BroxtenDigital
What a chief creative officer does depends on the agency, but at Publicis Media, Eric Levin runs creative across every format a brand touches, from commercial production to creative technology to the content and creator strategy he helped build from scratch. He decides where the group leans in next, and that scope is bigger than most job titles let on.
Eric Levin is the chief creative officer at Publicis Media. He cut his teeth in movie marketing in Detroit, spent time at a creative agency in New York, and later got handed a digital media team despite knowing nothing about media, which is exactly why I wanted to ask him what the job actually covers.
What does a chief creative officer do?
At that scale, creative spreads into more than one lane. "Creative today in our world can similarly mean a lot of things," Eric told me. There's the traditional side, commercial development and production, and there's creative technology, which is its own team with its own lead.
Eric's content and creator strategy is what connects all of this, which he put together after Publicis handed him a digital media team he had zero background in. He turned that team into the start of what is now a much larger content operation across the agency.
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What creative jobs are there in advertising?
Eric splits it two ways: the traditional roles, commercial development and production, and the newer ones built around platforms that barely existed a few years ago. "You've got micro dramas now that have come out, you have influencers, you have creators," he said, on top of short and long form content.
His advice was simple: stop chasing the first opening and think in years instead. Figure out where you want to be in one, three and five years, then judge a role by whether it gets you closer, not by whether it happens to be open right now.
Do you need an art degree to work in creative?
Eric's answer to the idea that creative requires the right school or major is blunt: "if you don't go here and if you don't work in an ad agency, if you don't deliver the commercial they're looking for, then you're not creative. It's nonsense."
His real question is different: what's your superpower, and what do you bring that nobody else in the room can. He told me straight up that just hosting this podcast counts as being creative, even if I can't draw.
How do you handle a job you feel unqualified for?
Early in his career, Eric got put in charge of a digital media team and was too wired to sleep. He came in the next day and told a friend, flatly, that he couldn't do it, that he knew nothing about media.
The answer reset his career: "We don't want you to know anything about media. If you know media, you're just gonna do what we've always been doing, and we don't want that." They were looking for someone to ask why the team was doing things that way to begin with.
Watch the full conversation
Watch the full episode for Eric's read on where the creator economy is heading, how he sees the phone-and-ring-light era evolving, and the campaigns that have him excited right now: Breaking Into Advertising: What A Chief Creative Officer Screens For.
Watch next: The BroxtenDigital Show - Episode 5: Ross Chowles
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