Jimmy Gilmore – Writer – Director

There’s been a lot of dis­cus­sion lately about what the future’s cre­ative depart­ment should look like and who it should be headed by. Do tra­di­tional shops need to get rid of their old guard and make way for lead­ers and prac­ti­tion­ers steeped in the tra­di­tions of the dig­i­tal shops?

Surely they need to get rid of dated think­ing. Kick out folks who can’t code, tag, and develop an app. And there’s no one who under­stands how to make use of the new tools avail­able than some­one with a dig­i­tal back­ground. Right?

But what about all that brand stuff? Is a techno cre­ative really bet­ter equipped to com­mu­ni­cate the client’s brand story than some­one who’s been focused on it their entire career? Aren’t the truly great com­mu­ni­ca­tors capa­ble of doing their job in more than old-school tra­di­tional media?

Dig­i­tal cre­atives are get­ting dinged for lack of brand­ing and plan­ning expe­ri­ence. While tra­di­tional cre­atives appar­ently can’t grasp the inter­net. But are either of these char­ac­ter­i­za­tions fair?

I think peo­ple are get­ting too caught up on resumes and not focused enough on real skills. For exam­ple, I work at a tra­di­tional agency yet the major­ity of the work I do lives online. Some of the work I do is even social media mar­ket­ing — imag­ine that. Does this make me a tra­di­tional cre­ative or a dig­i­tal cre­ative. I sus­pect in the eyes of many recruiters who can’t get past a resume it makes me a tra­di­tion­al­ist. But I just see myself as being current.

Mar­keters need pro­fes­sion­als that can tell their story and engage their cus­tomers in all media. Be it on Twit­ter or on a bill­board. And that is best done by a media neu­tral cre­ative, work­ing off a media neu­tral brief, for a media neu­tral media buy.

I don’t think the best cre­ative comes from a dig­i­tal or a tra­di­tional back­ground. What is impor­tant is their grasp of  today’s tool, the future, and the client’s business.