Crispin’s Maggie Malek on understanding the business of creativity

Name an agency role and Maggie Malek’s probably had it. Operations manager. Copywriter. Account executive. Social media director. VP of product and performance. SVP of strategy. President.

Malek is even a veteran of the U.S. Army.

Now, she sits as the CEO of the full-service agency Crispin. Her decades of experience give her a perspective not all executives have: not just saying, but doing.

Malek talked with The Current Editor-in-Chief Stephanie Paterik at this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity about her bold career path, advice for the next generation and the relationship between innovative creative and business solutions.

I love your career trajectory because you started as an account coordinator. You are now CEO. What is the benefit of that breadth of experience?

I’ve been at the agency for 17 years. I actually started as a copywriter on the social team. I love creativity, I love how social gives you this amazing landscape to play. From there, I joined the account team and eventually ran the strategy team.

I never thought I was going to be a CEO, but I got promoted just in time for the pandemic.

My background’s actually military too. I think that being a CEO who was a practitioner gives me the benefit of understanding the environment that we need to create for our people to do amazing work, the freedom that they need, the processes that can give them that freedom, but also understanding deeply the business of creativity and how it is we stay true to what we need to do while focusing on things like culture and sales and clients all at the same time.

The brand of Crispin is so associated with creativity. What creative trends are you excited about right now?

I learned about Crispin when I was in college. I was in PR school, learning to be a writer, and I heard all about Crispin. And it was wild misfits who were using creativity to solve business problems.

Crispin was never about just making ads. Crispin was about, “How do I figure out what’s going on with this business and create tangible products that show up creatively in the world to solve problems?”

Think about Domino’s and the Pizza Tracker [which allows customers to see order updates in real time]. That was not an ad-like object. That was a technology solution to a business problem for Domino’s.

What I’m seeing with a lot of the brands we work with — whether it’s Samsung, DSW, Target — is [that] as a creative industry we have to get back to that idea of wonderful, amazing, groundbreaking, outrageous work, [while] also at the same time making sure that that work is solving a real business problem.

Do you feel like that has shifted within the industry? Sometimes the knock on Cannes is that it so celebrates creativity, but sometimes that award-winning work doesn’t actually drive the business. Do you feel like those two things are coming closer together?

I hope so, yeah. I really think that both things can be true.

When you think about what AI can do in terms of automating the “boring” bits of the business — that allows your creatives so much more space and time to come up with the big, amazing ideas because they’re not spending the time doing 300 versions of a Facebook ad. You can potentially use a tool for that.

So, in my mind, AI is a tool that releases us to come up with these big, creative, amazing ideas. We shouldn’t get away from that.

At the end of the day, we are human beings, and human beings love nuance and feeling and magic. And that is what our teams do. AI is a tool that enables that. It can’t replicate it. And I see that coming closer together. And so I hope that the celebration of great creativity never goes away.

That’s so interesting because we’ve talked a lot in the industry about the importance of authenticity with influencer marketing and this idea that we have that radar for what looks like it was written by ChatGPT as well.

Yes, a lot of em dashes. If we have many em dashes, it’s probably AI.

I love an em dash!

So do I. All of us who are writers are very sad.

Final question for you: What do you need from the talent of the future?

That’s a really great question. We have two young lady creatives here, Hailey [Skinner] and Kendelle [Cragun], who are competing in the Young Lions competition for team U.S.

And, I’m not going to tear up, but they’re amazing. And they are so passionate about what they do. And they’re so curious. And they have no problem asking our CCO a million questions like, “What is the best print layout?”

For the next generation of leaders, the world is changing really fast. There’s a lot going on in our industry and also outside in the world.

Being curious, wanting to learn new things, having less ego at the same time as you have more ego. I am just looking for people to be passionate about this work that we do.

This is the most exciting desk job in the world. We get to sit at tables with brands who maybe have 400,000 to 1 million employees and [they’re] coming to us for help to figure out really big and meaty problems.

And I think that’s so cool. One of the things that we talk a lot about at Crispin is that we want to leave the advertising world better than we found it. That means how we use the tools to make things easier for our team, but also how we create great work that is meaningful in some way. We as an industry have an incredible responsibility to the world because we do control messaging that is put out there.