Colleen DeCourcy retired from advertising once. She’s not doing it again

Sitting down with The Drum at the Cannes Lions Festival, she says: “Creative people, by their very nature, are worriers, and when you’re tasked with your core competency being to defend ideas in every situation possible, change is always frightening. But I do fundamentally believe that what’s at risk [with AI] is not creativity. What’s at risk is the size of the margins of the businesses that built things out to wrap around creativity. So I’m excited about what’s coming.”

I had arranged to meet DeCourcy for a quick coffee at a nearby cafe after her appearance on the Palais main stage, where she interviewed Google DeepMind CEO Mustafa Suleyman – a divisive figure in creative circles. In front of a packed audience, she confronted the thorny subject of AI’s looming threat to the industry with unflinching honesty. Now, upon arriving for our rendezvous, a French waiter, comically irate just two days into the festival’s chaos, curtly tells us we can’t sit unless we eat. Seeing the panicked look in my eyes as I realize I won’t be able to scoff a croque monsieur before my next interview, DeCourcy winks and says she and her partner (Jason, joining her at Cannes for the first time) would gladly eat at what was a less-than-ideal spot when surrounded by endless gourmet options to allow us to finish the interview.

“I’m not sure that I am going to retire this time,” she says mid-order, as if it’s just occurred to her. “I think it’s just about setting different boundaries. It’s very different to be – I’m going to say it because I think this industry can be ageist – 60 years old. I know who I am. I have the ability to set terms on how I want to work and look around to find things that are super exciting to me. Operationalizing an agency through Covid and a massive protraction of the industry… after all that, I said I was ready to retire as I couldn’t imagine [being at] an agency that wasn’t Wieden+Kennedy. And what’s happening for me now is that I can imagine applying my creativity to things that aren’t agency, right? Snap allowed me to figure that out.”

DeCourcy is one of advertising’s most celebrated creatives, in large part because of her willingness and even comfort with working at the messy intersection of technology and creativity.

She entered advertising in 1986 at Saffer Cravit & Freedman, briefly detoured into media and entertainment, and then returned in 1994. After stints at Spafax, Organic and JTW New York, she ended up at TBWA Worldwide as its first-ever chief digital officer, where she was at the sharp end of figuring out how clients should think about then-emerging platforms like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.

Those experiments in social media pushed her to start her own social media content and design shop, Socialisit, in 2011. But two years later, the big call came. Within 15 months of arriving at Wieden+Kennedy as creative director, DeCourcy had been made a partner, joining an exclusive club that included Dan Wieden, president Dave Luhr and Susan Hoffman. It was the fastest anyone had made partner at the agency, and she went on to become its co-president and chief creative officer, working on campaigns for clients ranging from Nike and McDonald’s to Airbnb and Meta along the way. She also launched its tech and innovation lab, The Lodge, in 2013, where she encouraged creatives to think about how VR, AR and artificial intelligence could be applied to client briefs. Under her steerage, the global agency enjoyed one of its most successful eras, amassing 149 Lions at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

DeCourcy announced her retirement from advertising in 2021. But within a year, she was back to the grind as chief creative officer at Snap. This wasn’t in her plans. She has had conflicting feelings on Big Tech and the impact social platforms like Meta have on society. She “got in trouble”, she says, for an article in Time Magazine titled ‘Is it moral to have Facebook as a client?’ in which she admitted her fears about the giants’ influence. So how did she end up running the creative department at a billion-dollar platform?

People she “really cares about” on the Snap board convinced her to meet with the CEO, Evan Spiegel, initially. “Ending up at Snapchat was directly related to [the Time Magazine article]. I spoke to him about his intentions. I looked at all the research on the impact of that platform. I don’t even want to go into all the details of why it’s different, but I will tell you, Snap is built to not do the specific things that I was so afraid of with social media.

“When I joined, I felt I had an obligation to prove that. I can’t call something out and then go and wash my hands. People want to communicate through technology. Young people love social platforms. So the trick was to find one that’s not damaging and help it become essential. It wasn’t an incongruity. It was an intentional decision.”

Unlike her tenure within agency walls, where she had been the instigator to embrace new tech, her role in a place already at the cutting edge was to prove the power of brand, storytelling and creativity.

“There was no universe built around the sanctification of my creativity,” she says, reflecting on the three years she spent at the company. The big brand thinking, helping Snap work out its place and how it wanted to communicate that, was something she “could do in her sleep”. What was less easy was doing that at the “speed, the velocity” that Silicon Valley demands. Engineers wanted instant work promoting the latest update, Wall Street reacted to every launch, and the relentless news cycle influenced messaging daily.

But the biggest culture shock from leaving the world of agencies, she says, was the removal of any friction.

“Removing friction from agreement is how you move fast. And that’s not great for creative work. When I worked in an agency and we walked in to pitch ideas to a client, there were two bosses in the room, one on their side, one on our side. There was the CMO and me. And their team had to get me excited, and my team had to get the CMO excited. And we found a way to get there,” DeCourcy explains.

“When you work in-house, the person paying you is also the person who wants this thing, and there’s very little allowance for friction. And it’s a tech company that moves at the speed of light. You can very easily start to make anodyne work that makes a lot of sense, but doesn’t break through, that isn’t scary.” She adds: “But I’m grateful it was Snap, and Evan, as there was some allowance, some space, for that.”

Take its first Oscars TV spot, which ran in 2022. She tied the campaign to Best Picture winner Coda, the first film to star a predominantly deaf cast in leading roles, and worked with SignAll to develop Lenses that could help Snapchat users learn ASL.

Its most recent ‘Less Social Media, More Snapchat’ campaign was the culmination of her efforts to assert Snap’s position, highlighting the fundamental differences between it and other social media platforms. Users had steadily grown during her time with the company, but as ever, the question of how to monetize them arrived. Internally, it became “a dead heat” on whether to continue to grow users or ad sales. And as the pendulum began to swing back to a focus on product and performance marketing, she knew her time at Snap had come to an end.

“I knew it the second I reached the moment when it was time for a real marketer, not a creative director,” she says. “They’ll need someone like me again in the future. But that’s not what excites me. And Evan was gracious enough to hear that and be kind.”

So, where does she go from here if she’s not ready to retire? Well, no one knows yet. Not even DeCourcy. The challenge facing agencies as they grapple with AI and how it will upend the business model is something we talk about at length. She has little sympathy for holding companies under the cosh as they face ever-tightening margins after decades of putting an expensive wrapper around their creatives. They brought in a “vast number” of people and charged for services layered on services, and that’s “what’s going away.”

“What we do in defense is say it’s coming for creativity,” she says. “And I look at most of those places and think, as a creative, I was often one-third of the workforce, right? And it’s not coming for me. It’s not coming for us.”

DeCourcy believes the solution is to follow the lead of Jean Marie Dru and Lee Clow, who have long advocated for agencies to adopt a model that charges for big, share-price-moving ideas. Ideas like those she orchestrated for long-term client Nike while she was at W+K. The ‘Dream Crazy’ campaign was credited by some as driving a 5% increase in the retailer’s stock price. That’s the kind of big-picture, culture-defining work no AI model could conceive.

“I have not been one who has ever been fearful of tech,” she says. “Now is a really interesting moment. We’ve seen it come for the industries around us, and if you sit in meetings at a sales level, and you listen to the kinds of things that are being said about what will happen with ads, it could be alarming for an agency. But then you realize what the long-term gainer of this thing is [for creatives]. And it really is exciting to me as a creative person, playing with the tools, to get ready for this.”

As the surly waiter returns with her lunch, I leave with one final question. As someone who relishes making sense of the complex world of tech and creativity, who loves the “friction” in solving seemingly impossible problems, could she not be tempted back to an ad agency? To be at the coal-face in this new era as they experiment with new ways of working?

“You always like to say, ‘I don’t know, maybe’ [I’ll go back to an agency]. But no, I need to make room for other people in that space. I had a glorious career. I loved it. I loved the era in which I did it. And I’m excited about the other things that I’m finding in the world.”