Creative director

The advertising process itself may help throw light on this. Since the advertising agency exists to produce advertising, the creative director is called on to be the key participant in, and contributor to each and every part of the process that results in the advertising. Within most agencies, the creative director is a key part of the formulation of the brand and advertising strategy, the formulation of the brief, the actual process of creating the advertising, the presentation or selling of the advertising to the client, and its execution.

So essentially, a creative director must be qualified as a "manager", very nimble and astute manager of people, in harmony with the business plans of the company. This is a tremendous challenge for anyone. A precious few creative directors excel at all points. Besides needing to have the requisite aptitudes: he must have the force of personality to prevail over the process. Part protagonist and part mediator, the creative director must pick his way between currents of differing ideas, personalities, and agendas. The advertising process can be fraught with people with different agendas, and creative directors must have their way with force and grace when contrary views are expressed with fervency.

A creative director's lot is a complex one: there is also the matter of credit and blame: while clients and awards can be won or lost for a great many reasons, the win is frequently attributed to a great many reasons but a loss can be place quite squarely on the creative director's doorstep. Creative directors are more often than not a lightning rod for the ire and blame game that can follow. It is not too infrequent for an entire creative team to be fired when an agency loses an account and when that happens, many a creative director has realized that his own team also looks at him askance.