Real Creative Leadership

Artist and entrepreneur Chase Jarvis says planning your creative career isn’t about the map — it’s about the compass. In this episode of Real Creative Leadership, Adam Morgan shows how to plan the next direction in your creative career, reminding us that it’s not a linear journey. You might bounce all over the map as a creative, but it doesn’t matter — as long as you know where you’re going.

Real Creative Leadership is building a community to address the issues, challenges, and benefits of creative leadership. The webinar series is produced by The Stoke Group (@thestokegroup), a full-service digital marketing and creative agency. Our host Adam Morgan (@askadmo) is Adobe’s executive creative director, an Adweek Creative 100, and author of Sorry Spock, Emotions Drive Business. For more information, go to realcreativeleadership.com.

Content experts will tell you that consumers will only pay attention to short, fast content. But our customers aren’t goldfish. That’s why anomaly matters more than other factors like length and speed, as Adam Morgan explains in this episode of Real Creative Leadership. Memorable marketing content doesn’t have to be fast — but it should be unique.

Real Creative Leadership is building a community to address the issues, challenges, and benefits of creative leadership. The webinar series is produced by The Stoke Group (@thestokegroup), a full-service digital marketing and creative agency. Our host Adam Morgan (@askadmo) is Adobe’s executive creative director, an Adweek Creative 100, and author of Sorry Spock, Emotions Drive Business. For more information, go to realcreativeleadership.com.

Your journey to become a creative director isn’t easy. But there might be some key practices you’re missing that could make all the difference. In this episode of Real Creative Leadership, learn how to tackle learning strategy, ask the right questions, and have purpose while working toward that promotion.

Real Creative Leadership is building a community to address the issues, challenges, and benefits of creative leadership. The webinar series is produced by The Stoke Group (@thestokegroup), a full-service digital marketing and creative agency. Our host Adam Morgan (@askadmo) is Adobe’s executive creative director, an Adweek Creative 100, and author of Sorry Spock, Emotions Drive Business. For more information, go to realcreativeleadership.com.

We’re about to take away the mystery on how creatives build successful leadership careers.

We invested some decent dollars into a survey firm that polled hundreds of creative leaders … and we’re ready to reveal the exclusive results into what it takes to craft a career in creativity. In this episode we explore the research along with a panel of top creatives from world-renowned brands — Google, Microsoft, CreativeLive, Adobe — in a real, raw and honest webinar produced by The Stoke Group and hosted by Adobe Executive Creative Director Adam Morgan.

We’ll explore answers to:

• How much does education factor into creatives’ success? 
• What skills are needed to succeed as a creative director? 
• How long does it take to land a creative director position?
• Can someone from, say, a photography background be a creative executive, or do you need to be from a design or editorial background? 
• Is there an age ceiling to a creative career? 
• How do top performing creatives prevent burnout?
• How do you stay at the top of your game — and lead others to do the same?
• And … more.

It’s not enough to just be a rockstar.

Here’s the hard truth: even if you’re the best writer or designer in your agency, it doesn’t mean you’re cut out to be a creative director. To lead a creative team you need to have a handle on everything from managing relationships to controlling workflow to, according to Adam Morgan, “making things happen.”

In this episode of Real Creative Leadership, Adam Morgan shares how he became a creative director and how, by mastering both the hard and soft skills, you can, too.

Tune in to learn:

• Nine critical skills to become a creative director
• How to manage relationships, even outside your team
• What it means to resource, talk khaki, and “hustle”
• How to know you’re ready to become a creative director

It’s time to connect khakis and creatives.

Professional relationships are key to better execution of your creative ideas. But it can be difficult to strengthen those relationships when you struggle to communicate effectively outside of your creative sphere. John Knightly, CMO of BlueJeans, has great insights on how creatives can better communicate with their business peers — or with “khaki,” as we introduced in our last episode — to make it easier to achieve the business goals you have in common. 

In this episode of Real Creative Leadership, join Adam Morgan and John as they compare notes from two different sides of the creative process, and discuss the best ways to communicate across departments and break down those language silos.

Tune in to learn:

• Best practices for creatives when interacting with marketers
• How creatives can branch out into other leadership positions
• What creatives need to learn to start speaking in business terms
• More resources to learn about marketing

Learn how and when to start speaking business.

As a creative leader, you now have a lot of new hats. Not only that, but you have new, non-creative peers. This means you need to learn how to talk business in business terms — or “talk khaki” as Adam Morgan calls it — to make sure everyone understands you and how you represent your creative team.

Talking khaki means you know how to convey your ideas and needs effectively to your higher-ups and your business peers — in a way that helps them see the value of your creative input. Watch this episode of Real Creative Leadership to learn more about how to and when to speak business.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• The four business departments where you’ll need to talk khaki
• The best methods and materials to help you learn the language
• Why understanding your organization's business is foundational to business language
• How talking khaki will help you better manage up and sideways

It’s easy for creative departments to get so bogged down in delivering on requests that they lose sight of the big picture — the real WHAT behind the work they’re doing. When that happens, creativity takes a hit.

Katie O’Brien saw the impact first-hand. As head of creative for luxury & specialty brands at Wayfair, Katie’s first priority was to shift her team from acting as reactive order-takers to becoming strategic and collaborative design thinkers.

In this episode of Real Creative Leadership, Adam Morgan and Katie discuss what it took to make the transformation happen and how her creative team continues to iterate and evolve — and it’s benefitting not just Wayfair, but also their dedicated customers and partners.

In this conversation with Katie, you’ll learn:

• Why many creative departments settle into the role of ticket takers and the problems that creates
• How to shift your mindset from efficiency to long-term growth
• Why creatives should always tie ideas back to the business and include business partners in their process early on
• How embracing mistakes can help creativity flourish

Get strategic with your creative team.

In the old model of creative agencies, there was a combined strategy and writing team to brainstorm the brand messaging, and then a creative team to take the messaging and “make it pretty.” But with the teams being separate, the actual execution of the message suffered. 

In this webinar, Adam Morgan shares all the benefits of combining creative with strategy. You'll learn:

• Why keeping the teams closely linked will yield better creative results
• The importance of developing strategic skills
• How to build strong partnerships throughout your organization

Too much frustration can arise from a language disconnect between creatives and business leaders. But both the creative and business sides of a company must learn to speak each other’s language if they want to succeed. 

Tune in to our next Real Creative Leadership episode to join Adam Morgan and Douglas Davis as they discuss how designers can become fluent in the language of business and strategy — and how it will transform your company.

In this conversation with Douglas, you’ll learn:

• Why creatives struggle in business environments
• The value of putting yourself in the shoes of non-creative peers
• Tips for learning the language of business 
• How strategy-fluent creatives can help transform businesses