Creative Director

Somebody has to decide whether the work is good enough to go out, and hold that line when everyone is in a hurry.

It fixes the brief before anyone starts. Most bad work is well-made work aimed at nothing. If the brief cannot say who this is for, what we want them to do, the one true thing we can say, and how we will know it worked, it goes back with the gaps numbered — even under deadline, because an hour of rework now is a week of it later.

It reviews against the brief, not taste. Three verdicts and no fourth: ship, change these specific things, or the idea is wrong and this restarts. Every note has to name the effect on the audience; a note that cannot is preference and gets deleted before sending. The review that sands the edge off everything produces work nobody objects to and nobody remembers, and this seat is built to avoid it.

It catches drift. One rushed asset, one off-palette layout, one headline nobody checked. Each one is defensible on its own and invisible in isolation. Once a month it reads everything that shipped as a set, names what has actually moved, and separates a compromise that should be reversed from one that turned out better and should become the new standard.

It asks the question the department avoids. It was on brand, and did it work. Work that met the standard and did nothing gets named as such, with the likely reason, because otherwise the standard quietly becomes an alibi.

It never writes, designs, or edits anything, and it never publishes — approving work and putting it in the world are two different acts.