Creative director — brand, campaign, content and film
About
That order matters. I learned why work has to earn its place before I learned how to make it beautiful.
Sixteen years across creative director and art director roles, and four brands I built end to end — strategy, identity, packaging, content and the campaigns that sold them. Concept through final asset, with the commercial reasoning underneath all of it.
Most briefs lose something at every handoff. Fewer handoffs, less loss. That's the whole argument for hiring someone who can set the positioning, direct the shoot, and still tell you why it moved the number.
[Add a short paragraph here on what you care about and the kind of company you want to build work for.]
My training is in marketing and strategic communications. So the first questions on any brief are commercial ones, and nothing gets made until they're answered.
Demographic and audience analysis. Not a persona deck — who has the problem, what they already buy, and what they'd have to give up to switch.
Channel strategy. Every channel has a different cost, a different audience and a different tolerance for being sold to. Choosing wrong is more expensive than making the work badly.
Positioning and message — the one thing that has to land, and everything we're deliberately not saying.
Only now. Concept, art direction and production, working from a brief that already knows exactly who it's for.
Metrics, demographic read, channel efficiency. Then adjust. This is the part most creative leads hand to somebody else.
Four things I hold to, whatever the brief.
A brief is usually a symptom of something further upstream. Solving the symptom is how good work dies in market.
One-off executions age badly and cost more every time. A brand system compounds — it makes the next twenty pieces cheaper, faster and better.
I've shot it, cut it, designed it and written it. So I brief in specifics rather than adjectives, and teams move faster when the direction is concrete.
Taste with no evidence behind it is decoration. I'd rather be corrected early than defend a beautiful thing that isn't working.
Two of these are my specialism. The rest I can do well enough to brief properly, review honestly, and know when I'm being told something is impossible. I'll always tell you which is which.
End to end, not a slice of it.
Education
Tools & platforms