Susan Credle: People say about work, “It made me jealous”. Well, I'm not sure that's what we should be saying in this business. I think we should be looking at what we do much more as a business. We should be saying, “I can see where this could go tomorrow. I could see how this could lead to another great idea.” And can we start to reward work that is more visionary, that you can start to see what it is building, or what it's honouring. If we could look through that lens a little bit more often, I think we will have a stronger industry where more people believe in the power of creativity.”

It's not easy to get great work through the system. What do you think are the keys?

Susan Credle: I think the first thing about getting great work is that we're victims of the overnight success. Great work takes time. It takes resilience. The best work that I've done in my career has been with incredible partnerships, partnerships within the agency and partnerships with my clients. That partnership comes with trust and a belief that we're trying to get somewhere together. There’s an old saying in baseball that more runs are scored on single base hits than home runs. Sometimes we're so in a hurry to hit the ball out of the park that we forget to get on base and a lot of great work has foundational thinking in it that allows it to be great over time. Understanding a brand's purpose - not cause marketing, but a purpose - matters. What do you fight for? What do you believe in? What does your product or your business allow people to do day in and day out that matters to them? Without that foundational thinking, I think your odds of getting to great work get much less. And if you even do get great work, it's probably not going be a lasting thing. I don't think brands are built on one-hit-wonders. They're built on beautiful thinking that you keep playing up or supporting in different fresh ways.

Longevity is not an obvious characteristic of creative careers. How have you achieved it?

Susan Credle: My husband. He keeps putting me on the elevator or on the train or in the car, saying, “You know on most days you enjoy doing this, let's do it some more.” It sounds funny but it's actually true. We've been married 34 years and I think without him reminding me to be resilient and not letting the stumble today define the entire journey, I could not have done it. This career is hard. It's joyful, but it's hard. And I think what's frustrating for me is the amount of time that we spend hemming and hawing about creative to get to average. If we invested all those discussions and times and rounds of creative and it came out as brilliant on the other side, that would be okay. But where I get defeated is empty energy. Energy that doesn't seem to get us anywhere. And I just am a true believer that one piece of work is not going make or break anything. So don't worry it to death. Try some things, get out there, play. And again, if you understand your brand foundationally, then that play isn't too scary.

What do you feel are your key achievements?

Susan Credle: FCB is one of my proudest moments in my career just because I love brands so much and that brand was about to die. Carter Murray had this wonderful way of looking at the challenge. It was, “If I saved it, it was going to be amazing and if I didn’t, nobody was going to say why did you let this happen?” Carter, our chief strategy officer, Nigel Jones, and I all held hands and said, we believe creativity will save this company. So, everything that we did was in service of building a creative culture, supporting creativity. It was creativity as a team sport. I know we hear that all the time, but I don't think a lot of people really practise it. Then in our third year, we asked ourselves, “How are we going to get lucky more often? We started looking at what we did on our best days. And then we just started doing more of that. Best work on biggest brands was the first goal. Pro bono can't be the spine, or what your creative reputation is built on solely. Then we always asked if the creative had been an economic multiplier for the client and for us. Because we wanted to prove that creativity is important to business, not just a reputation. If you apply creativity even to a dinner party, it will be a better dinner party.

I’m also proud of creating the M&M's characters, the original CGI characters that Steve Rutter and I built into a comedic ensemble troupe. We had a vision for toys and stores and merchandise that we thought would give us an unfair media advantage because M&M's don’t have a huge budget even though it's a huge brand. We thought the merchandising and the idea of stores would fulfill what they couldn't buy in television and in more proper media. I've been gone from BBDO since 2009 and to still see the characters living and breathing in the stores and see it become a global something, that's pretty special.

The third is a campaign we did at Leo Burnett that didn't survive (but I'm so proud of it), a campaign called Mean Stinks for Secret deodorant.

The idea was that the minute that you probably start to need, or be interested in, wearing a deodorant, is about when bullying truly starts, 12 to 13 years old. So we did a program called Mean Stinks where we provided middle schools and high schools with posters and language, creative and lines that were all about anti-bullying. We also started a thing called the Nicest High School in America and the work was so compelling that people like Demi Lovato even volunteered to be the MC for its events. It was such a beautiful connection between young girls, a need and a brand. One time, we asked people take an anti-bullying stance by painting pinkie blue, and it trended on Elle. I remember riding the subway in Manhattan and seeing people with the blue pinkie paint. That was amazing.

What is the best moment in your career?

Susan Credle: We stepped into controversary about the green M&M wearing sexy knee-high boots and removed them. The controversy escalated. Once, my CCO in New Zealand called me and told me there were two old men on a dock, sitting on the dock, arguing about whether they should have taken her boots off or not. The things that have mattered the most to me, or meant the most, were big thinking that lasted over time and that other people have been able to pick up and play with and create on. That’s the big stuff.

What makes you proud to say you’re the Grand Jury President of ADFEST?

I love these regional shows where you really get immersed in the culture of the area of the world you're in. And what's fascinating to me is that great work travels across culture and geography, because I think it's rooted in humanity. And I think about the work that I see out of Asia with its humour and lack of a way to do things, you know, it just always feels like, whoa, where did this come from? Again, that collision idea.

It will also be very nice to be in this part of the world. I'm a big believer in diversity and that the more diverse your life is, the richer you are. So selfishly, it's a chance for me to be totally immersed in a world I don't get to play in very often.

Susan Credle will be sharing more of her unique creative thinking in a speaker session during COLLiDE at ADFEST. Delegate tickets are available now. Find all information here.