It's a dangerous level of good. It’s full of strong, credible work. The trouble is, many of the people who share your ambition, your experience, and your desire (for example, to become a Creative Director), have that too. You don’t have Dominic Toretto's 'Career NOS' in the form of a Black Pencil monster. You don't have a Grand Prix-shaped battering ram. You have a shelf of excellent bottles in a very crowded wine shop.
At that level, it’s easy to misdiagnose the problem as:
"I need better work."
Better work is never not going to help. But the issue with this approach, alone, is that you're trying to solve the problem at the same level it was created.
Sure, if you've literally never done a piece of proactive work in your career... doing one might get you unstuck. But chances are, if you have a relatively decent book, you've likely mined the depths of different ways to make better work.
Outside of the 1%, once everyone in the room is good, and most can make strong advertising, differentiation can move upstream.
This isn't about abandoning creative ambition. No, that, with craft, become the conjoined bar for entry. But now, decisions start happening a layer higher.
Not just what you made, but what the work meant. What it meant in culture, and what it meant for the business. Why it was needed, why it worked, why it went after that problem, and solved it in that particular way. And of course, why that mattered.
The things you are able to say about your work's impact, and the way you say them, start quietly doing executive-level labour.
Your 'write ups' are no longer admin, but evidence. They prove you understand Advertising and Marketing in a legitimate way. They prove whether your taste is attached to business intelligence.
You move away from a world where they act like little labels under modern art...To one where they function more like a boardroom simulation.
As a result, the most valuable copy in a Senior portfolio can often be the least 'glamorous'.
You can play the game of trying to make work that outruns everyone else's. You should. Never stop playing that game.
But you can also play the game of making the story around the work become part of the work itself.
You can have thine cake and eat it, too.
Because, people will keep asking:
“Can this person make great advertising?”
But they'll also start asking:
“Can this person shape the kind of thinking a business grows around?”
