Joe Skillman is a creative director.

Creative is kind of like getting up and choosing your clothes every day.

So you might be able to look at it and go, do we really care about what people are wearing?

That's such a shallow or surface level thing.

But the reality is that the clothes that you choose to put on your body convey lots and

lots of things to other people about your identity and what you care about and the way you want

to be seen and brands are the same way. Creative is taking this thing that is like a core belief of your brand and making it visible

to other people so that they understand more about you and who you care about.

And she says that people think about brands too narrowly.

There's kind of a misconception that brands are logos, that those are interchangeable terms

and they are the same.

And they are not at all.

Your brand can have hobbies, your brand can have belief systems, your brand can have a voice.

I don't know if your employees sing opera and all wear weird socks. Like, all of these things are brand things.

I'm Dan Heath, and this is what it's like to be. In every episode, we walk in the shoes of someone from a different profession, a stand-up comedian, a welder, a nurse. We want to know what they do all day at work. Today, we ask Joe Skillman what it's like to be a creative director.

We'll talk about how panic is a good motivator for creativity.

Why brilliant ad ideas rarely turn on exactly as planned.

And what clients really mean when they ask for a creative idea?

Stay with us.

So the creative director, your job isn't to, you know, shoot the video or write the copy on the poster or whatever.

Your main job is to make sure everybody's kind of aligned around the vision.

Yes, very much so. And I am actually a working creative directors, so I do write copy and I do design, but I try to position myself with my team as just kind of a fail-safe.

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