The Creative Leadership Conference
• Meet other creative directors and share how you’re balancing creativity with commerciality
• Get first hand knowledge on how to find your unique agency footprint on a well walked road.
• Discover ways to educate clients on the importance of creative teams
Thursday 27th February 2025 – 1.00pm to 5pm
The Shoreditch Treehouse
Creative directors have a difficult job. Balancing the passion to create boundary pushing work, with the need to make sure core services are being delivered – they are the glitter glue that holds an agency together.
Clients are looking for quantity over quality, freelancers or AI solutions are being favoured over agencies, and creatives can be harder to manage than other teams.
This is all while burnout is on the rise as creatives juggle personal projects with agency demands and designers are increasingly expected, and need, to master the art of commercial thinking.
This is where Dopamine comes in.
This event isn’t about the most trendy tools to play around with; it’s about the craft of running a successful creative agency.
Whether it’s building versatile teams, or finding space to experiment but still hit KPIs, Dopamine will give you the confidence to make bold choices.
Meet other people improving how their agency runs
Dopamine is an afternoon that will help you get inspired, and meet other agency creative leaders that you can learn from.
We blend interactive talks and group discussion.
- We dot you around the venue so you can interact – and we mix up the groups so you meet different people.
- We poll you before the event to see what you want to talk about.
- We make sure all the talks are original and interesting. We facilitate questions and reflections throughout.
It’s aimed at agency creative directors leaders – but any creative leader can come.
Meet your speakers…
Crazy, Crazier, Craziest: Pushing Creative Boundaries
Working with ‘boring’ clients is necessary sometimes, but it can be a real drain for creatives. So how can you push a brand with strict brand guidelines into doing something a bit out there?
Callum Devine, founder of CB Social, has got his system down to an art. When talking to clients about projects, he always offers different options for them to pick from, varying from safe to completely out of the box. He calls them his three levels of craziness:
- Level One – balances the brand guidelines.
- Level Two – this option goes a bit outside the lines.
- Level Three – this is a total wild card that doesn’t look like the brand at all.
“What we find ourselves doing is challenging clients and sort of saying, ‘Look, let us just do some weird shit. And if it goes really wrong, that’s fine. We’ll switch everything back. No problem.’”
He will be sharing all about the best ways to encourage clients to push boundaries in ways that will resonate with them.
How to Work With an ADHD Founder
“I’ve built a successful business around my brain. I need to learn from other people to not shut off, but I also have to think – how much am I going to change to fit in with someone else?”
In this session, Helena Traill founder of nooh Studio, will be sharing her experiences of being an ADHD creative agency founder.
Helena created her agency with her brain in mind, everything she does with is built to keep her on track and everyone on the same page. She will be sharing tips on how to stay open and honest with yourself and your team, and using her neurodiversity as an advantage.
If you’re looking feeling overwhelmed with and struggling to get your team to understand how you work, come along and hear what Helena has to offer.
The Great Debate – Should You Let Your Creative Team Freelance?
There was a lot of discussion in 2024 about whether people should be allowed to freelance on the side of their full-time agency job.
Katie Cadwell, co-founder of Lucky Dip says: “If you ban people outright, you’re not actually going to stop people from doing what they want to do in their spare time – you just end up fostering a kind of toxic environment of secrecy from your staff.”
But Russell Jones, co-founder of JonesMillbank, believes: “If you’ve got loads of cash in the bank and inbound inquiries just rolling in left, right and centre it’s much easier to let your team do other bits on the side, because you’re not as razor sharp focused on the businesses objectives. But when times are tough, things like staff fatigue, being overworked, working with potential competitors obviously has a much bigger impact.”
So at Dopamine, we’re creating a candid (but confidential) space to discuss these challenges and share advice for tackling them head on. With two co-founder duos with differing opinions and experiences on letting their teams freelance, there will be plenty to discuss and learn from.
Navigating Burnout in Creative Teams
“We want people to look after themselves and we want to gauge their position and if they are actually willing to help themselves.”
Burnout in creatives is rife. More and more agency founders are struggling with burnt out teams every year. Mental health issues aren’t necessarily top of the agenda when you start up your agency – so what do you when you’re faced with the problem head on?
Matthew Stanners, MD of Bearded Fellows, knows more than most about the tricky world of burnout. In 2024, a number of his team were signed off for mental health – costing the business thousands in sick pay and new hires.
Navigating the return to work was equally as hard, with people wanting to jump right back in to work despite contrasting advice from professionals.
“I try to do right by everybody, but ultimately, my role as MD isn’t to be someone’s therapist, it’s to make great business,” he says.
Matthew will be speaking candidly about his experience with team burnout, sharing his strategy for combating more problems, and how to navigate signing people off without burdening the rest of the team.
Battlefield to Boardroom: Rational Pitching for Designers
Pitching your hard work to clients is never easy. Weeks of your life have been put into creating your art and it can be hard to disconnect from it.
But when Alex Wright, founder of Friday and non-executive of The Keynote Club, noticed one of his designers consistently nailing the pitch – he found out that using hostage negotiation language was her winning technique.
“We didn’t think of her as our best designer, but she would always land work. She told us lots of clients are intimidated by design – they see it as art, done by people with flair and they didn’t have the language to engage or critique.”
Instead, the team started to change up their pitching style. Instead of getting clients to buy the design, the goal was to get them to comfortably explain the design so they could justify their decisions to higher ups.
“The mantra was, ‘Negotiate slow.’ Never respond to feedback there and then; capture it and take it away.”
At Dopamine, Alex will be going into detail about the techniques they used to consistently win creative pitches, and the Bubble, Probe, Playback approach to feedback they used.
Q: What actually happens on the day?
We start the event at 1.00pm so try to arrive by 12.45pm.
The day’s format is pretty simple: you will spend some time hearing from guests with interesting stories that you can learn from, and you will also spend some time in small groups discussing your journey with like-minded agency leaders.
The event is hosted by an Agency Hackers facilitator who makes sure that everybody with something interesting to say gets heard. (We poll attendees before the event, so we know who to ‘pick on’ on the day.)
Q: Who will I hear from? Who are the speakers?
The people you’ll hear from are all creative agency leaders with interesting stories to tell about leading creative teams.
We also decide who to spotlight based on the information we capture in the weeks before. (Look out for our emails!)
We will publish the line-up a few weeks before, but mostly we hope that you will trust us to select interesting folk from our audience. We find that the people who choose to attend our events are overwhelmingly on fascinating journeys that will resonate with you.
Also, the ‘talks’ aren’t really linear presentations. They’re more like structured case studies, with lots of questions and reflections from the audience.
You could potentially call them ‘fireside chats’, but these are not rambling cosy conversations. They are planned and structured . We put a lot of work into researching our guests, out of respect for your time.
Q: Who can attend?
This event is mainly for people who run the creative teams in agencies – but it’s potentially of interest to anybody interested in making their agency run better.
Basically, anybody can attend if you think it looks up your street.
