From Artist to CMO
I started out wanting to make pictures people cared about.
At school, and then at college, I studied art, with a focus on fine art. I imagined my paintings in a gallery. My illustrations in a book. Or an album cover I’d designed for a record someone loved.
I wanted to tell stories through art. To make something that caught someone’s attention and stayed with them.
That was the ambition. The career plan was a little less organised.
Looking back, I can see how that same ambition took me from artist to CMO. I kept finding new ways to make things—and new places for people to see them.
Finding new ways to create
When I left college, we were moving from analogue to digital. Suddenly, I could do things on a computer in my bedroom that had once needed a room full of equipment.
I could work with photographs, make videos, experiment with animation and type. I wanted to try all of it.
There was plenty to learn. We were working through manuals, figuring out software and trying to find jobs that would pay for the next camera or lens. But I loved the possibilities.
My first job was in the creative and production team at The Box Music Television. A few friends and I were making work for a major cable network, learning as we went.
The pictures were moving now. And people were seeing them on television.
Then I started Robot, my own design and motion agency, working in commercial advertising. Before too long, I was recruited to work in LA, where I built a creative studio inside a post-production house working on feature films.
Different settings, more tools, more people to make things with, and bigger and bigger audiences to see the work.
What I enjoyed was following an idea and seeing how far we could take it.
The city became the gallery
At TBWA’s Media Arts Lab, working on Apple, we could do that from the first idea all the way through to the finished work. We could think it, make it and see whether it worked.
And with “Shot on iPhone,” photography itself became the story. The pictures showed what people could create with the product. They appeared on billboards, buildings and screens around the world.
I’d started out imagining my work on a gallery wall.
With “Shot on iPhone,” the city itself became the gallery.
Across the award-winning work we made for Apple, I began to see how all those individual pieces could shape people’s impression of a brand.
That interested me more and more.
The brand became the canvas
At Ring, I built an internal team to develop the brand and make the campaigns. At GoodRx, I followed the same approach.
Now I could think about how everything fitted together. The words. The images. The way we presented the product. How people felt when they encountered us.
The brand had become the canvas. My role was to bring all the elements together.
Today, at Spectrum, that canvas is bigger again. And there are many more people working on it—our internal studio, agencies, creators, partners, customer experience teams, service teams and PR.
The product itself, and what people say about it, also help shape the picture.
I enjoy that. Other people see things I don’t. They bring ideas and abilities that make the work better. My role is to help us see what we’re making together and give people room to contribute.
That’s why I think the leader’s role is an artist’s role.
You need a sense of the whole. You think about what belongs, what to leave out and how one part affects another. Most of all, you think about the person experiencing it.
What will they understand? What will they feel? And does the experience we give them live up to the picture we’ve painted?
The tools will keep changing. Digital photography, new software, now AI—all giving us more ways to create.
What stays with me is that original desire to make something people connect with, something people understand and want to be part of.
I used to imagine someone standing in front of a painting or holding a record sleeve. Now I think about all the ways someone experiences a brand.
I’m still trying to tell a story.
The canvas just got bigger.
