I have been on enough sets to know the difference between a person who can read a brief and a person who can see a film. They are not the same person. The industry has spent twenty years calling both of them creative directors and the work has paid the price.
If you are a founder reading this and you are trying to figure out why your last campaign cost AED 600 thousand and got the same engagement as your intern’s iPhone post, this is for you.
The creative director job description we inherited
Creative director as a title was invented to manage a team. The original idea, going back to the Madison Avenue era, was that the creative director was the most senior person on the creative side of an advertising agency. They oversaw copywriters and art directors, presented to clients, and made sure the work shipped. They were a manager of taste, not a maker of taste.
The job is still that in a lot of agencies. The creative director shows up to the client meeting. The creative director approves storyboards. The creative director sends Slack messages at 11pm asking the team to push the deadline. What the creative director rarely does is sit at the monitor on shoot day and tell the colourist that frame 3217 needs less green.
That is the gap. The creative director is the person who said yes to the idea. The director is the person who has to put it on the timeline.
What a director actually does
A director is a maker. They have a body of work you can point at. They know what a 50mm looks like on Alexa Mini versus on Komodo. They have an opinion about whether a scene should breathe in a wide or pop in a medium. They will fight you on a casting choice because they already know what the call sheet feels like at hour fourteen and they know which actor will or will not still be present at hour fourteen.
More importantly, a director’s job is to compress a brand brief into a frame. That compression is the actual creative work. Anyone can write a deck. Anyone can pitch a concept. Very few people can take a 40 page brand book, a tight budget, three SKUs, and turn it into a 30 second film that a person watches twice.
If you have ever watched a campaign and thought oh that one is different, you were not responding to the strategy. You were responding to the direction. Strategy gets you to the brief. Direction gets you to the work that earns its second watch.
How to tell the difference in the room
If you are a founder hiring talent for a launch, here are five tells.
First, ask about their last shoot. Not their last campaign. Not their last brand. Their last shoot. A director will give you specifics about the camera package, the location problem, the talent shift on day two. A creative director will give you the strategic intent.
Second, ask them what they would change about a piece of work they are proud of. A director will tell you what they would have shot differently in scene three. A creative director will tell you they should have pushed the client harder on the brief.
Third, ask them to draw on the brief in front of you. A director will sketch a frame. A creative director will outline a deck.
Fourth, look at the showreel. If their reel is a series of typography animations and brand films that look like they could have been made by any well staffed agency in the world, you are looking at a creative director. If the reel has a visual language you can identify across pieces, even when the brands are different, you are looking at a director.
Fifth, see how they talk about their colourist, their DP, and their editor. A director knows their post chain by name and trusts a small group. A creative director will list the agency partners they have worked with.
Why this matters more in the GCC than in New York
In the West, the difference still matters but the supply is deep. New York alone has hundreds of working directors who have shipped real work. London has just as many. You can hire badly and still find someone good in the second round.
In the GCC the supply is thin. There are maybe forty directors operating between Dubai, Riyadh, and Doha at the level a regional brand needs. Most of them are foreign and parachuted in for the bigger campaigns. The local pool is smaller and uneven. So the temptation is to hire a creative director and assume they will figure out the direction part. They will not. Or they will, but the result will look like a creative director did the directing, which is the visual equivalent of a finance person doing your taxes badly and you only noticing in March.
The fix is to know what you are hiring for and to be specific about it. If you need someone to manage the agency relationship, hire a creative director. If you need someone to actually make the film, hire a director.
When you need both
On a big launch you usually need both. The creative director sits inside the agency and runs the relationship. The director comes in for the production block, owns the shoot and the cut, and leaves. They are different jobs at different rates and they should be on different line items in the budget.
What I see most often in the region is one of two failures. Either the agency cuts the director out and the creative director directs themselves, or the brand cuts the agency out and hires a director directly without anyone managing the strategic spine. Both fail in different ways. The first looks bad. The second looks beautiful but does not move metrics.
What I do at Add Hype
At Add Hype I sit in both seats depending on the project. On smaller campaigns I direct. On bigger campaigns I direct and I have a creative director in the room running the brand relationship. Nobody on the team gets confused about who is doing what because the line is drawn in the kick off meeting.
The reason I think this matters now is that the GCC consumer is getting better. Their feed is full of work shot in Seoul, Mexico City, Mumbai. The bar for what good looks like is no longer the regional bar. It is the global bar. And the global bar is set by directors, not by creative directors. So if your brand is competing for attention with a feed full of director led work, you cannot afford to put creative director output up against it. You will lose.
How to brief a director properly
If you do hire a director for your next launch, here is how to get the most out of them.
Give them the brand book and the brief two weeks early. They need time to live with it.
Take them on a location scout in person if at all possible. Not via deck. Their brain works in physical space.
Let them cast. Or at least let them sit on the casting calls. Talent is half of direction.
Stay off the monitor on shoot day unless they ask you to look at something. Notes from the client tent kill the take.
Give them final cut approval, not first cut approval. First cut approval is a creative director’s job. Final cut approval is the director’s job.
If you do those five things, you will get a film that you cannot fully predict from the brief. That unpredictability is the value. That is what you are paying for. If you can predict the film from the brief, you did not need a director. You needed a creative director and a competent production company.
Last thing
I have spent ten years on sets. The campaigns that moved metrics for the brands I have worked with were almost always directed by people who could draw the frame before they wrote the deck. The campaigns that won awards but did not move sales were almost always made by people who wrote the deck before they thought about the frame.
If your last campaign cost a lot and did not work, look at who held the camera. Not who held the slide deck. The answer is in there.
