Out of the set and into the board room: the shifting role of advertising’s directors

The media agency occasionally gets a mention at the bottom. The production and audio teams rarely receive this treatment.

But in the past two years, something has changed. Advertising’s directors are now not only getting a mention but are creeping in as a third quotable voice on a press release. And in some instances, they’re the headline. When Uber released its first TVC it was director Kim Gehrig, and not BBH, who claimed the first creative namecheck.

Imperceptible to most, this change is indicative of a greater power shift in the creation of ads. An idea is no longer passed, baton-like, from client to agency to director and back again. These factions are beginning to meet in the middle.

“We used to hand over much more of a fetus of an idea to the director for them to incubate and grow and give birth to,” says Jon Gledstone, executive creative director and partner at Mr President. “Now, to stick on the fetus analogy, it’s much more like an embryo. It’s much more well-formed. The script that’s being sold in often now is more than a script – there’s references, there’s a treatment, there’s maybe a mood film.

“It’s much more formed and considered and, therefore, when the director comes on board, it’s our job to make sure they can bring lots of stuff to the table still. But equally, because it is more well-formed, it has become more collaborative, particularly with the director. They become part of the team and they bring their expertise.”

Likewise, Laura Sampedro, creative director at Wieden+Kennedy London, has a philosophy of opening the door to the director in the earliest creative stages. “We put a lot of effort in making the briefs we send to directors as inspiring and challenging as possible and, in exchange, we get equally exciting and in-depth treatments,” she says. “We always leave many executional elements open on purpose.”

The accounts of Sara Dunlop, director at Rattling Stick, do not match those of Gledstone and Sampedro. For her, the scripts often come in as a starting point rather than a meaty blueprint, which is “good because agencies are open to new ideas, [but] bad if there isn’t enough clarity about want they want to make”. These incongruous experiences may tellingly describe the different way agencies and directors understand the term “fleshed out”, but Dunlop does agree that being involved in the scripting stage makes for an altogether more rewarding – and ultimately better – experience.

As directors and creatives merge earlier on, so too does the client. Long gone are the days of showing face for an hour at the shoot before ducking out to lunch with the ECD. Now, they reel off frames of cinematic references, names of directors, coloring notes, even their own ideas.

“When I started in the business, clients didn’t know so much about production,” recalls Johan Kramer, an ad man turned filmmaker at Halal. “They talked a lot about strategy and ideas and when you reached a point where you were making something they let go. I remember a lot of shoots where the client didn’t even come.

“Nowadays everyone has more knowledge about the way advertising works and the production process, and you spend a lot of time talking about styling, for example.”

This newfound enthusiasm from clients is symptomatic of modern times, both in and out of the industry. Externally, the world is growing more cineliterate ­­– the internet has broken down the smokescreen between audience and production, and most people can now name at least a handful directors and producers.

“The names of directors are not these mystical creatures anymore,” Gledstone explains. “There’s just so much more content flying around now and [clients are] viewing a lot more, reading a lot more and seeing a lot more online. They want to be part of the process and part of the journey too.”

Internally, chief marketing officers have never had it so tough. It’s widely acknowledged that their career lifespan is short and getting shorter, thanks to the rapidly changing demands and new methods of measurement placed on in-house marketing heads. No wonder they want to keep tabs on their agencies’ output whenever they can.

“There’s more meetings, the clients are wanting to see more, and I think that’s a good thing, but that’s made the job potentially a little harder,” says Gledstone.

Kramer’s in agreement. “On one side they bring knowledge to the process, but on the other hand they slow down the process a lot,” he says. “In the end you end up with 20 adults in one room talking about someone’s dress in the background talking about details that don’t matter that much."

Kramer has also noticed a lot more of his work is coming directly from the client, rather than their agency, which is unsurprising given the sheer amount of content brands believe they now need to produce, and the distance already traveled by the in-housing bandwagon.

Specsavers, one of the earliest pioneers of bringing creative in from the cold, has extended this in-housing to the direction process: Graham Daldry, creative director at Specsavers Creative, co-directs many of the opticians’ spots himself, alongside its own AV team.

“I haven't worked for an agency for a long time and I would not really want to go back to working in a business model where creatives are so detached from the clients,” he says.

For Daldry, being a client, creative and director in one “is certainly manic”, and one that’s “only possible because it is part of a huge team effort”.

“In some ways, shooting in-house is less stressful because you have full control,” he says. “So far as the particular challenge is concerned, you have to have a team of great producers and the necessary technical skills and experience. I think we've made production work in house for the same reason as we've made other creative functions work. We respect the differences in team roles and responsibilities but we make them work with a common purpose.”

However unique Specsavers’ set-up is, Daldry does add that the actual process of getting creative off the ground hardly differs from the traditional client-agency-production set-up. “If you diverge too much from industry roles it becomes impossible to recruit and train,” he notes. “What is unique is the integration of the teams."

In a similar vein, agency Quiet Storm also brought its direction in-house from its very beginnings. Its founder, Trevor Robinson, didn’t do so for grandiose visionary reasons, however. He did it because he was sick of working with directors.

“You’d come up with an idea, you’d work on it for months and you’d give it to a director who for all intents and purposes doesn’t like ads – they see them as a means to an end to get some money in order to do films,” he remembers. “The director has a massive amount of power. People think it’s just someone ordering some other people around - it’s not.”

Robinson’s breaking point came when a particular renowned director annihilated the creative’s idea with a laissez-faire attitude and a stash of drugs. “I thought we were going to get fired,” he says. “This is our living. We can’t afford to have a client fire us because someone’s let us down.”

Robinson believes that by directing his own work, the connection between idea and production is plugged with a real client understanding. He revels in writing his own storyboards and directing from them. And while he does sometimes wonder how the greats such as Frank Budgen or Jonathan Glazier would interpret his work, he never craves that extra level of accountability (or blame) that working with a director can provide.

“I never saw it as a secure thing, giving an idea to a director,” he says.

Quiet Storm’s issues may come when Robinson leaves; after all, he admits he hires strong creatives first and foremost, not directors who can come up with ideas. But as marketers continue to diversify their skill set and creatives choose to take the freelance directorial life over the agency 9-5, it’s likely we’ll see a stronger race of this hybrid creative-director emerge.

“Now there are large, savvy communities of creators and aficionados on sites such as Vimeo, which allow [clients] to follow and recognize a particular director or agency’s work,” says Carlos Alija, who works with Sampedro at Wieden+Kennedy. “And not long ago, directors were often given a project based on their name and reel. Now, most of the time they have to pitch for the job. We think that has opened things up a lot, allowing young directors or less expected choices to have a good chance to work on the best stuff.”

But would it be wise for all agencies to bring directors in-house, either in a hybrid role such as Quiet Storm, or through an internal production agency model, with which many have experimented? It would, arguably, add another creative string to a traditional shop’s bow when competing for work with the tech-heavy Accentures and Deloittes.

“It's a bit of a wild west at the moment: everyone’s doing everything,” says Gledstone. “I could see the bigger agencies seeing [internal directors] as a good in-house offering. But how good that would be, I’m not so sure. I’d rather work with directors from different places and know that we’re collaborative and use the fact that they’re independent to our benefit.”

It’s a view that resonates with many. Dunlop believes agencies will always get the best work from external directors, not just because they bring a freshness of thought, but because “directors are incredibly competitive, so we will pull out all the stops to get the job”. As for Kramer – he believes it’s a realistic possibility, providing the agency does it for talent reasons rather than cost-cutting ones. His main hope for the future is that clients, armed with a new directorial interest, will open up their doors to more work, and more creative work.

“I think we will produce much more for much less money. Less money is often good because it gives more freedom – more money brings a lot of responsibility and makes people scared: the bigger the project, the more people are involved, which gives it a bigger chance of becoming mediocre.

“The projects that have a little bit less money, a little bit less control, sometimes end up being the most surprising.”