Chief Creative Officer Dreaming.
Oh jeesh… I had this dream about being a Chief Creative Officer.
And nobody wants to hear about dreams, even less so than watching someone’s kid on a camera phone do some sports thing, unless the kid is Travis Kelce.
But this is something worth sharing and reading if you’re a Chief Creative Officer or want to be or work with one.
This dream was the last dream of the series last night, so it’s all pretty fresh. Since my job has always been to dream up ideas during the day, I have very vivid dreams at night. I actually enjoyed my malaria dreams when I was in strange places taking malaria stuff.
Here’s the scene. I had apparently taken another job as a Chief Creative Officer in some big company. In the dream, I had worked there before and in a different position and had come back after being gone for six months. Musta had stuff to do.
I’m talking to someone, and another colleague comes up and starts talking to them about a photoshoot. Going off to a ghost town and bringing in a professional athlete to pose on a bicycle.
Methinks, wha?
I started asking questions about why we needed this. What’s the point? The message? Who’s the audience? Why a bike and athlete in a ghost town?
My thinking is that this was an expensive boondoggle, so some creatives could have a vacation and produce something useless.
I recognized that because I’d done it in my misspent youth.
There was the gnashing of teeth in the dream. Some young creative is crying. Someone storms off. Bad juju.
Then I wake up and make coffee, find my Viking Mug of Doom, pull out the laptop and try to keep the cat out of my lap and write.
So why did I bother writing this early?
Here’s why.
I’ve been a Chief Creative Officer plenty of times over the years, both in my own agencies, in other people's agencies, and in startups. In fact, I just left a CCO position at a startup because the brand development was popping off all over the place and it was impossible to control.
I’ve got a lot of points here, and something I learned working in direct response many years ago taught me that numbering and bullet points are effective ways to keep a reader engaged.
So I’ll number it all.
1. A good Chief Creative Officer has had the crap kicked out of them for decades. This is someone who’s worked with terrible clients (I don’t know what I want, go do another).
The CCO has run agencies, has maybe been on the client side, and has been a Copywriter, Designer, Art Director, Creative Director, and Account Director. Someone who’s had massive triumphs and failures and has finally learned to tell the difference beforehand. Being in the creative business for decades can crush your soul or make you a bastion of cast iron in a rust-free environment.
2. As CCO, everything is your fault. The CCO is the last stop on the creative assembly line, and if something stupid slips by, that’s the head that will and should roll. That was the point of this dream. Since the CCO is the Guardian of The Brand, everything has to run through one mind that sees the soul of a brand in all dimensions and can recognize an anomaly.
Kind of like one of those tumor-sniffing dogs.
Being the CCO in the dream, I saw a disaster about to unfold, so I was smart and asked questions of the creatives. I wasn’t crushing the idea; I was just asking them to justify it. Which was damned good of me, being it was a dream and all.
That’s how a CCO SHOULD operate.
Don’t run around crushing dreams because they’re not your dreams. That’s petty bullshit. Ask hard questions because no creative strategy should come to life that can’t justify itself. I love engaging like this on ideas. If we don’t look at all the reasons an idea will work, AND why it’ll fail and do the math, we’re not doing our jobs.
3. A good CCO should recognize the RIGHT idea. That means they should be mature and generous enough to realize that perhaps their own idea was second best. This is really hard. We all fall in love with our own stuff but after a lot of years, one will finally recognize real genius when it peeks in the door. A CCO might be brilliant and lead the flock with great genius, but if they get too enamored with their own stuff, they will fail to recognize something better.
We’re not prophets with The Final Word.
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We’re the ones who recognize new prophets who might appear and disappear multiple times a day and bring their brilliance to the flock. That’s the hardest part of this job and, really, the hardest part of any position of power in a corporate organization: Recognizing the right idea and not caring where it came from.
And how do you recognize that right idea? Ask a lot of questions. Get all Socratic on it’s ass. If there is a plausible defense for every pointed stick, then maybe it’s worthwhile.
Personally, I don’t present an idea to a client or team until I’ve run it through the grinder. I just naturally do that. I look like I’m always taking thoughtless risks in my creative work and in my life (riding a motorcycle around aimlessly for months at a time), but I do the advanced calculus before taking a leap; I just do it really fast.
I learned to do this the hard way, blindly believing my inspirations were always right and selling badly cooked ideas that seemed brilliant at the time. And failing.
4. If you’re a CCO or want to be or have one below you in the big corporate food chain, this is key.
The CCO might be a brilliant creative thinker, but they can’t always be in love with their own thinking. The creative we do for work are not your precious children. It’s what we do for a living, and most of it will never survive. Mourn and move on. It doesn’t matter. Ideas are dirt cheap until they’re priceless, and the only way to make them priceless is to subject them to a lot of dirt, germs, and bad weather.
A good CCO does this every time and a really good CCO teaches everyone in the room to do this.
At one point, I got hired as CCO for a big startup that had a dozen smart, talented, young, and very green creatives cranking out a ton of terrible work for upper management and clients who didn’t know it was terrible. My job was to make it all good. Or at least gooder.
I started by gently working with every creative to look at their work one-on-one, then by implementing a Friday Fry-Off.
I had everyone in the Great Meeting Hall show a campaign they were developing on the big screen and we’d all tear it to hell. It was fantastic. They all learned to ask the right questions about everything they did before they did it. And I drug upper management types into the room to watch and participate in the process. Lay the egos aside; we’re all just channeling a higher force. Don’t own precious ideas. Think of all the reasons it’s good and bad and be prepared to defend it and if you can’t, take it round back and shoot it.
Be gentle with your wacky creative thinkers because they’re all crazy but also teach them to be tough. I’ve hired some absolute lunatics who did superlative work and had big ideas and could execute them because I learned to gently keep them from going off the rails.
Recognize great thinking, scrutinize it, nurture it and if it survives, spend money on it.
So in good Direct Response Marketing copywriting, I’ll circle back to the beginning.
That dream thing.
Being a CCO means it’s always your problem and not always your idea.
Recognize the right idea, bake at 350 and see if it’s going to be good. Ask a lot of questions and if an idea can’t survive good, honest scrutiny, pop a cap in it’s ass and move on.
And to that creative type that was crying because their idea got squashed, suck it up, buttercup. In the dream, I was quite gentle with my questions, and you still thought hysterics were appropriate. It wasn’t. It was a mediocre idea, not a precious child. It’s kind of like that old saying about prayer. You can ask God for anything, but sometimes the answer is no.
Now I’m hoping that tonight I dream about spearfishing for my dinner in a warm sea instead of arguing creative involving boondoggle photoshoots. Maybe a boondoggle photoshoot that requires spearfishing for dinner in a warm sea.
Good idea.