Or like a curator, or an editor, they say. Because in the day and age of AI, someone’s value won’t reside in their capability to generate ideas, as hundreds can be generated in seconds by machines, and spending hours or days brainstorming in conference rooms or staring at the blank page is just too expensive. The same goes for executing those ideas. Granted, most of the AI generated ideas are crap, but also most of the ideas that come out of a brainstorming session are crap. And if you use the right AI copilot (wink) there will definitely be some great starting points. Saying, however, “you need to think like a creative director” is a bit like saying “you need to play basketball like Stephen Curry”. Easier said than done! The important question then is how can one become a creative director, and it reminds me of the old joke about how to get to Carnegie Hall — practice, practice! In advertising agencies, you get to be a creative director after years of learning the ropes: understanding what advertising is and what isn’t, what it does and how it does it, how to interpret a brief, how to ideate and how to conceptualize, how to work in a team, how to be in tune with the zeitgeist, how to present/sell the work, what is the language and the possibilities of a medium. But mainly, after years of practicing your craft. If you’re a copywriter, you get better at expressing ideas in writing and if you’re a designer, you get better at expressing them visually. Bonus points if you also learn how to express ideas like a copywriter if you’re a designer, and vice versa. And importantly, along the way, you develop taste. You kind of absorb it, by being exposed to the work: your own, the work from people around the world of advertising, and if you’re curious and smart, from beyond it. You develop the criteria to judge your own work and that of others. To recognize greatness when you see it, and to be able to explain why it’s great (as opposed to that US judge whose definition of what pornography is was “I know it when I see it”.) And that’s when you can become a creative director. In other words, you can’t just wing it. I mean, you could, but you’d be a lousy creative director. The problem with AI is that people think they can get great results when they don’t know how to express what they want, and have little idea of what a great result is like (the same happened when the Mac made graphic design accessible to non-graphic designers: just search for the meme “design is my passion” for what is now a meta-commentary of that phenomenon). So— good news for creative directors, right? Definitely, but not as good for creative-directors-in-the-making, that is, for the people currently working for creative directors. Because, if AI can do great stuff when properly directed, maybe an agency needs only creative directors. If that is the case, how are we going to train the new generation of creative directors? It wouldn’t make sense to hire people to learn for a few years before becoming productive. The current apprenticeship model is broken, if what we expect of newcomers is to be productive by writing or designing while they develop taste and criteria. I think the answer is to fast-track this development by switching the work from ideation and execution to learning how to ask questions (to people and to AIs) and how to judge what they’re getting back from them. For example, I’d ask a new copywriter not to write as many headlines as they can think of for a campaign, but to use Seenapse to generate them. Their presentation would entail what they asked for, what they got, what they think is good (and why), and what tweaks would they do to make them great. Then I’d give them feedback on how to ask better questions, and tell them what my favorites would be and why, and how to make them better. This way they would focus immediately on what matters the most now: taste and criteria. Now, will there be bots that replace creative directors? Sure, but I don’t think they will produce great work; they’ll most probably choose stuff that ticks all the boxes, that is, safe stuff.