Your Daily Dose of Ad World Buzz
Latest
✦Girish Mathrubootham, Who Marketed Software Like a Product✦When Creators Influence Agencies More Than Agencies Influence Creators✦What A Creative Director Does On A Shoot Day✦The Categories Where Generated Copy Still Needs A Signature✦Jayesh Veralkar Leaves Dolby After Thirteen Years For A Record Label✦Turtle Wax Gives Ashutosh Saxena India And ASEAN✦Prose Integrated Picks Up The Communications Mandate For EaseMyTrip✦Cummins India Hands The Managing Director Role To Gbile Adewunmi✦JLL Puts Its First Big India Statement On The Bandra-Worli Sea Link✦The Intern Who Stayed: Himanshu Sharma Takes Sales At JSW Sports✦Bark Out Loud Builds A Campaign On How Little Effort A Dog Makes✦Instagram's Edits App Gets A Canvas That Runs Across Slides✦Girish Mathrubootham, Who Marketed Software Like a Product✦When Creators Influence Agencies More Than Agencies Influence Creators✦What A Creative Director Does On A Shoot Day✦The Categories Where Generated Copy Still Needs A Signature✦Jayesh Veralkar Leaves Dolby After Thirteen Years For A Record Label✦Turtle Wax Gives Ashutosh Saxena India And ASEAN✦Prose Integrated Picks Up The Communications Mandate For EaseMyTrip✦Cummins India Hands The Managing Director Role To Gbile Adewunmi✦JLL Puts Its First Big India Statement On The Bandra-Worli Sea Link✦The Intern Who Stayed: Himanshu Sharma Takes Sales At JSW Sports✦Bark Out Loud Builds A Campaign On How Little Effort A Dog Makes✦Instagram's Edits App Gets A Canvas That Runs Across Slides
Work Life

Why Great Creatives Do Not Always Make Great Managers

Ad Tribe Editorial2 min read
A single tool lying beside a doorway it clearly does not fit through

The industry has one reward for being excellent at making things, which is being asked to stop making them and look after the people who do.

This is not unique to advertising, but advertising has an unusually sharp version of it, because the promoted person's identity is bound up in the craft they are leaving. A creative director who has not made anything for two years is still, in their own head, a maker. The team experiences them as a bottleneck.

The two jobs are genuinely different

Making is solitary and ends in a thing. Managing is continuous and ends in nothing you can show anyone. The satisfaction arrives second hand, years later, in the form of somebody else's good work, and a person who needs the direct hit of having made something will not find it there.

The skills barely overlap. Taste does not transfer into the ability to give a note that leaves someone able to try again. Speed does not transfer into patience with a junior who is slower than you were.

Promotion in advertising takes the thing a person is best at and puts it in the part of the week that gets cancelled first.

Why the industry keeps doing it

Because there is nowhere else to put the money. A senior creative who does not manage has no obvious next rung, so the only way to pay them more is to give them a department. That is a design flaw in the ladder, not a failure of the person who climbed it.

Deloitte's 2026 India survey found 96 per cent of Indian Gen Z respondents interested in senior leadership, but only 9 per cent naming it as their primary career goal. The people below the promotion have already noticed what it costs.

What a second track requires

Not a title with "principal" in it and the same job. A genuine maker track needs the pay, the seniority in the room, and the right to be in the client conversation without carrying a headcount. Agencies that have built one keep their best craft people for years longer.

The rest keep promoting their strongest maker into a job nobody trained them for, then treating the resulting unhappiness as a personality problem.

More on Ad Tribe Work Life.

#Creative Careers#Creative Leadership#Mentorship
Follow Ad Tribe