How to Grow Beyond the Creative Department With Alex Amado

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July 28, 2021 Career Growth Leadership Management

Guest Speaker

Alex Amado

VP of Marketing, Adobe (Former)

Alex Amado is a creatively driven and people-focused senior marketing executive with an exceptional track record of forming and leading teams that build brands, drive revenue, and continuously evolve to meet modern marketing challenges. He has contributed his expertise to Adobe for 17 years, and has watched the company grow from 3,000 employees to 25,000.

Yes, creative leaders can become business leaders — here’s how.

At some point, many creatives hit a career wall and feel like there’s no room to grow. Alex Amado never hit that wall — because he consciously positioned himself to add value beyond the creative department.

In this episode of Real Creative Leadership, Alex shares how he made the leap from freelance writer to creative leader to VP of marketing at Adobe.

Watch this episode to discover:

Why creatives should venture out of “the cave”
7 skills you need to progress beyond creative leadership
How to transcend the “creative” label while using your creativity to solve business problems

mentioned in this show:

Adam Morgan

Creative Leader and RCL Host

The Stoke Group

Digital Marketing and Full-Service Content Agency

Transcript

Adam Morgan:

When you combine incredible craft with the power to back it up and speak intelligently about statistics and testing like that is the goal. Welcome to Real Creative Leadership, a place where creative leaders can find insights and practical guidance on the day-to-day job of being a creative leader. We focus on real issues, topics, and insights of creativity in the business world. Join me as we explore the best strategies for developing your team, getting others to embrace your vision and generating amazing experiences. This webinar series is produced by the Stoke Group. I’m your host, Adam Morgan, Adobe executive creative director, author of, “Sorry Spock, Emotion Drives Business,” and this is Real Creative Leadership.

Adam Morgan:

All right. Thank you everyone for joining us today on Real Creative Leadership, we have a special guest here today, Alex Amato, which is someone who I hold very dear to my heart because I’ve been working with him for a long time for like the last seven years. He took a big gamble on me and so I’m super grateful for him to take a gamble on joining us on this show. But, today’s topic we are excited to talk about and this is something that’s been on my mind for a while of, where do you go beyond your traditional creative director or ECD or chief creative officer role? It seems like in this industry, there are many of us in this creative field who just feel like we hit a ceiling. And is there any opportunity to move beyond that? And we even did some research last fall with grilled creative leadership and asked a lot of creative leaders out there and we got mixed results.

Adam Morgan:

Some say they like going back to the craft, some like just staying where they’re at and some were looking at new opportunities, but mostly it was around being the CEO of some startup or a new idea, a new, bigger business that you’re starting on your own. But, I want to talk more deeply about how do you still do… How do you have growth within either your company or your industry? So grateful to have Alex on board to talk about this interesting topic and we’re going to dig right into it. But first, let’s pass it over to Alex to give us a little background. I want you to just tell us about… Take a couple of minutes and talk about where you come from, your journey, your personal experience, and then we’ll get digging in more to this topic.

Alex Amato:

Yeah, sure, absolutely. And thank you, Adam for having me. I really appreciate it and looking forward to the conversation. The way I usually describe my career is as incredibly non-linear. I’ve had a lot of various things that I’ve done. I’ve taken a lot of opportunities that frankly intimidated me at the time that I took them and it turned out that in some cases I was able to completely crush it and in other cases I was a miserable failure, but I learned from all of them and really, that was the heart of it. But I started out, and probably the reason that you’ve even asked me here, is I started out when I was in high school. I very determined that my career was… I was going to be a writer. I had like writer written all over me. My early email address was Alex@writerboy.com, which I actually don’t think I have anymore, and I probably should get that back.

Alex Amato:

But, I really wanted to be a writer since I was actually even younger than high school. I was writing stories and I wanted to be a fiction writer. I took… Went to Cal and got a degree in English literature and had some sort of writing oriented jobs. I did PR, I did some other marketing stuff that involved a lot of writing and then in my very, very early twenties, right after college, I took a leap and said, I’m just going to go freelance writing. And I was a freelance writer for a number of years. Three, three and a half, something like that and I got to do a lot of really great stuff. I did some fiction, published some comic books, I did a lot of marketing writing, I did ad copywriting, I did PR writing, I did ghost writing for journalism and books and technical documents, all kinds of things that I was horribly unqualified for. And, that was sort of my identity.

Alex Amato:

And eventually, what happened is, as happens to many people is, that whole, “I’m going to be a freelancer forever. I want that freedom.” Ultimately, the tarnish starts to show up on that and the bloom is off the rose and it’s sort of like, “Well, actually, more than that creative freedom, I really love a steady paycheck and maybe some health insurance. And so, I went after a number of years and actually got a real job, and I was working in a… Leading a creative team, leading a writing team at that time at a small web agency and this was back in the late nineties, mid to late nineties.

Alex Amato:

And so, I did that and got a bigger experience actually working with many more clients. I’ve worked with clients in PR by working with a lot of clients in the web agency, this was the late nineties where everybody needed a website and web designers were in incredible demand. And, did that for a number of years and grew my responsibility that I got to take over other things. I took over, I started running writing, I took over all creative, I took over… Or I should say, was invited to take over. It sounds kind of hostile when I say…

Adam Morgan:

Yeah, you just took it.

Alex Amato:

The boss had no say I just did it. I took over client relations, and these were things that I found I liked and was reasonably good at. And then 2001, the dotcom bust happened and literally overnight half of our clients went out of business. And so, after a year or so, I struggled, so did our web agency, which was an incredibly painful but very resonant lesson in business and in the real stakes of business and having to lay off the 15 or 20 people that I had hired and handpicked and worked with, in some cases for years. It was a learning experience. So I decided to go and kind of augment my business knowledge.

Alex Amato:

I like to say, I learned what I didn’t know about running a business, which was most things. And so, I went in and was fortunate enough to get into a great business school and I went and got an MBA to really augment and round out that business knowledge and set me up for the next phase of my career. And then, that career ultimately led, Adam to where you and I worked together, which is at Adobe where I had a whole bunch of different roles over time but ultimately the thing that I ran the longest, which was, I think for 14 years, was the creative studio at Adobe. So, the team that touches all of the marketing, all of the web, all of the creative output of that studio and that gamble that I took on you, Adam was an absolute winner. So I’m a super happy, super happy that we did that.

Alex Amato:

But, we did that for a lot of years. Running that studio and the company grew from 3000 employees to 25,000 employees and became a fortune 500 and became a massive brand and it has been a really great experience. But, beyond just the creative team, which is wonderful and it’s still something that I really identify with, I got to run marketing strategy for B to B, marketing strategy for B to C, adobe.com as a product, the technical sign of adobe.com. I got to run… What else did I get to run? Events or corporate events, I got to run our performance marketing, which is a really quantitatively driven organization, I got to do all kinds of things that really broadened myself out to the extent that I almost did a double-take, Adam, when you invited me to be on this. And I’m like, “I’m not really a creative.” And I was like, “Oh yeah. Actually, I was and I am in my core, but I’ve broadened my experience so much that I’ve gotten to do a whole lot of other things.” So, that for me…

Alex Amato:

[crosstalk 00:08:16]

Adam Morgan:

That is perfect. And then just to absolutely put a pin on that, you did move beyond just a creative and running the creative team to many, many other big org structures and things that you were running. It was big time. Being a VP at a massive fortune 500 company like Adobe is a huge accomplishment. So, you are absolutely the good example for all of us, as I’m looking to like, “Okay, who are people that have moved beyond just the creative realm into other things?” So, perfect. That’s great background. Now, everyone understands why you’re on the show. You’re the example that we’re looking for.

Alex Amato:

Including me?

Adam Morgan:

Yeah. All right. Let’s back up a little bit because I want to dig into a few of the purposeful choices you made in your journey, because a lot of other creative people may want to move on to other jobs, but they’re not doing the homework. They’re not doing the work to be prepared for those other roles. So, I want to back up even back to like grad school or some of the earlier choices you made when you went back to reinvent yourself. Before you just… You said you took on new stuff. There were clearly skills that you had that leadership saw, “Okay. Alex has got this.” Talk to me about some of those lessons and those skill gaps that you had to fill in before you had these opportunities.

Alex Amato:

Yeah, there were a whole lot of them and I actually found that being a freelancer and being a starving artist, if you will, was incredible training for this. Because, if you end up in an agency, you get to just be a creative and you don’t have to worry as much about client management, about cashflow, about where the next job sits, selling, how to present yourself, all of that stuff. You just focus on the craft, which you get much, much better at the craft. But as a freelancer for a number of years, I had to market myself, I had to pitch myself, I had to deal with collections from customers, clients who owed me money, I had to deal with my own cashflow. And sometimes it was as simple as how am I going to pay rent. But, you sort of deal with a large world of things that don’t come up as much in your professional career.

Alex Amato:

And then the other thing that I was able to do, or in some ways forced to do, was I had a lot of other jobs as well. I would identify as a writer, but I took on whatever jobs that were reasonable and interesting and came my way. And so, I did things like I ran a comic book convention for a number of years. Well, I just had to figure it out. I didn’t have any experience in running a comic book convention but I did have some experience in running small publications and things like that. And so, I took on this thing and just learned and talked to people, and interviewed people.

PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:11:04]

Alex Amato:

I took on this thing and just learned and talked to people and interviewed people. I used my journalistic skills to interrogate and pick up these skills. I was a reasonably fast student. But all of those things gave me enough of a chameleon background that I could really use my creative writing skills to emphasize or de-emphasize different things. When I was looking for different kinds of jobs and taking different kinds of opportunities, I didn’t always start with, “Well, hey, I’m a writer, but I also have this other stuff.” I said, “Well, I can write, but I’m a communication specialist.” Or, “Yes, I can actually create content, but actually the program management of that content and getting things delivered, or the organization of teams of people, those are all things that I picked up along the way and did it through both having the opportunity to take on out-of-the-box roles, but also as a freelancer, the nothing to lose.”

Alex Amato:

This is so much harder if you’re in an agency, because you don’t have the time. It’s an all-consuming job. You don’t have the time to say, “Hey, I’m going to spend 10 hours a week for the next four months doing something additional, or 20 hours, or 40 hours.” That’s a challenge. That’s where I got a lot of those foundational skills or maybe discovered more than acquired them.

Adam Morgan:

I can imagine, like when we were talking before, you also talked about other skills, like learning statistics. Talk to me a little bit about more of, not just the skills you pick up in different experiences and different roles, but also some of the purposeful things that you had to study and learn in your MBA or another earlier class on data that really shaped your growth.

Alex Amato:

When I went to Wharton to get my MBA, one of the things that had really struck me in my web agency experience was how much I had to deal with numbers. And whether it was budgets and burn rates, or it was web clicks was a very… This was the 1990s. It was a very infantile period in web analytics. But people cared about clicks and conversions and hits, hit counters. I dealt with a lot of math. One of the things that I really realized that I was very intentional about going into business school was I need to bolster my ability with numbers. I need to bolster my strength in being able to evaluate, analyze and really understand numbers. I was surprised at how incredibly useful that became. In particular, statistics was something that I consume and use all day long in my professional career, even as a creative. This is a test-and-learn culture.

Alex Amato:

If you’re in this for business and not just pure creativity, you have this obligation to make sure that your creative is impacting the business in positive ways, lots of testing, lots of user research. You need to know how to consume that and how to be a critic and a guide for those research people. I am not a research professional. But I am a very savvy consumer of their product, because what you can find is that if you don’t ask the right questions and you don’t know what all of those terms really mean, you can find that you are either being led to, or inadvertently jumping to, a mistaken conclusion.

Alex Amato:

By being a smart consumer of that data and making sure you’re asking the right questions, you could really take your creative to the next level, because you really know what’s going on. It’s always presented as numbers, charts and graphs. That was a very specific skill that has paid enormous dividends since business school.

Adam Morgan:

I think that the tendency for most creative people is to go back to that creative cave. We’re used to, when we’re being productive and doing a really good job, is to just get in that state of flow and design something or write something. You’re just on your own and really focused on creativity. I think you bring up this awesome point. You had to learn to love statistics. You had to learn to love math and other things. I think typically, in my experience, a lot of creatives will just, once you start talking numbers or finance, they’re going to roll their eyes back and just be like whatever and stop listening.

Adam Morgan:

I think that’s a big, important note that we need to hit on right now, which is, if you’re going to move beyond that role, or you want to become “a true leader” with a creative bent, you need to understand and embrace numbers. You need to understand and embrace math. You need to clear those gaps, because the world beyond the cave is full of numbers. You talk about how your job recently was a mix of math and creativity. Maybe talk more about why that’s so important from your perspective, that if creative leaders need to move up they need to understand all of that and data and math and everything.

Alex Amato:

I think the cave is a place of comfort. It is a warm, safe environment for those who are just focused on the craft. But if you’re in the cave, by definition you’re not out on the hunting field, the battlefield, in the boardroom. You’re hiding in the cave. People in the cave don’t get invited to the bigger meetings, just to be honest, because if you’re in the cave and what you’re worried about is the craft and the things that you bring to it from your experience and your mental model, you’re not engaging with the business problems. As you rise up the ranks, that is 100% what everybody… Our CEO at Adobe, all of his direct reports, they worry about their specialties, but really they worry about the business as a whole. It’s not about, hey, is this good creative? It’s about, is it doing what it needs to for the business?

Alex Amato:

That’s true of any of them. All of those different types of leaders have their specialty. But they also, they become broader and more broadly engaged and concerned about the business as a whole. As I’ve grown up through the ranks, I’ve found that my focus has gone from much more around the functions that I run to the broader output of my extended team, which when I was a VP at Adobe was the entire marketing of the global organization. I was very worried and engaged about that and helped with crafting strategies. You have to broaden out. The cave is comfortable, but is not a growth space. You don’t grow in the cave.

Alex Amato:

There’s a stereotype of the creative in the cave, who’s just worried about the art. It’s not beautiful anymore. When you combine incredible craft with the power to back it up and speak intelligently about statistics and testing, there is nothing sexier than a creative who can sling data really easily and just tell you not only why this is gorgeous and meets an aesthetic bar, but here’s the three reasons that a business person is going to care about that this design is better than this other design. That is gold. That is the space that the most effective creatives in my organization have always operated. But it takes time to get there. It’s not native to everyone.

Adam Morgan:

You know, it’s interesting. There are a couple of interesting things you brought up. I was listening to a recent webinar from Northwestern, where they brought in several people from the C-suite to ask them, what does it take to move up to the C-suite? They said the exact same thing as you, which is, people keep coming at the C-suite with their discipline, thinking that that’s all that matters. I’m the creative, or I’m the PR person, or I’m the marketer person. At the top, they don’t care about that. What they want to do is, you come to the table and let’s talk business problems and business results, and be able to speak that language. And then, oh, by the way, bring your discipline in when it’s needed.

Adam Morgan:

So when you mentioned that, I think that’s a critical point to hit on for everyone here is, don’t go run into the board room table saying, “Beautiful art here and great prose there.” Don’t start there. Start with an understanding of business and then move down. Alex, you had a really cool quote that you said before, that totally hits on that, which is this idea of the biggest job of the CMO is to represent marketing to non marketers. It totally lines up with that. If you’re wanting to move up to whether it’s a CMO or Chief Digital Officer, or whatever it may, your job is to talk to other business people, operations people, finance people, people at the top in a way that they get marketing without any background.

Alex Amato:

One of the things that’s interesting is that again, as you go up levels in an organization, in the early stages of your career you’re proving yourself by showing and demonstrating your skill in your particular discipline. I’m a great writer. Let me show you all the stuff I’ve written and the problems I’ve solved. I’m a great designer. I’m a great video editor, whatever. As you rise in the ranks, that becomes taken for granted. You wouldn’t be the Vice President of the creative team at a company like Adobe if you weren’t great. We know that. We don’t care about that. That’s not what you’re here for. What you’re here for is to bring that lens onto the business. We’re all there having a business conversation about strategically, what are we going to do? What’s the marketing angle that we’re going to do?

Alex Amato:

When my boss, [Ann Lewis 00:11:27], is in the executive staff with the CEO and her other leaders, 95% of the conversation is about decisions that the business needs to make. How do we drive the business? Then she’s got the angle and action around, what is marketing going to do to support and drive and bring unique value to that? But it’s a conversation driving what Adobe is going to do as an enterprise. She doesn’t just talk about marketing. She’s a business leader. That’s an evolution that I’ve gotten to see, several of the steps along the ladder and how it really changes.

Adam Morgan:

Another thing I want to talk about is we’ve talked a lot about a skill gap of, if you want to move up, you’ve got to get the right skills, speak in the right language, understanding and reading the room, all of those great things. But there’s also this perception gap that we talked about. A lot of times it’s our own fault as creatives, where we put on this rockstar persona of wearing the cool, crazy clothes and the crazy hair and walking in and talking like a surfer. There’s certainly a persona around creatives that isn’t doing us any good at that level. Talk to me about that-

PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:22:04]

Adam Morgan:

… creatives that isn’t doing us any good at that level. So talk to me about that perception gap, and how you fix that perception gap at a leadership level.

Alex Amato:

Yeah. I will confess here possibly for the first time on tape, that I did go through a phase where, probably a multi-year phase, primarily at the agency where I wore all black.

Adam Morgan:

Of course, we all do.

Alex Amato:

But that’s not the heart of the perception gap. And I think the perception gap doesn’t really have to do, especially these days, maybe it did 20 years ago, 30 years ago, but it has much less to do with presentation, and much more to do, like visual presentation, and I think we’re getting better at that as a society, and more conscious. That it doesn’t matter how you look, it’s much more what you bring to the table. But it’s how you frame the conversation. And it kind of goes back to, are you a business leader talking business strategy, business outcomes, business tactics? Or are you a creative who kind of pigeonholes him or herself by just bringing the creative angle, and not thinking about the larger context and impact on the business?

Alex Amato:

It really has to do with both learning their lingo, but also engaging with their problems, and doing the translation in your head, of what that means from a creative point of view. You don’t have to share that. Because to some extent, they’re like you, as a creative leader, your peers are like, “You’ve got the creative covered, I’m confident you’re going to make the creative great. Now let’s talk about the business problem that we’re all solving together, and then we’ll go do our pieces of it, and make sure that it connects.”

Alex Amato:

So I think it’s really about the framing of the problem, and how broadly you can envision those solutions and engage with the problem. And that’s something that I think creative people, creative artists have as an incredible superpower, is creativity is what solves 100% of the world’s problems. Whether they’re engineering problems, strategic problems, infrastructure, supply chain problems, whatever kind of problems, creativity is what solves them. But we have to broaden creativity from the craft of moving words and pixels into specific configurations, to using that out of the box thinking that is taught, and is incredibly powerful in the creative community. And using that force for bigger thinking, and bigger ideas that are going to impact the business, and not just the creative output. I think that’s the reframing that we have to do. And that superpower is so latent, but ready to be tapped. It’s amazing when you think about it.

Adam Morgan:

That’s been a big discussion over the last little while, especially as we’ve been working through some of our brand problems. But it’s like in business, the word creativity sometime is seen as not business essential, not real, not helpful. But when you think about creativity in terms of that ability to zig or zag, or pivot, or try something new, or look at problems in different ways. And if you really take on that mantle of capital C creativity, where everyone is creative, every human is creative, and really engage on that. I think that’s where big things can happen in business. And you’ve got to move beyond, you’re right, pixels and letters. That’s a huge deal.

Alex Amato:

I think we get tripped up by the language. And I think we would do ourselves a favor if we, as capital C creative humans separated the craft of creative output, design, copy, video, that craft, if we separated that from the creative thinking that we bring to the problem solving. And it’s funny, no other team has this problem. There are incredibly creative people in PR. There are incredibly creative people in media strategy, and they don’t have the problem that they get pigeonholed by that creative, that C word. In fact, they’re rewarded when they show creativity. And somehow creatives are bound by this word that is both the description of their job and their team, as well as the thing that they need to bring to the table, but in a different context.

Adam Morgan:

Oh, I love that. It’s our own fault. It’s our own fault that we’re holding ourselves back. There’s some truth there.

Alex Amato:

It’s our opportunity. It’s not our fault, but it’s our opportunity to reframe the language and say, “Yeah, there’s the design stuff. Design is great. We can do design all day long, but let’s find creative solutions to business problems.” That’s the thing that an army of creatives can bring to unleash the next wave of business revolution.

Adam Morgan:

I love that.

Alex Amato:

That sounded very militant, what I said [crosstalk 00:26:54].

Adam Morgan:

We’re not going to-

Alex Amato:

This wasn’t like a seize the means of production kind of call to action or anything.

Adam Morgan:

Improve the world, go to the positives.

Alex Amato:

There you go.

Adam Morgan:

We’re going to improve the world with positive experiences. Well, digging back a little bit more into this perception gap. There’s something else that you and I talked about earlier, which is, there’s also this perception that in marketing, marketing leaders make decisions, and they have been trained to make decisions. Whereas, maybe someone from an agency who just swoops in and helps in a project and goes out, or someone in the creative department who’s not used to making the decisions. Traditionally, that’s part of that gap of moving up and trying new roles, is do they understand the severity of all this? Can they make business decisions? Can they figure that out? So talk to me a little bit more about that topic, and how we can fix that gap.

Alex Amato:

For me, the context of this is how do leaders in agencies shift over to become leaders on the client side, and get sort of similar, or higher levels of respect, and status. And I think part of the challenge is that sort of inside outside perspective, where when you’re in a brand looking at your agency, you tend to think of them. And I think this is an immature way of thinking of them, but it is very common. You tend to think of them as the group that, either you tell them what to do, or they come up with some crazy ideas that you might like a few of. But ultimately that agency is not really accountable in the same way that you’re accountable, because you’re the ones spending millions of dollars, you’re the one the CEO, or the head of revenue, revenue officer is going to go yell out if we don’t make our marketing contribution to sales, et cetera, et cetera.

Alex Amato:

There’s a perception of a lack of accountability on the agency side to the client side. Your accountability is to get stuff done that you commit to get done, and it’s not to impact the business. Like we’ll just move on to another agency, whatever. There’s not that longterm committed relationship. And I think that that can be a challenge. And even inside the organizations, I think it’s way too common that creative teams in particular, are pigeonholed as being agencies, agency-like as opposed to critical decision-making accountable parts of the organization. And it’s something that I struggled with, and very intentionally changed as part of the culture at Adobe over many years was, we were not the creative service bureau, we were the brand stewards and creative oversight of everything that the company did. I think a lot of brands make a huge mistake in having their internal creative teams be set up in competition to agencies.

Adam Morgan:

Yeah.

Alex Amato:

One of the things that I did really early on at Adobe was I had our agencies work primarily through our creative studio. So everything goes through the internal creative team, and then we may do it in-house, or you may do it through an agency, but it’s all going through that same set of creative filters, brand appropriate filters. And it enables and empowers the team to be more deliberative, more strategic, it pushes them up into a higher level of conversation, as opposed to really just being at the whim of a client, if you will. I think it gives them much more of a stake at the table, because when you’re internal, the client can’t fire you, if everything is going through your team. And that’s, I think a powerful place to be. So I do think it’s important that creative organizations have that accountability and are long-term partners with their business partners, rather than just being a creative service bureau, or a somewhat disposable agency who’s going to come up with ideas and not really have accountability for the impact of those ideas.

Adam Morgan:

I’m a huge advocate of that. I will be preaching that same story along with you for a long time, that more businesses, more brands need to split off, so it’s not like, yeah, creative is just a subset of the marketing team, but strategic partners with the marketing team, and not a service agency. But that said, we’ve also been talking about, as you move up in your career, you only hit a ceiling so far of creative, so people hear the word marketer, and it sounds like a dirty word for a creative, like, “You don’t want to become a marketer if you keep moving up.” But talk to me more about, in your experience, it sounded like you had to take on the mantle of marketer and creative in order to have that platform and that ability to use creativity for good. But you just have to get over that just the thought of becoming a marketer. And it’s okay, it’s greater capital C creativity. So talk to me more about that.

Alex Amato:

Yeah, I think, I mean, so it makes me reflect a little, Adobe did a study probably 10, 11 years ago now around perceptions of marketing. And I think marketing has a similar type of branding problem. They have a reputational challenge in the same way that kind of creatives doing, or in a similar way to how creatives have a reputational problem. We did a study of business people of all levels across the U.S. and internationally. We asked people to rank in order of sort of respect, like positions, different positions inside an organization, in different types of profession. And so CEOs, lots of respect, financial…

PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:33:04]

Alex Amato:

And so, CEOs, lots of respect. Financial leaders and accountants, lots of respect. At the bottom end of the scale, where car salesman, insurance salesman and marketers, which [inaudible 00:33:16] really hurt. No, I think marketing has really for the last 15… 10 to 15 years, it’s been really changing our perception and our opportunity and organizations and the way we do it is through accountability, marketing 20 years ago… I mean, I ran agencies and I did marketing copy actually 30 years ago because I’m really old. It was very loose with its data, right? We used to make campaigns and it was a lot more instinct and a lot less data because we didn’t have data, nothing was digital and we’ve helped create a campaign for a client and then we’d launch it and we’d wait and maybe three months later, we do a survey and hope. I mean, it felt like rolling the dice every time, hope that something great can happened and that no exogenous factors had come in and screwed everything up. And, sometimes it won and sometimes it didn’t, but it was much more a game of persuasion than a game of data.

Alex Amato:

And now marketing is incredibly accountable. I mentioned earlier, I ran the performance marketing organization. We had a multi hundred billion dollar quarterly target that we needed to hit. And I was sitting in front of the CEO and the leaders of the business, justifying on a weekly basis why we did, didn’t or just barely hit that number. That was an incredibly accountable position, there was no storytelling that got you off the hook. It was real data showing the impact of marketing. That’s a fantastic place for marketing to be and that’s how… That accountability is what every business peer wants, because the CEO is accountable for the business, no matter what. And he wants that accountability at every layer down the business and they want that accountability and that’s how creatives need to think about, this broader obligation to the business and marketers do as well. If you get to the point of accountability, you’re going to be successful in the business.

Adam Morgan:

Now that’s interesting. I guess is… I was thinking about all this, so clearly marketing is not a bad word, we got to get it away from their used car salesman-

Alex Amato:

I think we’ve, since climbed up in the ranks.

Adam Morgan:

Oh good.

Alex Amato:

We’re not quite at firemen yet but we’re getting there, right?

Adam Morgan:

Yeah. Well, they’re heroes we’re not, let’s be honest.

Alex Amato:

Not yet.

Adam Morgan:

That’s fair, that’s fair. Well, the other thought that I had is, as we’ve been talking about, okay, career paths and where you can go as a creative and where’s your ceiling and where it’s not. Clearly moving up to a creative leader as bosses, the CMO, that’s the path. But maybe I would just ask the most important question, is that the right path for many of us? Maybe, maybe not. I think there’s got to be some introspective thought of do I want to go into more of a digital thing? Do I want to become more of a marketer? Do I want to start my own thing and be a CEO? Whatever. I think that’s awesome but maybe just tell us, what other advice do you have for people who are, a creative leader who wants to grow? What are things that you would say “here’s some things to try or some things to do”?-

Alex Amato:

Yeah.

Adam Morgan:

Things you have to consider.

Alex Amato:

So, I think that there are a lot of adjacencies and very logical places for creatives to go. Finance is probably not one of them but there are a lot of places available. So obviously, marketing. Marketing thrives on creativity. Marketing doesn’t exist without design, output, as one of its kind of core elements. So, that’s a natural adjacency and if you’ve done a good job as a marketing supporting creative, you will have a good insight into what the levers, what the needs, what the opportunities are in those kinds of marketing adjacent spaces. So that is an obvious one, but I also think of things like product. Product is a… especially in this digital world, product is very much about the design and a lot of marketing now, actually resolves in product.

Alex Amato:

If we look at marketing kind of any service or subscription, it’s a continuous journey for the customer, from the marketing surfaces to the transactional and commerce surface to the actual product. So I think those lines have blurred in a way that used to be much more divided. You could easily go from being a great marketing designer, marketing organization designer, to being a great product designer. I think that there are good connections there, and you can also go into a lot of these digital accountable roles, as well. If you’ve embraced that idea of statistics, numbers, and accountability, if you’ve done that work and you’re… I think of examples like, really strong web creative leaders, right? They’re on the hook for the numbers, because there’s no way their stakeholders let them off the hook for the numbers where this is a data driven creative practice these days.

Alex Amato:

You could flip the script on that and become a data-driven leader of a digital property and those digital outcomes, like a revenue driver. And just use your creative output as a… or your creative experience as a way to partner with a creative team, who’s doing that work. While you take on those other challenges of infrastructure and audience in the broader strategy over time. I think there are a lot of really good paths for creative people because like I said, those creative skills, that thinking out of the box, that ability to find non-obvious solutions that can be really powerful in design, they can be equally powerful in business. And I think there are very few limits to what creatives could do as a leadership role.

Adam Morgan:

Oh, that is awesome. And that is a perfect place to end. Anyone listening here today, I hope you’ve gathered, there’s so much good real world experience from Alex here, as he’s moved up the chain and taken on greater leadership roles. So much to learn, so much to dig into and some amazing advice.

Adam Morgan:

So, thank you, thank you, thank you for joining us here today and giving everyone at least some hope of some things to think about and where we can push in our careers and try different things and embrace adjacent jobs or roles or anything else to help us move along. So thank you, thank you for joining us.

Alex Amato:

Absolutely, it’s my total pleasure. If there was one last piece of advice, I would say, take the uncomfortable leap, do something that is out of your comfort zone and win or fail. You will absolutely learn and it’ll give you a set of experiences that will help you figure out where to go next. So take those risks.

Adam Morgan:

No, that’s great. I love it. All right, Alex, how can people find you or where can they follow you? just-

Alex Amato:

LinkedIn is where I am most often active, it’s Alex Motto at LinkedIn.

Adam Morgan:

Excellent.

Adam Morgan:

Well thank you everyone for so much, for listening and joining us here today. As always, you can find us at realcreativeleadership.com. You can find me at adamwmorgan.com, thestokegroup.com is where you can get help from, if you need to scale or get some more creative juices into your flow. They’re awesome partner in making this happen, so all the different ways that you can reach us. And the big ask at the end here is just to get involved with us. We would really appreciate it. Go out there, share this content with others, have all the advice that Alex has given you. And I think, more and more, we’ll have more growth with creative leaders and start to have a bigger impact on business. So, we appreciate everyone listening in. Have a great time, we’ll see you.

Adam Morgan:

Thanks for listening to Real Creative Leadership. I’m your host, Adam Morgan. And this series was brought to you by The Stoke Group, for the most effective marketing use both sides of your brain to align your strategy, creative execution and analysis. Connect with The Stoke Group for help designing each step of your marketing plan and creating a coherent vision. Visit thestokegroup.com to learn more.

PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [00:41:19]

Guest Speaker

Alex Amado

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