The Worst Place for a Creative Director Is the Middle.
For years, creative leaders have positioned themselves as translators. We explain the value of brand to commercial teams, turn business strategy into something audiences might care about and attempt to reconcile long-term growth with the demand for immediate results.
It sounds collaborative, but it can also be one of the fastest ways to become irrelevant. When a business needs to make a difficult decision, it doesn’t need another person carefully explaining both sides of the argument. It needs someone prepared to take a position.
I was thinking about this while listening to a panel discussion about the apparent crisis between CEOs and CMOs. The figures presented at the start were fairly damning: CEO confidence in CMOs had fallen to 46%, only 15% gave their CMO an A rating and many still saw marketing leaders as executional rather than strategic. At the same time, CEOs were demanding more brand narrative, greater accountability for AI and, of course, more growth.
Creative Directors often sit directly beneath that tension, pulled between the pressure to deliver measurable activity and the responsibility to build something with lasting value. The temptation is to occupy the space between the two, mediating between brand and performance, creativity and commerciality, ambition and delivery.
The middle isn’t a position.
It’s where decisions die.
When everything matters, creativity becomes production
One of the clearest points from the panel was that marketing leaders are being asked to transform everything at once: attraction, retention, defence, cross-sell, upsell, brand, AI and customer experience, all with different teams, measures and timescales. If one number falls short, it can quickly become evidence that the entire function is underperforming.
That pressure inevitably travels downwards. More campaigns are commissioned, more channels activated and more content requested, often to compensate for the absence of a meaningful decision about what matters most.
For a Creative Director, this creates a dangerous role. You stop shaping the direction and start servicing demand. Your team becomes the place activity goes to be made presentable, rather than the place the business comes to make its thinking sharper.
One of the most useful moments in the discussion came when the CEO on the panel described her decision to revisit the business plan with her CMO rather than continuing to follow it blindly:
“Let’s not just carry on on the hamster wheel of activity. Let’s have a rethink.”
That is exactly the conversation creative leaders should be part of. Not simply asking what the business needs us to make, but challenging what it is trying to change and which activities are genuinely capable of changing it.
Our job shouldn’t be to make everything work. It should be to question whether everything needs to exist.
Don’t automatically take the side of brand
This may sound strange coming from a Creative Director, but I don’t think our job is to take the side of brand.
The endless debate between brand and performance has encouraged creative leaders to become custodians of one half of the equation, defending long-term value against colleagues demanding faster, more measurable results. We arrive armed with arguments about memory, distinctiveness and emotional connection, while the other side arrives with dashboards, leads and conversion figures.
It’s a debate we’ll continue to lose if we accept those terms, because one side sounds like an investment and the other sounds like a belief.
The Creative Director shouldn’t take the side of brand. They should take the side of growth.
If brand investment builds preference, pricing power or market share, defend it. If performance activity creates valuable demand without eroding the brand, support it. If a piece of work generates plenty of engagement but does nothing meaningful for the business, challenge it. If a beautiful brand campaign has no clear role in moving the organisation forward, challenge that too.
Taking the side of growth doesn’t mean surrendering creativity to a spreadsheet. It means refusing to discuss creativity as though it exists separately from commercial performance.
When an audience member asked why brand so often lacks representation at the most senior level, one response was that brand leaders should connect their work to business-level outcomes such as market share and preference, rather than relying solely on brand-tracking metrics.
That may be uncomfortable, but it gives creative leadership a far stronger place to stand. Not between creativity and the business, translating one for the other, but inside the business, influencing what it values and where it invests.
Leadership begins when we choose what matters
The middle can feel like a responsible place because it allows us to understand every perspective without fully committing to one. We can explain why the CMO needs long-term investment, why the CEO wants faster returns, why the CFO needs evidence and why the team needs more time.
We can become extremely good at understanding why nothing can change.
But creative leadership requires judgement, and judgement means making choices with imperfect information. It means saying one opportunity matters more than another, one audience needs attention first or one piece of activity may deliver a faster return but take the brand in the wrong direction.
When asked how she wanted those conversations to happen, the CEO’s answer was simple: “Be open and direct.”
Creative Directors should take that advice seriously. We need to stop translating, stop mediating and stop trying to make every stakeholder equally happy. We need a point of view, and we need to defend it commercially.
A Creative Director who can only explain the creative merit of an idea will always be brought in too late. One who can define the business problem it solves, the behaviour it needs to change and why it deserves investment becomes much harder to treat as an executional resource.
AI makes the middle even less comfortable
AI promises to make production quicker, cheaper and easier to scale, creating a fairly stark choice for creative leaders. We can supervise an increasing volume of outputs and attempt to protect standards as the machine accelerates, or we can move upstream and influence what the organisation is using the technology to achieve.
If we choose the first, we risk becoming quality control for an endless stream of efficient mediocrity. If we choose the second, we can shape new experiences and make sure efficiency doesn’t become the organisation’s only ambition.
One panellist put the risk bluntly, warning that without the right guidance, care and governance,“lots of brands are becoming quite shit” as AI models shape their outputs.
It may not be conventional boardroom language, but it captures the danger perfectly. Technology can scale output without scaling originality, coherence or value. More activity, produced more efficiently, is still just activity.
Stop defending creativity
The job of a Creative Director isn’t to protect creative people from commercial reality. It is to bring creative thinking into commercial decisions.
That means challenging “activity for activity’s sake”, questioning the brief before answering it and connecting creative recommendations to business outcomes rather than hoping people recognise their value later.
It also means accepting that not every fight is a fight for brand. Sometimes the business needs an immediate result. Sometimes the data shows the creative idea isn’t working. Sometimes long-term value is being used as an excuse to avoid short-term accountability.
The middle feels safe because it avoids choosing a side, but it also makes creative leadership easier to overlook. If we want greater influence, we need to stop translating other people’s decisions and start helping to make them.
The Creative Director shouldn’t sit on the side of brand or performance. They should sit on the side of growth, and be prepared to challenge both.