Don't Like - The Celebrity Creative Director Career Move
A curious shift in the advertising industry recently is the celebrity brand partner and creative director. It used to be the case that celebrities got to show up to set, read a few lines not very well, make a big payday, and go back to doing the rarified work of being a celebrity. Now for some reason, that isn’t good enough. Celebrities want to be tied to the work in a deeper way. They want people to believe that they were involved from the brief to the campaign launch. Of course, they’re not (usually anyway) really the creative director on any of these projects. There are creative teams working hard on these campaigns before they get to the celebrity’s desk where perhaps they make suggest a few changes before it goes into production. But again, they’re not in the trenches with creative teams working in Google Docs or the Adobe suite refining scripts, mood boards, type treatments, or color correction.1 They’re there to give final approvals and notes to make sure the work fits their “creative vision,” which most likely isn’t theirs in the first place.2 That means that celebrity creative directors get to claim credit for work that isn’t theirs. It's always aggravating when someone claims credit for work they didn't do, but when that person is also already a celebrity? That’s wild. Why they want this, I couldn’t tell you. They must have also fallen under the alluring titular spell of being a “Creative Director.” They must see it as some element of collective roles as a multi-hyphenate creative. Why that would be better than being an actor, director, singer, or musician is beyond me. Imagine becoming an A-list celebrity and wanting people to imagine you on a Google Meet waiting for a team member to show up. Go be glamorous.
Frankly, creative directors shouldn’t be doing all this work themselves anyway. That’s what a creative team below the creative director is supposed to be doing. Alas, this is too is a shift in advertising today.
For instance, Ochuko Akpovbovbo’s newsletter yesterday “if you launched blush sticks but no one cares, did it really happen?” she referenced that someone on Twitter recently celebrated the Rhode Beauty’s creative direction with a Tweet thread attributing it to solely to Hailey Bieber. The creative director quoted in response that she was pissed the person assumed Hailer Bieber came up with the creative direction.