Profile

Being a creative director means that I get to mix a lot of unusual talents in a way that not many jobs allow you to do.  You use a strategic business sensibility and mix it with the artistic side of you. You get to use your artistic sensibilities to influence people.

I get to do a lot of everything. I dream up ideas for fun viral videos, TV spots or multi-media campaigns. I sit in meetings and give my two cents on market trends. I grab a video camera and go out on the street and interview women.

Being a creative director is a great job for people who enjoy writing, creating, art and music.  It is a great job for mixing those sensibilities and getting paid for it rather than being a starving artist. 

One thing I’ve always loved about the ad agency world is the office environment. Ad offices are rarely a cramped cubicle city. Instead, they are bright with concrete floors and chairs that swing from the ceiling. Pool tables and fooz ball tables. People ride razors down the hallway.

My other favorite thing about the ad world: smart, funny people.
People who work at ad agencies usually have very curious minds and enjoy learning about different things.  They are usually passionate people who enjoy staying up on the latest films and music.  It is a pretty eclectic group who likes to be informed and know what’s going on in the world.

Communication. An ability to create ideas out of thin air, describe them succinctly enough to convince a client to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce them.

A sense of humor and a thick skin.

It can be grueling. This business is deadline driven and the hours can be long, especially when you are traveling on a TV shoot and production. Shooting TV and videos and then editing them is a blast, but it often means a week or two away from home.

Yes. L.A. Canada, New York and wherever the current client is based.

It’s never the exact same thing.

Inspiring others. Making them laugh. Or cringe. Or think. At the end of the day, my job is to move people to action on behalf of a product or service.

My high school English teacher and creative writing instructor, Betty Bland.

All there is to it is to do it. (my Dad)

Lay low.

Just go for it. That may sound overly simplistic, but a few of the more amazing things I’ve done wouldn’t have happened if I had thought about them to much or asked around for a lot of advice or tried to figure it all out before I acted.


Sometimes it’s better if you don’t know how hard it’s supposed to be. For instance, I waltzed into a job in San Francisco at Chiat Day. It was only after I started working there that I got calls from people saying how long they’d been trying to break into the San Francisco ad scene. Or how hard they had tried to get a job at Chiat. If I had known that before I interviewed I would have psyched myself out. Ditto with performing a one-woman stand up routine in Atlanta. Or flying to Dubai to speak at a marketing conference. Just go. You’ll figure it out along the way. (Or at least learn a lot and pick up some good stories by trying!)

What spare time?  I hang with my sweet family quite a bit. Soccer games and runs around the lake.

Lately, my real passion is taking a look at advertising and how it often negatively stereotypes women and girls and not just because it sexualizes women.  I believe that most advertising talks down to women and treats us like we are one-dimensional idiots. I’ve seen that my entire career.

I’ve created campaigns for brands like Levis, Curves and Celestial Seasoning that have treated women with great respect. 

I would really like to change things by educating women—women and girls—about how the media and advertising impacts us. We all like to think that we ignore it but there are 5,000 messages a day that bombard us.  Most of them are insulting us or sexualizing us.  I think that it ultimately effects how I look at my body and decide whether I like it not.  I know it impacts my 11 year-old little girl.  It impacts how she thinks about her body. It informs her about what sexy is.  We don’t get to define that as parents anymore. She doesn’t get to define that as a girl anymore.  Magazines and TV are defining that for her. Whether we think we are immune to it or not we aren’t.

Women are the most powerful consumers in the world. We spend more money and control more purchase decisions.  If we decide that Abercrombie is doing us a disservice by making their ads into middle school pornography, then don’t buy from them.  Tell others.  You can hurt these corporations by closing your wallets and raising your voice.

I would have never laid low. I would have had a bit more of a plan (but just a bit). I wouldn’t have underestimated myself. I would have been quicker to talk about my worth and accomplishments and louder about my needs for more money or a bigger title or more time off. In short, I would have had faith that I was worth it. Every day.

I don’t know that I’ve done that very gracefully.  I think that one of the reasons that only about 3% of the creative directors in ad agencies are women is that women in general are not willing to give up the amount of their life that is necessary to be in that position.

I thought my own life would be easier starting my own company than working for an ad agency, which kind of lets you know how exhausted I was at the point I decided to start my own agency.  Trying to start your own business is a 24/7 operation if anything is.

To try to balance motherhood when I worked in ad agencies, I started taking my kids with me during the editing process for commercials.  I’d be in LA doing the editing or doing the music for a TV spot and I would take my kids. I’m lucky that I have great kids. I’m lucky that production facilities are pretty cool with that.  It enabled my children to see mom at work and hopefully see possibilities for jobs that I never knew where there.  I’ve also taken them with me when I speak.  I was just speaking in Sweden and I took my entire family.

You just become unapologetic about having a family and having a life.

I fell into it. A college professor once chased me across the quad with a paper I had written. He told me I was a persuasive writer and that I should consider advertising. I was horrified! Advertising? Why would anyone sell people stuff they didn’t need???

Then, after college, I was selling ad space for a chain of local newspapers in Atlanta and I started designing and writing ads for my clients and I was hooked. Someone told me about Portfolio Center and the rest just fell into place. I have not worked straight through my career, though. I took time off and lived in Amsterdam when my son was a year old. I worked part time for a while after my daughter was born. I think it’s healthy to take breaks from a demanding pace.

I’ve spent over twenty years at some of the largest and best ad agencies in the world.  I was in Atlanta, Chicago, San Francisco and Dallas.  Every time there is a product that has an audience of women, they hand it to the women in the creative department.  Over twenty years, you become an expert on what women want and what intrigues them about certain products and services.  You kind of become an expert.  The problem is that when you try to get your creative team to write a campaign about what women want, they often drop the ball.  That’s mainly because a creative team in most ad agencies is generally twenty-year old boys—not that there is anything wrong with that.  It’s just hard for a twenty-year old guy to understand what a thirty-five year old woman is wanting and feeling.

Every woman I’ve known that has been in advertising has said to herself that we should start our own agency.  I finally did.

I loved mixing words and images to evoke emotion. I had always enjoyed writing and also loved to paint and draw when I was younger, so the fact that you could make a living at these tings was amazing to me. No one ever told me about this career when I was growing up.

Starting my own business has been tough. We had to think creatively when the money got tight. We rented out our house for a profit and moved into a small apartment temporarily to hold down expenses.

Today my biggest challenge is getting the (mainly) male CMOs to understand that women and girls need to be treated differently / portrayed differently in the media. I try to use economics and common sense to appeal to them. After all, with women controlling 60% of this country’s wealth right now and making at least 85% of all consumer purchase decisions, it just make sense. But quite frankly, old white men and large corporations move slowly.

So I’ve recently started taking my message to moms, women and girls. Even if you think you’re not affected by advertising images, studies prove otherwise. And since you’re inundated with up to 5,000 ad messages a day, it would be hard NOT to.  The stereotypes and sexualization of women impacts the way we think of ourselves and our bodies. It colors how men look at us. So when you see a brand like Burger King using women as sexual gags to sell hamburgers, exert your power.

Women have been called the most powerful force in the global economy.   Shut your wallet. Raise your voice. Don’t buy from companies who perpetuate unhealthy stereotypes of women and girls. Do talk about why you’re not buying. Post a comment on YELP. OR write to me about it. Tell your friends you think Abercrombie is nothing more than soft porn for middle school kids and you’re not wearing it. Or buying it.  You can make a difference.