Interpublic Group of Cos. has named Susan Credle as its first creative advisor, effective immediately.

Credle will move from global chief creative officer at IPG-owned FCB but will continue to serve as chair of the FCB agency network through 2024. She will continue to report to IPG CEO Philippe Krakowsky. FCB has not yet announced a replacement for the global chief creative officer position.

Credle joins a growing central team within IPG that includes Chief Client and Chief Business Officer Jacki Kelley, who returned to the holding company from Dentsu last June; Chief Commerce Strategy Officer Jeriad Zoghby, who joined in January 2023 from Accenture Song to oversee commerce across the group; and Chief Solutions Architect Jayna Kothary, who joined last October to oversee IPG’s tech, data and platform solutions.

‘The life I’ve lived as a creative’

Credle will now advise all the agencies in the holding company to ensure that creativity is integrated into other emerging business practices such as commerce and marketing technology. Her role is to foster a culture of creativity across IPG’s agencies, “ensuring it is central in all the network’s work for brands,” according to the holding company.

“This advisory role allows us all to tap into [Credle’s] unique expertise, her standing as an industry leader, and her interest in representing the power of creative ideas linked to our full range of capabilities, in the service of building our clients’ brands and growing their businesses,” said Krakowsky in a statement. 

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Credle said she sees her job exactly as it’s described: An advisory role to the people doing the work, explaining why her title is not, for example, chief creative officer.

“I try to pull as much ego out of everything I do,” Credle said. “I think title is about clarification of what you do. It is an advisor role.” She added, “I’ve gotten calls like, ‘What do you think about this?’ And I said from, a creative lens and the life I’ve lived as a creative, ‘This is what I don’t think would work.’”

Credle said she has always taken a hands-off approach to managing teams, so her role really will be to help agency leaders when they need it, but not get in the middle of client relationships or new business pitches.

Part of her job will also be to help IPG’s agencies attract and retain top creative talent. In January, FCB Brazil hired former Dentsu Creative U.S. CEO Paulo Fogaca as its new CEO.

“I think it’s a false narrative and it actually hurts the people doing the work when they think there’s something going on ‘up here’ [at very senior levels] that they’re not a part of,” she said. “It’s the big cultural conversations I’d rather be involved with than the business itself.”

Numerous accolades 

Credle joined FCB as its global chief creative officer in 2016, from Publicis Groupe’s Leo Burnett, where she served nearly six years as its chief creative. Before that, she spent more than two decades at Omnicom Group’s BBDO, where she started and developed her career and eventually rose to executive creative director and executive VP.

The FCB network includes FCB Brazil, FCB Canada, FCB Chicago and FCB New York. Last year, its client wins included Intuit QuickBooks, which consolidated its global creative account with FCB New York.

FCB was also named the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity North America Network of the Year for the fifth consecutive year in 2023. The network took home several awards last year, including for FCB Canada’s Adidas campaign that pushed for the inclusion of neurodivergent athletes.

“Under Susan’s creative leadership, FCB has dramatically outperformed much larger competitors, being named the Cannes Lions Global Network of the Year, and the Festival’s North America Network of the Year for the last five years, which is an industry first,” Krakowsky said in the statement. “We wanted to create an opportunity for that impact to extend to the rest of IPG in a role that respects the importance of our agency brands and also positions Susan to inspire and influence the breadth of our company.”

Throughout her career, Credle has been part of the creation of some of advertising’s most recognizable mascots, including the M&M’s spokescandies and Allstate’s Mayhem. She also was the first woman ever named chair of The One Club for Creativity in 2018.

The future of brands

Though IPG has been building out its central team, Credle said she appreciates that the holding company has remained agency brand-centric, versus going the way of rivals that have merged and collapsed storied agency brands.

“I’m a huge believer in brands for our clients and for ourselves,” she said. “If you don’t practice what you’re preaching externally, internally it feels a little goofy to me. Why would we be telling our clients 'Brands are important' and then we go, ‘But not here.”

Creative shops have struggled recently with clients scaling back big branding budgets and the industry investing in faster-growing areas such as performance media and data and analytics. But Credle said she remains optimistic about the future of creativity.

She criticized some people in the industry who argue you can’t prove the performance of a big branding campaign. To that end, Credle recalled seeing the 1980s Chanel ad, “Share the Fantasy,” with “Star Trek” actor Leonard Nimoy doing the voiceover.

“I was 12 years old sitting in the basement of my little house in Greenville, South Carolina,” she said. “The next week I saved up my babysitting money and I bought a little bottle of Chanel No. 5 perfume. To this day, I have a bottle of that Chanel perfume. [That commercial] reminded me as a little girl in Greenville, South Carolina’s middle class that I was invited to share the fantasy.”

“If a client found out that a media company had shown that spot to a 12-year-old girl who had no money, they would be fired,” she said. “We want it to all be data. The data will prove everything … [but] brands are powerful.”