunities and they get them. Or management panics at the thought of losing them. Suddenly they’re creative directors. 3 years into their careers.

Except they’re not creative directors.

They simply don’t have the irreplaceable hard-earned experience that is so necessary in this constantly changing and challenging business. Experience dealing with different kinds of colleagues, staff, bosses and clients. Experience handling all the different kinds of problems that get thrown at you over the years from insane last minute deadlines to crazy client demands (“My wife hates the colour green”) to economic meltdowns.

They certainly won’t have nearly the level of craft needed in their respective areas of expertise – be it copy or art direction or digital – because they won’t have spent the hours and years necessary to acquire those skills.

And they won’t have the maturity and, dare I say it, wisdom that comes from simply having more life experiences. In other words, getting older.

And so, though they might have the business card with that precious job title and they might even have a pay package to match, they are not creative directors.

In effect, our industry has devalued the title of creative director because quite frankly anybody with the right level of ego and ambition can become one.

People with just a couple of years’ experience.

Rap artists and footballers.

Even clients.

*In the dark ages before the arrival of the holy Mac, when artwork had to be prepared by hand, dry transfer sheets from a company called Letraset were available with letters in a large range of typefaces, styles, sizes, symbols, and other graphic elements. These letters could be transferred one by one to the artwork by literally rubbing the letter down with a stylus. Yes, it was every bit as tedious and painstaking as it sounds.