Creative Job Titles Are Turning Into A Stupid Load Of Old Bollocks
When I was a nipper, there were only a few job titles in the creative department of your average UK ad agency.
You had the Creative Director at the top, then maybe a Deputy Creative Director, then the rest of the department, which could use the prefixes ‘senior’, ‘middleweight’ and ‘junior’, but were really just copywriters and art directors.
Larger agencies would have Group Heads, who were kind of like deputy CDs, but that was about it.
Over the last 5-10 years, this has changed.
For some reason, the top job is now Executive Creative Director, and the title of Creative Director is now used to describe anyone from the former Deputy CD to the Group Head to anyone who has responsibility for an account (‘Yeah, well I’m the Creative Director on Marmaduke Dog Food, actually.’)
I think this has happened for a number of reasons:
When I was at AMV around 1999, Tony Cox joined the department. He had been CD of BMP/DDB for many years with a great deal of success, so he couldn’t really come in as anything other than CD. But Peter Souter was the CD and it would have been a bit confusing to have two CDs when one was above the other (Peter hired Tony). Thus, Peter became the ECD, while Tony was the CD.
Fine.
Except (and this is where my facts turn into conjecture) I’ll bet that across town, there were CDs who saw this happen and wondered why they weren’t ECDs. I’ll also bet that upper management of those agencies were only too happy to bestow this prestigious title upon the mere CD because it got them out of giving a raise and it meant that they could boast to clients of having an honest-to-God ECD. Not a mere bogstandard CD, you understand; an E fucking CD.
And the disease spread from there. Over the course of a few years, the normal job title for the person who runs the creative dept of an ad agency has become ECD. This has freed up the CD title for the former Deputy CD or Group Head. So now any agency yet to adopt this system has a CD whose title denotes something less significant in another agency.
It’s also interesting to see what that word executive means. As an adjective (which the E in ECD is), it just means something that is to do with execution or implementation. So an ECD is a CD who is involved with carrying things out. Great. And let’s not forget that an Account Executive is the lowest rung on that ladder, almost certainly because that job carries the proper meaning of the word, which is being responsible for implementation (ie making tea and photocopying).
As a further oddness, I also know of some agencies who can’t actually bring themselves to allow the CD title to be bandied about so freely and have come up with some other titles for the group heads/individual account CDs, such as Creative Supervisors. Truly pathetic. I can only suppose that the people who do this still hold the CD title in the esteem it used to have, even though they have supposedly moved beyond that. It’s like a particularly arsebrained dog in a manger.
So where will this end?
That’s an easy one. Just look across the pond to see the Creative Vice Presidents, Creative Chairmen, Chief Creative Officers, Senior Creative Vice Presidents and all the other daft bullshit that fails to do what a job title, any title in fact, needs to do: tell you what it denotes.