What does a chief creative officer (CCO) do?
The chief creative officer is the top of the creative hierarchy. At an agency the CCO sets the creative ambition for the whole business, hires and leads the creative directors, decides which work goes out under the agency's name and sits on the leadership team beside the chief executive, the head of strategy and the head of client services. At a brand the CCO owns everything the company makes that a customer can see: campaigns, product design, retail, packaging, content. The title is relatively young and borrowed from the C-suite to signal that creativity is a board-level responsibility rather than a department.
The difference from a creative director is scale and remove. A creative director leads the work on a project or an account. The CCO leads the people who lead the work, and is accountable for the whole output.
Why it matters
Why a chief creative officer matters
Creative quality decays without someone at the top who is paid to protect it. Every company has pressure to ship faster, cheaper and safer, and without a CCO those pressures win quietly, one compromise at a time, until the work looks like everybody else's. A CCO is the person with the authority to say no at the level where it costs something. For an agency the CCO is also its reputation: the industry judges a shop by the work its CCO lets out the door, and the best talent chooses where to work by who they will answer to.
At a brand the role connects the dots. The campaign, the store, the product and the app should feel like one company, and a CCO is the only person whose job description includes all four. The title also tells the market something. A company that puts a creative at the top table is saying that how things look and feel is a strategic matter, and the best creative people read that signal when they decide where to work.
In practice
How a chief creative officer works in practice
- 01
A CCO spends less time in the file and more in the room. The week runs between reviewing work across every account or division, hiring and developing creative leaders, setting the standard through the work they choose to champion, representing the company in pitches and in the industry, and arguing for creative at the leadership table where budgets are set. The best CCOs still get their hands on the work that matters most: the pitch that defines the year, the rebrand that defines the company.
- 02
The structure beneath them varies. Agencies typically run executive creative directors on groups of accounts, creative directors on accounts, and art directors and copywriters in teams. A CCO's real job is to make that structure produce work they are proud of, and to notice when it has stopped.
At RIOT
Chief creative officers at RIOT
RIOT was founded by a creative director, and the top creative job here has never been separated from the top job. Our founder and executive creative director is the final eye on the work that carries our name, from the 2022 rebrand film for the Washington Commanders to the Lew Frankfort "Bag Man" documentary for Coach, and he also runs the company. At a boutique the CCO function and ownership live in the same person, which is the point: the standard is set by someone who also pays for it.
Watch out
What people get wrong about chief creative officers
Treating the CCO as a creative director with a bigger office. The role is executive: hiring, structure, standards, the economics of the creative department and the politics of protecting work inside a company. A brilliant maker who hates management will be miserable in it. The second mistake, on the brand side, is appointing a CCO and leaving product, retail and digital outside their remit, which produces a title without a job. The third is measuring a CCO on awards alone. Awards are a signal; the real measure is whether the company's work got better and whether its best people stayed.
