Creative Leadership Is a Growth Role.
So Why Do We Still Measure It Like a Service?
One of the most interesting things I've heard recently didn't come from a Creative Director. It came from a CMO.
During a discussion on long-term brand building, Sarah Holt, whose career has included Centre Parcs, Lego, the BBC and Merlin Entertainments, was asked a simple question: if she had another £10 million to invest tomorrow, where would she put it? Her answer wasn't advertising. It wasn't content. It wasn't paid media.
She'd put it into the guest experience.
For a marketer, that's almost a heretical thing to say in public. We spend most of our careers trying to persuade organisations that marketing deserves greater investment, not arguing that the money should go somewhere else.
But that's precisely why the answer was so interesting. Sarah wasn't thinking like the head of a function. She was thinking like somebody responsible for growth. And I think that's where many organisations still misunderstand creative leadership.
For years we've behaved as though creative teams are a service provided to the business. They take requests, interpret briefs, produce outputs and measure success through delivery. Campaigns launched. Projects completed. Content produced. Deadlines met.
Yet at the same time, we talk constantly about creativity driving growth, creating preference, building value and shaping behaviour. Those two ideas don't really fit together.
If creativity genuinely influences growth, then it isn't a service function. It's a business function.
The distinction matters.
A service function is measured by what it produces. A growth function is measured by the value it creates.
They're not the same thing.
That's why I've always found the standard measures of creative success slightly unsatisfying. We talk about awareness, engagement, sentiment and reach because they're the things we can most easily see. We celebrate outputs because outputs are visible. We can point to a campaign, a film, a rebrand or a launch and say, "Look what we've done."
What's much harder is measuring the thing underneath.
Did that work actually increase preference?
Did it make the business easier to choose?
Did it strengthen pricing power?
Did it improve customer retention?
Did it support growth?
Those are considerably messier questions, which is probably why many organisations avoid them. The irony is that they're the only questions the board really cares about.
This is where Sarah's point about product and experience becomes so important. Her argument wasn't anti-marketing. It was that investment should go to wherever it creates the greatest return. At Centre Parcs, she believes that improving the guest experience creates greater and faster returns than additional media investment.
That's not a marketing decision. That's a commercial decision.
And I think creative leaders need to become much more comfortable operating in that territory. Because the most valuable creative decisions are not always creative outputs.
Sarah described the introduction of Apple Pay into the Centre Parcs app as creating significantly less friction and generating additional revenue from bookings. Nobody is entering that piece of work into a creative awards programme.
But if creativity is fundamentally about solving problems in original ways that create value for people, I'd argue that's a creative success.
The problem is that our industry often struggles to recognise creativity when it isn't attached to an advert.
Which brings us to the uncomfortable bit.
I think creative leaders have occasionally contributed to their own lack of influence by positioning themselves too far away from commercial accountability.
We've become very good at talking about originality, craft, emotion and storytelling, all of which matter enormously. But we sometimes struggle when the conversation turns to trade-offs. Where should the next pound be invested? Which opportunity creates the greatest return? Which activity should stop so another one can grow?
Sarah talked extensively about understanding the entire P&L and being financially literate enough to have those conversations. Perhaps the most revealing line of the session was her observation that the power of creativity has to be translated into the power of the numbers.
I think she's right. Not because creativity should become subservient to finance.
Because that's where influence actually sits.
The people who shape organisations are rarely the people making the strongest creative arguments. They're the people helping allocate resources, prioritise investment and make choices about growth.
Which leads to a question I think more Creative Directors should be asking themselves.
Are we trying to be the best creative person in the room?
Or are we trying to be one of the people helping decide where the organisation grows next?
Those are very different ambitions. One earns you ownership of the work. The other earns you influence over the business.
Maybe that's why another of Sarah's comments stuck with me. She said she'd made it her mission to make the CFO her best friend.
Most Creative Directors spend their careers trying to become indispensable to the CMO. I'm increasingly convinced the more interesting challenge is learning how to have useful arguments with the CFO.
Because once you're helping decide where investment should go, rather than simply asking for it, you're no longer acting like the leader of a service function.