on modern creative leadership

I am often considering my approach to visual work and how best to create distinction and differentiation for the brands I work with. We are in a moment when creative quality is exceptionally high across competitive brands. Consumers have grown accustomed to strong aesthetics and expect brands to look good, so we can no longer rely on simply having the “best” creative in an objective sense.

In this landscape, impactful creative and design isn’t about whether the work meets a high visual standard, but whether it delivers on relevance and specificity. That is, relevance to the person seeing it and specificity to the brand behind it. Now that every brand can make something beautiful, edgy, minimal, or design-forward, creative is only distinct when it’s meaningful to the audience and original to the brand. All else, including what’s best for trends, algorithms, and artistic credibility, is secondary.

I like to call our current creative landscape The Post-Aesthetic Era, where we can’t rely on visual appeal alone to inspire purchasing or connect with audiences in a lasting way. Now, even when creative work is genuinely interesting, if it isn’t speaking to something deeper (something beyond style) it fails to create the advantages it should.

Today, my goal for brand creative is to express something distinct, and return to that distinction again and again, finding ways to make it feel both fresh and familiar. I am seeing how this approach leads to stronger creative outcomes and helps teams fast-track solutions when things aren’t quite going right.