What New Skills Are Required of Creatives Today?

Chief Creative Officer Barry Schmader Shares His Thoughts With PM360

This month PM360 posed the question “What New Skills Are Required of Creatives Today?” to a panel of advertising industry veterans. Elevate’s Chief Creative Officer, Barry Schmader, participated in the discussion and shared his thoughts on what is need to thrive in today’s creative marketplace. Schmader shared:

Things have most definitely changed, and it’s not agency consolidation that is having the most profound effect. Years of consolidation and stagnation in big pharma have created a new wave of smaller, more agile and entrepreneurial “pharma” companies, chock full of experienced marketers who’ve fled the big pharma model in favor of something different and more rewarding. So as creative marketers, there is now a new type of client—the biotech, the small pharma, the rare disease, the young pharma company marketing a compound they developed, the medical device and drug therapy hybrid, the pioneers in digital health—who have new and specific challenges to overcome.

The spirit of working with these clients is more upstart and startup, and for creative teams it’s often more demanding—and more fun. Helping to create the voice and tone of these companies’ brands requires a different, more disruptive, creative approach—they’re the underdogs—which is ultimately more rewarding from a creative perspective. And without the level of funding of big pharma, they need impact from every opportunity. That’s challenging—and exciting.

We’re looking for people with a skill set that comes from having a balanced mix of experiences. Not so much experience as in years, but experiences, plural. We look for talented people who have had different kinds of brand challenges and have been exposed to varied marketing approaches—traditional and digital. But they also need to have a passion for bringing traditional and digital together in service of an idea that can help create an experience—that word again—across every channel. And it’s always good if they can grasp the sales process and put together a really tight core sales aid. Because whether it’s digital or in print, that skill seems to never go out of demand!

To read the entire article, and learn about what nine top Creative Directors have to say, visit PM360.