Chicago: Susan Credle; Cultivating Creativity

Susan Credle is grateful to the CDs who helped progress her career from ‘bathroom-break girl’ at BBDO to CCO of Leo Burnett USA. Now a mentor of new talent herself, she’s enthusiastically proud of Chicago’s creativity and swagger – and plans to tell the world…

“If you can show up and be resilient, well, that’s the key to success.” That’s the belief of Susan Credle, chief creative officer of Leo Burnett USA, and if her belief holds any truth then Credle must have an extremely high attendance rate and the resilience to match. Since becoming CCO in 2009, Credle has overseen something of a creative revolution at the Chicago agency, with brands such as Samsung, McDonald’s, Allstate and Always benefitting from her and her team’s creative ingenuity.

Competing with everything

Sitting in her office on the 21st floor of 35 West Wacker Drive, the impressive Chicago headquarters of Leo Burnett’s global operation, Credle is an animated and enthusiastic interviewee. She is passionate about her role, her agency and the industry at large and while she is overwhelmingly upbeat about what she and her contemporaries are trying to achieve in an ever-changing marketing landscape, she is also more than aware of the shortcomings of the business and is not afraid to voice them.

For example, she believes that the industry is sometimes too caught up in ‘content creation’ and that, “If we put as much effort into the ads that we make as we do into content creation, I think the ads alone would be fine.” She believes in the power of campaigns and thinks that clients often put too much faith in single executions; she wonders why some people only put their best efforts into working on Super Bowl spots and laments the dearth of commitment from some brand custodians. “Someone said to me the other day, ‘Well, for such-and-such a brand, this really is great advertising.’ And I thought, no audience says ‘Well, for advertising, that wasn’t too bad.’ We’re not competing with all advertising, we’re competing with everything: with architecture, with TV shows, with the funny guy on the street.”

But Credle’s default position seems to be optimism. She is ambitious for her clients, and in turn her agency and its staff, to succeed and talks passionately of her employees’ career paths, the myriad ways they’ve come into the business and the connections she has instigated to get the most from each of them, both to their benefit and that of the agency at large.

It comes as no surprise that Credle takes particular pleasure in nurturing the creativity of her staff, some of whom have no specific advertising training but who are “creative, interesting and interested”, because it was a reassuring creative director at BBDO who ignited her career back when she was “basically the bathroom-break girl”.

Initially Credle, a North Carolina native, was looking to get into theatre and dance, but wasn’t sure she could do something that was so “loose and unstructured” so instead thought that advertising offered both creativity and organisation. She moved to New York and in 1985 took a job at BBDO, where she essentially filled in for the receptionists when they went for lunch, coffee breaks, or to the bathroom. But she took the opportunity to seek out the people from whom she thought she could learn the most.

“I quickly realised I loved the creative department,” says Credle, “and I loved that they were the ones people listened to – that was where the buck stopped. So I focussed on that department and I found a desk and taught myself how to type because you had to type a certain amount of words-per-minute to be a secretary, which is what we were called back then. But I found a desk that only had art directors on it, my thinking being, ‘Okay, if I want to be a writer and they only have art directors, maybe I could help them write.’ And that’s exactly what happened.”

Bathroom break to big break

Credle started sending the team ideas for projects they were working on after a couple of creative directors there said they would pass on all the briefs to her when they were able to do so. “I was just lucky that I had creative directors there who were very generous,” she says.

A new creative director came into the agency and didn’t like the fact that a secretary was working on client briefs, thinking it might encourage other secretaries to do the same, so they put a stop to it. It was then that Credle applied for a junior copywriter position and soon after noticed a Post-It note on her desk that said, ‘Hey kid, you’re hired.’

Credle was at BBDO for 24 years. She worked on countless award-winning campaigns and created work for clients including FedEx, Pepsi and Cingular. She developed the anthropomorphised M&M characters that still front the brand today. Having reached the level of executive vice president, executive creative director and member of the board, she eventually left the agency in 2009 after being courted by Mark Tutssel, Leo Burnett’s global CCO, after the pair met on an awards jury. “I never looked for another job,” she states. After initially rebuffing Tutssel’s offer, they met for dinner and things changed.

“I have a weakness,” she says, “which is being a Southern girl and a daddy’s girl, a lot of times I put myself in a subjugated role [and] I had noticed that I was doing that a little bit at BBDO, that I wasn’t stepping up and being an equal. I think a little bit of it was I still saw myself as a bathroom-break girl. But I was sitting there having dinner with Mark and I realised I wasn’t editing myself and I wasn’t feeling vulnerable and I wasn’t thinking that I don’t know what I’m doing, and I thought, ‘This feels pretty interesting to have this kind of relationship with the top guy.’” 

She was attracted to the role itself, and what she refers to as Leo Burnett’s “creative DNA”, but the fact that the role relocated her to Chicago, initially at least, seemed irrelevant. “But then Chicago was a gift,” Credle says. “Being from the South and then living in New York, I’ve always said that if North Carolina and New York could have a love child, it would be Chicago.”

She believes that Chicago is a city that understands creativity and is entrepreneurial in spirit, with “good people trying hard to do good things”. She is also very keen for the entire city’s advertising fraternity to succeed and states that general success, whatever Chicagoan agency or client achieves it, would be good for the city. “It’s bad if there’s only one agency that people want to work at,” she says. “It hurts our recruiting if you have to let someone go and there’s no place else for them to get a job, versus somewhere like New York. It’s really good for us if we have four or five viable creative agencies. We just need to market this area and let people know why it is amazing.”

Working like a girl

One of Credle’s most recent and successful campaigns is Always’ #LikeAGirl, which, with a clever and thoughtful online video, showcased the fact that the phrase ‘like a girl’, had become an insult; that to run, swim, fight or do pretty much anything like a girl was to do it ridiculously. The campaign garnered lots of media attention and to date has almost 50m YouTube hits. It’s a great example of a brand using social responsibility cleverly and, importantly to Credle, relevantly. It’s also a useful segue into asking Credle about her own experience of being one of a select group of women at the top of the advertising tree.

There is, admittedly, an almost inaudible but definite groan when the topic is brought up, but immediately that’s replaced with an understanding that it’s a relevant issue, that there are still very few women in top creative jobs and it’s something that needs addressing. “When I was at BBDO I refused to enter into [this discussion],” she says. “In general I don’t think that I get any more or less of an advantage being a woman but I have to say that if I wasn’t the main breadwinner there are a few times that I would have said, ‘I’m done with this’. I actually think that the more women have the pressure of having to contribute to the economic situation of a household, the more we’ll see women [succeed] in business. Sometimes I don’t think we stick around long enough to get to that next level.

“Equally, I hate to say it and I don’t want to feel like I’m a part of an affirmative action thing, but I’m also savvy enough to realise that, were I a white male, doors would not open quite as fast for me sometimes. So, look, I don’t love the question [about being a woman] but the only thing I can’t ignore is that only three per cent of CCO positions are held by women, so that’s a problem. And I look around our creative department and I see that we’re missing that diversity, not just women but diversity period, and that really bothers me.”

Credle is, no doubt, in the process of tackling this anomaly in the same way that she’s tackling the fact that her agency and the town in which it resides need to be more forceful in telling people about their positives. “I mean,” she concludes, “if I go anywhere in this town and I say that I work for Leo Burnett, then chefs come out to talk to me, bartenders make drinks. This is a famous place to work in Chicago. We just need to take the swagger we have in this town and say ‘We deserve to have it nationally’, and make no apology about it. And I think we’re almost there. We are,” she says, holding her thumb and forefinger a centimetre apart, “this close.”