Creative direction
Set the standard and point of view before the work becomes a collection of disconnected deliverables.
Fractional Creative Direction
Fractional creative director
For brand teams that need senior creative leadership at the moment the work has to become clear, connected and ready to move.
Start a conversation
Leadership where it counts
Bring in the point of view before the work starts pulling apart.
Some projects need more than another capable pair of hands. They need someone who can see the whole system, decide what the idea needs to do and make sure the details keep serving it. That need often arrives at the exact moment a team is moving quickly: a new launch, a campaign with many channels, an evolving customer experience or a business story that has become harder to explain.
Chad works as a fractional creative director for those moments. He brings experienced leadership across the strategic idea, the creative expression and the practical choices that let work move from an early brief to something people can recognise and use.
The role is intentionally flexible. It can create momentum at the start of an initiative, strengthen an in-house team through a key stretch of work or help a group of partners stay aligned as an integrated effort grows. The common thread is a clear standard, a usable direction and fewer decisions being made in isolation.
That means the engagement starts with the pressure point, not a pre-set package. Some teams need a senior partner to turn a loose brief into a creative platform. Others need a trusted lead who can challenge work constructively, bring order to a complicated review process or help a promising campaign idea become consistent across every customer-facing detail.
Campaign leadership
Turn a strategic idea into an integrated platform that can travel across channels, partners and customer moments.
Team alignment
Give internal teams and outside specialists a shared brief that makes feedback, choices and handoffs more productive.
Experience thinking
Connect what a brand promises with the real places people encounter it, from a launch film to retail, digital and service touchpoints.
The work behind the title
Make the big idea useful to the people building it.
Creative leadership is most valuable before the work becomes expensive to change. A good direction gives the team a way to choose. It clarifies what the audience should understand, feel or do, then helps the people making the work see how their part supports the same outcome.
That starts with the real decision in front of the business. It might be a launch that needs a stronger story, a campaign that has more moving parts than its current brief can hold, a customer journey that does not yet feel like the brand, or a group of talented contributors who need a more decisive shared direction.
From there, Chad helps shape a creative platform and the guardrails around it. The aim is not to make every piece identical. It is to give each piece a recognisable role, whether it is a film, a digital experience, a retail environment, a service message or a partner deliverable. The result should feel coherent because the work has one clear reason to exist.
Chad has spent more than 15 years doing this across regulated healthcare communication, national campaigns, retail experiences, digital launches and product innovation. That range matters when the work has to survive the handoff from strategy to execution. The central idea has to be strong enough to inspire the team and practical enough to guide the next meeting, the next review and the next customer interaction.
For a lean internal team, that can provide a valuable level of confidence without building out a permanent layer of management. For a larger organisation, it can bring a clear outside view to a particular initiative without losing sight of the people, systems and practical constraints already in place. In both cases, the goal is to make the work easier to carry forward after the engagement, not create dependence on another set of slides.
More than a review layer
Move the work forward without adding another silo.
A fractional role should make the team faster, not turn every decision into another presentation. Chad brings the outside perspective needed to identify what is not yet working, then stays close enough to the work to help the team turn a promising direction into a real, integrated result.
That can mean developing the first campaign thought, strengthening the story behind a new service, giving a creative team a sharper brief, working with agency partners to make their output cohere or helping leaders assess whether the work is carrying the promise the brand needs to make.
His experience across brand strategy, campaigns and customer experience helps close the gap between the message a business wants to send and the experience a person actually has. The work becomes more deliberate for the team, so it can feel simpler and more human for the audience.
The value is not a borrowed title. It is experienced judgment applied where it can change the quality of the outcome: deciding what deserves attention, giving good ideas enough shape to travel and protecting the central thought when a complex project starts accumulating requests, channels and competing opinions.
Explore Chad’s expertise →
Selected work
Build a platform that can live in real life.
For CVS Beauty in Real Life, the opportunity was to create a more human story around beauty. The work moved beyond a single execution to become a brand platform built around the many roles people carry through an ordinary day, from parent to manager and everything in between.
It is the kind of creative direction that has to hold both the big thought and the details. The platform needs to be distinctive enough to give the work a point of view, then flexible enough to meet people in the many places a brand shows up.
View the case study →Frequently asked questions
Start with the work that matters next.
What does a fractional creative director do?
A fractional creative director brings senior creative leadership into a team for the part of the work that needs it most. Chad helps establish the point of view, raise the creative standard and keep the campaign, customer experience and delivery partners moving in the same direction.
When is fractional creative direction a good fit?
It is a strong fit when a team has an important launch, brand shift, campaign or customer-experience challenge but does not need, or is not ready to make, a full-time leadership hire. The work can be scoped around a specific moment, a stretch of planning or an integrated initiative.
Can you work with an in-house team or agency partners?
Yes. Chad can work alongside internal marketers, designers, writers, business leaders and specialist agencies. The role is to create useful alignment, give the work a clear centre and help every contributor make better decisions from the same direction.
What kinds of projects can you lead?
Chad is most useful on work that has to connect strategy and execution: brand platforms, integrated campaigns, service launches, retail and digital experiences, customer stories and complex communications that need a more human, usable idea.