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Feedback, Humility, and the Creative Ego
October 30, 2025 AI and Creativity Branding Creative Bravery Design Leadership Leadership Personal Brand
Featuring
John Renz, VP, Head of Creative, U.S. Businesses, Prudential

John Renz is VP and head of creative for U.S. businesses at Prudential, with a career spanning both in-house and agency leadership. With deep experience across in-house and agency roles, John helps creative teams navigate ambiguity, build trust, and make better decisions.

Feedback, Humility, and the Creative Ego

What if the real power of creative leadership isn’t confidence, but knowing when you might be wrong? In this episode, Prudential creative leader John Renz shares how balancing ego with humility leads to stronger teams, smarter partnerships, and work that actually wins. From the Bill Bernbach card trick to breaking the “throw it over the wall” habit, you’ll hear practical lessons you can put to work today.

Takeaways:

  • Why “no brief is better than a bad brief” — and how to work with both
  • The Bill Bernbach card trick every creative leader should know
  • How to avoid “throwing it over the wall” and build real partnerships
  • Why feedback really is a gift (even when you don’t want to unwrap it)

Listen now for leadership lessons that will change the way you work with clients and teams.

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mentioned in this show:
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Adam Morgan
Creative Leader and RCL Host
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The Stoke Group
Digital Marketing and Full-Service Content Agency
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REAL CREATIVE LEADERSHIP

Season: 6

Episode: 4

Episode Title: Feedback, Humility, and the Creative Ego

Guest Title:
With John Renz, VP, Head of Creative, U.S. Businesses, Prudential

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Adam Morgan

Welcome back to Real Creative Leadership. Today’s episode is all about client and partner success — but not in the usual “manage a project” way. Instead, we’re focusing on what creative leaders can do to build trust, collaboration, and true partnership with clients.

And our expert to help us out is John Renz, Vice President and Head of Creative at Prudential. Because John has worked with big brands, both in agencies and in-house, and he’s become sort of a, what we’re calling a client whisperer. He knows what it takes to steer clear of the part where everybody wants to tear their hair out, both at the client calls and behind the scenes.

So in this episode, John is gonna share some of his hard one insights into what creatives can do to collaborate better with clients and make business easier for everyone involved in the work we do. So we’re gonna unpack how to understand their challenges like a leader, the art of building trust and confidence, and how to lead teams through change and client feedback without losing creative integrity. So, hello John. Welcome to Real Creative Leadership.

John Renz

Thanks, Adam. I’m excited to be here. I fir, first of all, client whisper. I love it. I love it. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t know if you’ve trademarked that, but I, I, I’m gonna rush right to my local patent office and see if I can get that claimed.

Adam Morgan

All right. It’s a race. We may get you to it. It’s a good, it’s a good phrase. So let’s start out, tell us one of the best moments that you’ve had a success with this — one that ended with everybody winning.

John Renz

Everybody winning. You know, when you’re doing the right behaviors, when you’re leading in with some of the things that we’re gonna talk about today, you get a lot of those, right. And I’m lucky enough to lead a team where we have a lot of those wins. I’m gonna lead into one that really sort of blew the doors off. It’s actually from about two and a half years ago. We had an incident, or shouldn’t say, an incident, an opportunity, right, where we were brought to the table, and one of our larger businesses had a significant new business opportunity. It’s a highly profitable business. It’s an institutional business, very complicated sales. And they had traditionally been going to market with this very old fashioned PowerPoint, 90 to a hundred slides, I mean an old clunky deck. And finally they said, listen, we’ve got an unbelievable opportunity.

We can’t go to market with this deck. If we show up with this deck, we’ll get laughed out of the room. We need a whole new experience. and the head of the business said, listen. we need to create something that’s best in class, never, ever seen before. Oh, and by the way, we have two weeks to do it. No pressure, right? 

So we created a whole cadence of how we were working. We created a cadence of how we were gonna work internally as a creative organization. We created how we were gonna share, workout on a completely rapid and collaborative way with our business partners. And listen, long story short, two weeks later, we created this completely. digital end-to-end sales experience that to say it wildly surpassed expectations, it is not doing it justice. The day after the presentation, the head of sales called me personally and said, you know, I was walking out of that deal and a broker pulled me aside and said, I’ve never seen anything like that. I’ve never seen anything like that. Within 24 hours, we had the note we’d closed the deal. It was a spectacular accomplishment.

Maybe not on a monster basis like that. Like if I put the dollar figure, it was in the billions of dollars, right? So you’re talking a significant win. But when you have wins like that, it’s just, it’s so gratifying as a creative and it’s gratifying as a business person.

Adam Morgan

But we gotta go back here. Hold the phone. From what I just heard from you, you’re like, I like it better when they don’t have a brief, when they don’t know what they’re doing, when it’s just like, that sounds like the stuff of nightmares for more creative people, where it’s like they don’t even know what they want and we gotta come in and tell ’em what, like this is gonna be the worst. So explain yourself a little bit more.

John Renz

Listen, there’s two great points. When they come to you with a completely buttoned up brief, that’s wonderful. That’s great. You’ve got your insights, you’ve got your data, you’ve got everything you need to really act on this. Sometimes it’s not bad if they don’t have a brief. And here’s what I’m saying. Sometimes no brief is better than a bad brief, right? Sometimes you get a bad brief and it’ll steer you in all kinds of wrong directions. But if you’re a great creative, and I, listen, I have a vibe, I’ve been a creative my entire career. I, man, I think we have superpowers. I really do. I think it was like George, Lois had this thing, and he said, just, just let the creatives handle everything.

We can do it all. Like, I’m, I’m all in on that, right? Like, we can do the strategy, you know, great creatives can really lean in and have great influence. But when a client comes to you and they say, man, we’ve got a business problem and I know what I need to solve, and I know our audience. And they may not have an insight, they may not have hard data, but they know they’ve got a business problem that they have to solve, and they know they need the creatives to help them solve it. When creatives are really utilizing their superpowers, right? They start to interact with their clients and they say, “Tell me what you’re trying to do.

Tell me about your audience.” Explain what happens. Explain why people aren’t buying. Tell me what happens when people are buying. Tell me about how people are feeling when they’re going through your process.

Tell me about anything a creative would want to learn, right? And when you have a client that’s coming to you and is willing to be vulnerable and saying, “We’re not really sure what we need, but we know we have to solve a problem.” Great things can come from that, but the onus is on the creative, right? We’ve gotta really, strap on our superpowers and start to say, dig in and say, tell me about this. Tell me about your business. Tell me about your product. Tell me about your industry. And then we are hearing it directly and we’re processing that. And come on, there’s all creatives, right? This is just family. It’s all creatives listening to this, right? So we can do it better than everybody else, right? So we can listen, we can hear, and we can turn out fantastic creative. Even if there’s no brief, I’ll go that far. But as long as we’re at the table, as long as we’re at the table driving the conversation.

Adam Morgan

All right, well, let’s get into it. There’s, you have these five tips for people of how they can get into, better relationships with their clients. Let’s start with tip one, and you’ve hit on this a few times already, so far, but let’s talk about recognizing their challenges. Like why is this number one, what are the mistakes we made when we’re trying to understand them in your

John Renz

Yeah. Too often, creative professionals will think it’s all about them, right? It’s all about me. It’s all about my idea. It’s all about my concept. And by no means am I saying we shouldn’t be fighting hard for our ideas, fighting hard for our concepts. At the end of the day, we are, especially if you are in business, if you’re in advertising, right, you’re a business creative, you’re solving business problems, right? And you have to understand if they didn’t have a problem, they wouldn’t be coming to you. That’s the first part, right? But they come, they’re coming to you because they need a creative solution. That’s the start and the end. But also, keep in mind that clients are navigating a world of complexities that’s outside of your world, that’s outside of the world of creative, right? They’re in charge of profit. They’re dealing with pressures from the distribution team. They’re dealing with pressures from the product team. They’re trying to take products to market. They’re trying to get sales numbers up right there. There’s a lot of strain and stress on these folks.

So, you have to understand that, right? So you have to, as a creative, you have to begin and end with empathy for your client, right? Like, what are they going through? How are they here, right? And how can I, as a creative help them overcome that? Now, ultimately, it’s gonna come out in your creative output, right? But there’s an enormous amount of dialogue and back and forth that happens as you’re interacting with these clients. And I’ve seen too many creatives, you know, they get peeved, they get pissed. Like, oh, this client’s coming back with more, they’ve got more changes that they’ve got this, they’ve got that. I get it that there are some problematic clients. Sometimes people like to pick up a pen or, you’ve got some clients who, you know, as, one person I heard say they like to leave a lot of fingerprints on the murder weapon, right? They can’t let things go through. You have to sort of understand what they’re trying to accomplish. And you have to remember that it’s, bigger, right? There’s a bigger problem that you’re trying to solve. So if you start and end there, it can also help guide your dialogue, right? What are the challenges you’re up against, and how are we not solving those?

Adam Morgan

Yeah, exactly. I think something we need to keep in mind with this is commercial art, not fine art. if we’re an advertising, marketing or branding, it’s not about all about our beautiful art and how dare they not like it. But you’re right. When we put ourselves in the mindset of like, what is the big brand or marketing or advertising challenge we’re trying to solve here?

Getting more crisp on it is only gonna help it versus pushing back and being like, whatever. Let them go speak khaki and business and numbers. I don’t care. I just want mine to look super cool ’cause it’s my portfolio piece. And I think you’re right, like the first shift is to stop having that attitude.

John Renz

Right. Because look, at the end of the day, what I’ve always say, and I, sorry, I, I tend to say at the end of the day a lot. So try not to coin that, but everybody wants great work. Yet creatives — I want a portfolio piece. I want it to be as great as it possibly can. Here’s a secret, so do your clients. Your clients want the work to be great, right? Even if your client is a mid-level marketing manager who might be responsible for a very small part of a campaign, they want it to be great. Let’s say it’s like a very hardworking email, right? They want it to look good. They want it to sound good. They wanna share it with their significant other and go, “Look what I did at work.” Like I did this email. And then they want it to work like gangbusters. Oh. And it far exceeded the m QLS that we were expecting. Everybody wants great work at the end of the no client, trust me, no client is lying awake at night going, oh, how am I gonna mess with the creative team tomorrow?

How am I, why they really did some great work. How can I really mess this up for them? Yeah. If I re-figure this and I, we all want great work, right? But sometimes clients don’t necessarily recognize great work, and that’s how creatives have to lean in. You have to understand we’re all trying to do the same thing. We’re all trying to have a positive business outcome. That’s where our creative expertise comes in, a client may not recognize great copy or a great design, but that’s our job to pitch that through. Let me show you how it’s working. If a client is struggling with a headline, well, let’s talk about it and let’s, let me show you how, you know this style sounds better, looks better. Has the opportunity to be more impactful.

Adam Morgan

So, okay, so first we start with this mindset of just understanding that they, they’re not out to ruin us. We all want good stuff. How do we show them that we get them, we understand your concerns. What are some of the things we can do to get to put them at ease, basically?

John Renz

This may be uncomfortable for some creatives to hear, ‘cause I know there are a lot of creatives in the world, creative leaders and creatives alike. It’s really about at its essence, communication, right? It’s communication. I have in my career seen a lot of talented creatives who are just so painfully introverted, and they don’t show up and they don’t speak and they don’t present and they don’t champion their work. And they don’t fight for their work, and they don’t present their work. And even on a fundamental level, I’m not saying you need to, it needs to be some mad man-esque type of presentation. but even so far as just sharing your work out with the client, no matter how big or small. I’ll share a story with you. 

I moved from agencies to in-house and I was working for Dow Jones, right? And we were launching an ad campaign, and we were working on it. And this is really gonna show my age, but it was an original online searchable, database. Okay? So this is back before the days of a, right around the times of AOL, right? It was as the web was starting to come out, right? And we were launching these products and they were new to the corporate space, right? So we had hired an agency, and the agency was had was doing some really great work, but the marketing lead at the time made a fatal flaw. And the fatal flaw that this person made was, she guided the agency on the assumption that what we were launching everyone knew about.

Adam Morgan

Hmm.

John Renz

The problem was, it was 1995. So the idea of online, like there was no Google at the time. There was like, so even though we as a company were living in the digital space, the rest of the world really wasn’t. So, the work that the agency presented didn’t quite hit the mark, right? They were sort of guided on the wrong path. So we had to make the decision at that point, the, the agency was frustrated, and we had to make the decision to, to bring the work in-house. And the vice president of the organization at the time. Asked to meet with me, and he said, he explained, “Hey, listen, this is what’s happening. We need your team to lean in.

We need your team to handle this work.” He said, “But you gotta help me here. How do you do what you do?” And that this guy was a lawyer, right? He had no idea what it took. He said, “Explain to me, how do you make an ad?” And I’ve gotta tell you, first of all, it was the first time I’d ever been asked that. But it was so refreshing because most people don’t know how you make an ad. They think they can, right? They just sort of assume because, well, there’s writing and I can write, you know, I was an English major in college or something. Oh, and there’s design and well, my kid can design things on a computer. Therefore, how hard could this advertising really be? Well, it’s pretty hard, right? But it here was someone, you know, a senior level executive being vulnerable enough to say, I have no idea how you do what you do. Tell me what you do. Tell me how you do it. And I had to walk them through the process, right? And I said, well, you take in the facts, there’s a creative brief, and you take in your data and you learn about your audience and your product and how’s it fit in.

And I said, and then you sit and stare and you think, and you come up and you come up with ideas. And when you have your ideas, you vet them against the brief to see if they’re strategically sound. And he said, “Well, how long does something like that take?” I said, “Five minutes, five days, five hours, five months, five years.” I said, “What’s the business problem we’re trying to solve? How long do we have?” That’s how long it’s gonna take, right? So your space is gonna open and compress. But, by having those kinds of dialogues, and not every client’s gonna be vulnerable enough to say, tell me about your process. They won’t do that. That falls on the creative team, that falls on the creative team to, to push and say, “Hey guys, here’s what we need in order to do our best work.” Is it more data? Is it more insights? Is it more context around your audience or more context around your products or about your markets? You know, what do you need to do that? That’s really, that falls to the creative team and when you can do that. Again, as I’ve said before, you’re demonstrating to your client that you care. You’re ready to put in the work, and you’re ready to do what it takes to solve their problems,

Adam Morgan

Yeah, that’s great because your example of when that executive came down and just asked probing questions to learn more about your world, that’s what they want. They just want you to do the same that you just said. Go ask ’em questions, dig in, show that you’re invested and that you care. And the trust meters will just go off the charts, right? So.

John Renz

Right.

Adam Morgan

So now let’s move on. Number two tip. Remember, we’re all on the same team. Talk to us about that. So it’s one about understanding the problems. Now what are we talking about when we’re saying, Hey, we’re on the same team?

John Renz

So it hearkens back to what I said. and I say it a lot to my team, the clients aren’t sitting there, lying awake at night saying, how can I screw with the agency? How can I screw with the creative team? They’re not, right. We all have to remember, we’re all trying to solve business problems.

We’re just trying to solve them using different skill sets. We’re solving as a creative professionals, we’re solving them using our writing skills, our design skills, our programming skills. We are bringing to the table a body of work and skillset that’s gonna help us solve it in new and different ways, right? They’re coming with different skill sets. They may be analysts, they may be marketing strategists. They’re gonna have a completely different skillset. We have to constantly remember that we’re all pulling toward the same goal. Okay? We all want great work at the end.

We all do, whether you’re the copywriter who’s drafting, right? Or if you are the strategist. Ultimately if they, if the work gets a can lion, right? Everyone has a piece of the line, right? Everyone is gonna say, “Look what we want.” The creative team will, the strategy team will, the media team will, the client will, right? Everyone’s gonna raise their hand and go “Look what we want.” Because again, at the end of the day, we all want the same thing. We all want great work. What’s important for creatives to remember and for creative leaders to keep reminding their teams, is that some of our clients don’t truly understand what we do or how we do it, therefore, it’s difficult for them to articulate. One of the beautiful things about being in-house is you have direct access to all of these wildly intelligent people, right? If I have a creative who’s trying to solve a problem for a particular investment product, they can go ask the person who just made it. They can go ask the manager of the product. That’s unbelievable access. The flip side is you’re interacting with people whose main job not to fill out a creative brief, right? But they need to work with us, so they may not know how to fill out the greatest brief in creation, which is, if you’re in an agency, you’ve got an intake document, you’ve got a strategist, you’ve got an accountant, you’ve got a small army of people, making sure that by the time, the creative team gets that brief, it’s been vetted, signed off, it’s run a gauntlet. That’s a wonderful thing. But, you don’t always have that in-house. But, that’s when we dip into our superpowers, and we start to say, hey, we can ask the questions that we know we need, that would normally be in a brief, and we can start acting on that because we’re all trying to solve the same problems.

And even if you were to say, “Hey, listen, it’s an outside agency, right? how do you get over an us versus them?” I think the outside agencies who are really, really good, and we work with some very, very good ones, you don’t get that feeling, right? When you have a meeting with, whether it’s a strategist one-on-one, or whether it’s a strategy team and the creative team as well, they’re showing up as one. They’re showing up in a manner that’s very, um, there’s some vulnerability there. They’re willing to ask the questions that may risk them sounding like they don’t know every answer in the book, and they’re willing to put in the work. To say we’re trying to succeed. We’re trying to help you succeed.

Adam Morgan

Well, something just going off that same idea if it’s true that maybe these people are great at a lot of different things, but they’re not necessarily great at the same skillset as building a brief or doing whatever that you’re used to. Something that I’ve learned that really helps is just flipping the script, saying, yeah, but you creatives aren’t amazing at all at the other marketing stuff. You may think you are, but you don’t have experience in that. So, it would be a really good experience for you to just like I would say, go out and run a full marketing campaign all on yourself, all by yourself. For some little product, I don’t know, start an Etsy shop, like whatever, where you really have some skin in the game. And then let’s see how it turns out. Because then all your super high ideals of super, fine art stuff, it’s gonna fall apart. ‘Cause you’re gonna have to get some sales and you’re gonna have to make it work. So it’s like how do you balance all of those elements and have empathy for them while you’re expecting them to have empathy for you? So it’s like, try it, see what it

John Renz

That is so right. And it just reminded me. So there’s a, there’s an art director in one of my business, who supports one of our businesses. and she’s a young and up and comer and she’s a terrific talent, right? And, she enrolled in this, program right? For creatives. And it put them through that rigor and where they were solving a very particular business problem. But as a group, they needed to solve it, not just from a creative standpoint. They needed to come with a business plan. Why are you coming in? Why are you attacking this? What is the market opportunity? What is the approach? How much, where are you gonna find the money to invest in it? how are you gonna measure it once it gets out the door? And, she actually just had her readout on Tuesday night. It was fabulous. But when I met with her on Wednesday, and I said, “How was it?” She goes, “Oh my God, it was so much work. It was so exhausting. And I feel so energized about how to do my job now.” Because she’s “I feel like I can talk with people on a different level now.” Because she she’s gone through it. So that’s actually an outstanding exercise. Do it yourself. See, it’s not easy.

Adam Morgan

We’ve talked a lot about like how, obviously those first two steps are really important by understanding their problems and then really, making sure we’re on the same team because that’s what it’s all about, those client and, creative relationships, that’s how you’re gonna make great work. Which leads us to the next step, number three, which is changes something every creative leader faces just like you. You’re like, there’s new things coming at us. So, now that we’ve got good relationships, how do we lean into change? How do we help our creative team understand that it’s okay to have change and that’s how our relationships are gonna get better.

John Renz

Without question, change is inevitable, right? It’s disruptive, it’s, painful, right? But there’s enormous opportunity in change. Enormous opportunity. There’s also tremendous opportunities for growth. In change. So yeah. It’s just some old cartoon. I used to just, you know, it’s, there’s a leader and he is saying, speaking to a roomful of people, “How many people want change?” Everybody raises their hand. “Alright, how many want to change?” And nobody raises their hand, right. Change is difficult. Right? It’s, it’s challenging. But without it, there’s no growth. Let’s just attack the 800 pound elephant in the creative room right now. Uh, AI, right? AI is disrupting everything. And, we’ve spent the better part of the last two years, upskilling our entire creative organization to maximize the use of artificial intelligence AI is just crazy disruptive. I mean, it’s really gonna change the world as we know it, but in many ways we’ve seen this story before. So let’s, let’s just talk as creatives. If you’ve been around the block for a while when the Macintosh hit your desk for the first time, and, oh God and like PageMaker came out, right?

The devil that is Adobe, right? Like, oh my God, what are they doing? They’re putting, they’re putting designers out of business. How dare they do that? I have a story I would tell. I was with a small agency at the time and they were investing heavily in technology, and we were upskilling the entire art department. And even though I was a copywriter by trade, I was like, well, I wanna learn this. I wanna see this. So I was going through the training and there was a very talented art director who worked with us, named Jim. And I said, Jim, why aren’t you getting in? Why aren’t you learning digital page layout and stuff? And he looked at it and he was, he had this sort of gruff kind of thing. And he said, “F that I’m not, that’s BS and I’m not learning that.” And I remember running into him about three or four years later, in a store or something. And I, Jim, how he was out of the business, he was painting houses.

He never kept up. So he never kept up. But if you look at what happened with desktop publishing. Desktop publishing came around and art directors and designers were fearful for their lives. “Oh my God, what’s gonna happen to our jobs?” Well, what happened, my opinion is it superpowered them. It gave art directors and designers superpowers. If you think, go back to the Mad Men age, you needed a small army of people to create a brochure. You needed a type center, and you needed an illustrator and a photographer, and an art director, and a comp designer. And it, well, now art directors could do it all and designers could do it all. And you had incredible control over things like type and kerning and letting, it was unbelievable the power that was put into a designer’s hands. So when you first looked at it, you go, “oh my God, they’re coming for my job.” No, they were coming to give you the tools to take your skills to the next level. And that’s what AI is doing, right? Now Ai, when you, the, so as I like to say, what happened to designers in the late eighties, early nineties, that’s what happened to copywriters.

Two years ago, chat, GPT came out and these other tools and copywriters went, “Oh my God, they’re coming for our jobs. They’re never, what’s gonna happen to us? They’re gonna put us outta work.” Well, no, no. I can tell you firsthand, it has superpowered my copywriters There’s an old phrase, with copywriting, “Say it straight, then say it great.” Right? So get your thoughts organized, get your facts out on paper, then get your style to it and really make that stuff great. AI says it straight. Boom. Like that. Fast, incredible. And in many cases, if you’re prompting it properly, does a really nice job, it’s not gonna give any stylistic issues. It’s not gonna make it great. That’s where we come in. So now when you talk to a team and, you know, there was a lot of talking people off of ledges, listen, this is okay, this is how it’s gonna work. And it’s a slow process. You have to get someone on, you have to find your champions. You have to show how they’re winning. It’s not a push button solution, but I can tell you two years ago, I had people who were like, this is the worst thing that has ever happened to me. And now, if I went to some, to my writers and said, “Hey guys, we’re gonna get rid of AI.” They’d be like, “The hell you are. The hell you are. Like, what are we doing?” Because it’s made them better at their jobs. The ones who have embraced it, you know. So anytime you have a change, and obviously I’m just using technology as a very particular thing. There’s also organizational change. You could be reporting up through different areas. These are all, while they could be uncomfortable, they’re always opportunities. They’re always opportunities to learn more, learn more about different aspects of the business, learn more about how other parts of the organization operates.

It’s always an opportunity to learn more. So uncomfortable. Yes. Disruptive. Yes. A fantastic opportunity without question.

Adam Morgan

So, we can see how welcoming change can help our personal careers, but how does that help us build stronger relationships with clients?

John Renz

So it’s kind of a two-way street. The first thing is you have to understand, how are your clients embracing technology? That’s the first part. So again, in-house, the way we embed technology is yes, there’s a creative aspect to it, but also the other aspects of the company. So one, you have to, it’s what I just said, sort of the same team mentality, right? We’re all embracing this new way of working. But whether you’re in-house or an outside agency, it connects back to what I said earlier. What are we trying to do? We’re all on the same team, trying to solve the same problems. Okay? Technology if used properly. We’ll superpower the creative team to do our work. Name it better, faster, we can be more efficient, right, by, simplifying or automating repetitive tasks, right? Low end work, personalized work that once the concept’s done, okay, now we need 300 versions for all of these audiences.

Well, we don’t have to do that by hand anymore. So three tiers for that, we can be onto the more conceptual and strategic work. so it ultimately anchors back to what do, what is the value that we’re delivering to our clients? And in in some cases it’s real true value. And in other aspects, it could be just purely fun. We had a fun exercise, same business. We had sales meetings. Sales meetings were always an opportunity to to get a little fun right, and do things that are a little unusual. And we used AI to create this whole montage video of things that just didn’t exist.

And we were able to have some fun with our senior leaders and things like this. Everyone had a great time. It was a blast. It was fun. And we never could have done that before, so that was just a wholesome, good hearted, Hey, let’s feel about good about ourselves as a company family. 

Adam Morgan

We can see how that helps with all those relationships, not just in that we show that we’re together with you on it, but we can also, find bigger and better ideas that they would’ve never thought of before for our clients. Which kind of leads into your fourth tip, which is be open-minded. So open to change is also just open-minded in general. So talk about that. How is that a creative leadership superpower?

John Renz

Yeah I, I, I’ve seen creatives in the past and, it’s sort of like the mad men, you know, their ego walks in the door, five minutes before they do with the presentation. And, while some of them can be wildly successful, I just see their shelf life being so limited, because they become difficult to deal with, things like this. I have always been a proponent of being open-minded, and I’d actually like to add humility into that, what we do is pretty cool, right? I mean, as creatives, it’s pretty cool. I mean, come on. If you’re at a cocktail party, what do you do? I make ads. I am a writer. I’m a designer. That’s pretty cool. One of my closest friends is an accountant and he hates telling people he’s an accountant. But like, how cool is it? Like I write ads and I, so it’s pretty great. Um, but it’s not something that’s easily done, in a vacuum.

That’s one. And it’s also something that, there’s the risk of coming off as arrogant. And again, it’s that sort of ego thing, I like to come at things from a point of humility. There’s a fabulous, I’m a diehard Springsteen fan, diehard Bruce Springsteen fan, and there’s a phrase that he said at South by years ago, and unfortunately I wasn’t there, but I read it in an article and I actually have it on my wall, so I’m gonna look over here as I, I do it. And he said, “I thought I was a complete phony, but of course, I always, I also thought I was the greatest thing you’d ever seen. The trick is to keep those two ideas in your mind at the same time.” So, have the humility to understand that other people have perspective, and those perspectives are gonna help you be better at what you do.

It’s gonna help your team be better. You also have to have an ego, right? I mean, you know, what we do is risky, right? We have ideas and we’re putting ideas out there, and they’re getting holes shot in them. And, it’s being a creative is not exactly for the faint of heart. But I think if you’re open-minded, there’s also the famous story, Bill Bernbach, the great ad man from the sixties. I don’t know if it was true. I hope it is. ’cause it’s a wonderful story. He was, generally for those who are younger, Bill Bernbach was generally credited as creating the creative revolution in the sixties. Right. He sort of brought creative concept to, so when you see Mad Men, a lot of that was fired by Bill Bernstein. And, sorry. Bill Bernbach.

Adam Morgan

Bernbach. It was close enough.

John Renz

No, no, no. So that’s a nod to my friend and a photographer that I’ve worked with for years, Bill Bernstein. So here’s Bill, Bill Bernbach is who I’m referring to. So Bill Bernbach, right. And he was generally regarded as this great mind, but whenever he presented, rumor has it, and again, I hope it’s true, he used to keep his hand in his pocket, and he had a little card that he kept and it said “he may be right.” And the idea was if, just because he’s Bill Bernbach and he’s presenting these ideas, someone may have an idea that is better. Someone may have an idea that elevates your work. And that’s okay. That is okay. So you have to be open, you have to be willing to hear what other people have to say. And I know it’s hard to do, especially when you’re like, you love an idea, oh my God, this is it. This is it. I, I got it. This is the idea. Sometimes it’s not, sometimes it’s not. and when you get that feedback, you kind of have to look, another mentor in my past used to say feedback is a gift.

Feedback is a gift. And I sometimes it’s a gift you don’t wanna unwrap, right? But, but really when you take feedback to heart, you have to understand as a creative, creativity is not a one way medium, especially not business creative, right? We’ve got multiple different audiences, and just because we understood it a certain way when we created it doesn’t mean our audience is gonna take it the way we meant it. And if you are gonna be closed off to that, it’s not a healthy way to be as a creative, not destined for great success.

Adam Morgan

That’s a great story. I’d never heard that story of Bill Bernbach. And I remember mid-nineties. Okay. So being open-minded, that’s a lot. That’s, that’s really, really important. But the last tip that I think really lines up with this, ’cause you’ve mentioned some elements of it, is it’s all about trust and confidence. That confidence, like you said, just like the Bruce Springsteen thing, you’ve gotta have some element of it and the humility together, but how does trust work its way into all of that?

John Renz

It’s all cumulative. It’s all, it all comes up together. So if if you’re doing the work, if you’re spending the time with your clients, if you’re showing up, if you’re showing them you care. And I don’t mean just at, like at the kickoff meeting, right? Or the intake meeting, whatever you happen to call. It’s every step along the process.

What I like to coach with my team, it’s that you’re avoiding the, what I like to call the “just a.” If all you do as a creative is just show up, do the work, hand it off, go back, wait for the next thing, you become just a creative. Just a copywriter. “Oh, him. He’s just the designer.” “Oh her. She’s just the copywriter.” But when you consistently show up and show people, show your clients that you care, that you’re vested, that you’re willing to put in the work to learn about their products, their services, their audience, and it shows through in the work, and you’re willing to champion the work and push it through, you’re not just an anything, you’re a partner, And I like to say the barometer of that is when a meeting starts, do the clients look around and go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Where’s creative?

Adam Morgan

Is so and so here. Yep.

John Renz

Wait a minute. No, wait. My creative director couldn’t make it. Let’s reschedule, You know what I mean? Because that’s the barometer. That’s when you’re not just, anything. You’re a partner. And that as as creatives and especially as creatives, creative leaders, whether you’re in-house, whether you’re in an agency, that’s what I think we should all be striving for.

Adam Morgan

Well, everyone who’s listening, I hope you’ve paid attention until now because. Many of the comments and stories and things that John has been sharing here are like things I’ve said so many times. This isn’t just another podcast about how to build client relationships. This is a masterclass in how you have amazing relationships, become a great creative leader, and in the end have great, great work.

So thank you, John for sharing all these tips and tricks. I think this has been phenomenal, and this is one of those go back and listen and really dig into what we’re talking about here, because this is stuff that’s been learned over years of really getting into this industry, and they’re just amazing, amazing tips. So thank you. Thank you so much. I’m gonna summarize now real quick. 

Here are the five key leadership tips that John has been presenting today. He talked about, number one, recognizing your client’s challenges. Two, remember, you’re all on the same team. Three, lean into change. Don’t avoid it. Four, be open-minded to everything, even that your idea may not be the best idea. And then five, build trust and confidence because that’s everything. And it’s being engaged from the opening meaning and asking questions to explaining your work in the final presentation. So hopefully that at least summarizes it all. But this has been fantastic, John. Thank you so much for telling.

John Renz

I really, I appreciate the opportunity to, uh, to have this conversation with you and, and it’s been a lot of fun.

Adam Morgan

Okay, great. Well thanks for tuning in everyone, and we’ll see you next time.