Creativity Is an Economic Multiplier: Susan's Story Begins

How a girl from Chapel Hill — with a record player at the library and a subpoena in her hand — found her way to the top of the advertising world.

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If you were designing the origin story of a Global Chief Creative Officer from scratch, you probably wouldn't start with a receptionist filling in for bathroom breaks at a New York ad agency. You wouldn't start with a single mother stretching every dollar, or a teenager driving down a highway to serve legal papers on a company she'd never heard of.

But that's exactly where Susan Credle's story begins — and that's precisely what makes it worth studying.

Susan Credle rose from receptionist at BBDO New York to Global Chief Creative Officer of FCB, one of the world's largest advertising networks. Along the way, she spent 24 years at BBDO, helped build iconic campaigns for M&M's, Snickers, and Cingular Wireless, and became one of the most respected creative leaders in the industry. Her journey is not a story of luck or privilege. It's a story of creative instinct, relentless curiosity, and the courage to bet on yourself — repeatedly.

But this lesson isn't just Susan's story. It's a mirror. As you read, ask yourself: Where do I see my own instincts in this? What have I been filing away without knowing why? And in a world where AI can generate a campaign brief in seconds, what is it that only I can bring? Those are the questions this course is designed to help you answer.

Before any of that, though, there was a little girl in a neighborhood putting on a production of Cinderella.

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Susan grew up in Greenville, South Carolina, after her family relocated from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where her father had been in medical school. When her parents' marriage ended, it was just Susan, her brother, and her mother — a teacher who believed fiercely in education and found a way to enroll her kids in one of the best private schools in Greenville by taking a job there.

Money was tight. But creativity? That was abundant.

As a young child visiting her grandparents' neighborhood, Susan didn't just play — she produced. She organized the neighborhood kids into theatrical performances, built makeshift stages, designed costumes, and handled casting. She was seven or eight years old, directing Cinderella with the seriousness of a Broadway producer. (And yes, she cast herself in the lead role. She was the best. She knew it.)

Then there were the trips to the library with her mother. Because the family couldn't afford a record player at home, Susan's mom would take the kids to sit with headphones at the library's listening stations. "You just need to listen to this," her mother would say. "You need to know about this." And she'd play Mozart. Bach. Classical music that most kids their age would never encounter.

Key Insight: Susan's early creative life wasn't built in a classroom or a studio — it was built in the margins. A neighborhood yard. A public library. A dance recital. These "informal" creative experiences are often the most formative ones, because they're driven by genuine curiosity and joy rather than obligation.

These experiences did something important: they trained Susan to notice things. To find meaning in performance, in music, in storytelling. To understand — even before she had the vocabulary for it — that creativity is a way of opening minds to things they didn't know they wanted to think about.

Pause here and reflect: What were your equivalent moments? What did you do as a kid — before anyone told you it was useful — that you now recognize as creative instinct? Those early signals matter. They're worth excavating.

That instinct would serve her for the rest of her career.

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Here's one of the most unlikely origin stories in advertising history.

At sixteen or seventeen, Susan was clerking for a law firm. One day, she was handed a task: drive down Highway 385 and serve a subpoena on a company called Henderson Advertising. She walked in, announced her purpose — "I'm here to serve you a subpoena" — and then stopped dead in her tracks.

Everyone was wearing jeans and t-shirts.

And on the wall, she spotted a character she recognized from television. A stuffed animal. A mascot. Something she'd seen in a commercial.

"What is this place?" she asked.

"We do advertising."

"What's advertising?"

"You know — the commercials."

Oh. Someone has to write that stuff.

That was it. No dramatic epiphany. No lightning bolt. Just a quiet, curious recognition: this is interesting. The casual dress code alone made an impression on a teenager who'd only ever seen adults in suits. But more than that, she'd glimpsed something she hadn't known existed — a place where creative work and business structure lived together under the same roof.

Pro Tip: Pay attention to the moments that make you stop and think "I didn't know that was possible." Those moments are often pointing you toward something important. Susan didn't walk out of Henderson Advertising with a career plan — she walked out with a seed of curiosity. That's enough. Curiosity, tended carefully, becomes direction.

She filed the experience away. Years later, it would resurface at exactly the right moment.

Your version of the subpoena moment might not be as cinematic — but it exists. Think about the last time you walked into a room, or stumbled onto a piece of work, and thought: I didn't know you could do that. What did you do with that feeling? Did you file it away, or did you follow it?

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At UNC Chapel Hill, Susan majored in drama — and loved it. But she grew restless. It felt too easy. She wasn't being challenged. So she made a bold move: she left the drama department and walked over to the journalism school.

The journalism faculty pointed her upstairs. "You might like advertising," they said.

She met Professor John Sweeney, who had come from the Chicago advertising world and brought that industry's energy and rigor into the classroom. He became a pivotal influence. And through him, Susan found the answer to a question she hadn't quite known she was asking.

Theater had always scared her a little. Not the creativity of it — she loved that. But the life of it. The instability. The idea of sleeping under a makeup table, chasing roles, living at the mercy of casting directors. It felt like surrendering control of her own story.

Advertising offered something different: creativity within structure. You could exercise the creative muscle — write, concept, perform, persuade — but within the framework of a business. There were clients, deadlines, briefs, budgets. And within those constraints, there was still enormous room to make something genuinely surprising and beautiful.

That combination — creative freedom and professional structure — was exactly what Susan had been looking for without knowing it.

Key Insight: The choice between "pure art" and "commercial creativity" is often a false one. Susan's pivot from drama to advertising wasn't a compromise — it was a recognition that creativity thrives in many different containers. The constraints of advertising didn't limit her creativity; they focused it.

The subpoena memory came back. The people in jeans. The TV character on the wall. Someone has to write that stuff.

She was going to be one of those people.

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In 1985, Susan arrived in New York City — a place she'd fallen in love with at sixteen, when she'd visited for her birthday and felt the city "call" to her. She was electric with ambition and had almost no practical skills that a major advertising agency needed.

BBDO was on the cover of every trade publication as the agency of the year. Susan's mother had always told her: surround yourself with the best people, and you have a better chance of being good. So Susan walked into BBDO and said she'd love to work there.

They asked what she could do.

She could do nothing.

So she became the receptionist's backup — the person who covered bathroom breaks. It was, by any conventional measure, the most entry-level position imaginable. But Susan looked at it differently. If she could get in the door, she could turn the company into her university.

She started calling department heads and asking for informational interviews. She moonlighted typing scripts for senior creatives — including legendary BBDO chairman Phil Dusenberry, one of the pioneers of advertising as entertainment. By typing those scripts, she began to understand story structure. She began to see how the best minds in the business constructed a narrative in thirty seconds.

She stayed at BBDO for 24 years.

Pro Tip: The "get in the door" strategy is one of the most underrated career moves in creative industries. Susan didn't wait for the perfect role — she found the smallest possible opening and then made herself indispensable through curiosity and initiative. If you're early in your career (or pivoting into a new field), ask yourself: what's the smallest door I can open right now? Then walk through it and start learning.

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There's a phrase Susan uses that cuts right to the heart of why creative work matters in a business context:

Creativity is an economic multiplier.

It's a deceptively simple idea. Apply creativity to anything — a product, a brand, a message, a strategy — and it matters more. It becomes more memorable, more meaningful, more effective. Creativity doesn't just make things prettier. It makes them work harder.

This framing is important, especially for anyone who's ever had to defend the value of creative thinking in a boardroom or a budget meeting. Susan isn't arguing that creativity is nice to have, or that it's a luxury for brands with big budgets. She's arguing that it's a force multiplier — that the return on creative investment is real, measurable, and significant.

And she's lived that argument. The M&M's characters she helped develop became so culturally embedded that people genuinely felt like they knew Red and Yellow. The Cingular Wireless brand she helped build over nine years transformed from a scrappy telecom challenger into a genuine cultural presence. These weren't just creative achievements — they were business achievements, driven by creative thinking.

Key Insight: When you're making the case for creativity — to a client, a boss, or a skeptical colleague — don't lead with aesthetics. Lead with economics. Creativity makes things matter more. That's not a soft argument. That's a business argument.

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Here's the question you should be sitting with right now: If AI can generate a brief, draft copy, ideate campaign concepts, and produce images in seconds — why does any of this matter? Why does Susan's story matter to me?

It's the right question. And the answer is the whole point of this course.

AI is a power tool. An extraordinary one. It can process, pattern-match, generate, and iterate at a scale no human can match. But a power tool doesn't have a point of view. It doesn't have a subpoena moment. It doesn't have a mother who took it to the library to listen to Mozart because she believed her kid needed to know about that. It doesn't have the scar tissue of a career built from the bathroom-break shift up.

What AI cannot replicate is you — your specific accumulation of experiences, instincts, obsessions, and perspective. That is the raw material of genuine creative work. And in a world where AI is rapidly commoditizing the mechanical parts of creativity — the drafting, the formatting, the iteration — the human parts become more valuable, not less.

Susan's principle that creativity is an economic multiplier has never been more true, or more urgent. When every brand has access to the same AI tools, the differentiator is the creative intelligence directing those tools. The person who knows why a story should be told this way, who it needs to move, and what it needs to make them feel. That judgment — earned through curiosity, experience, and the courage to develop a genuine point of view — is what separates work that compounds in culture from work that disappears.

Key Insight: AI raises the floor for everyone. It makes competent work easier to produce. But it also raises the stakes for genuine creative thinking — because when the baseline rises, standing out requires more originality, not less. The lessons in this course aren't relics of a pre-digital era. They're the operating system you need to use AI well.

So as you move through this course, hold two questions simultaneously. The first: What can I learn from Susan's story? The second: How do I apply this in a world where I have AI as a creative collaborator? The answers to both questions live in the same place — in the creative instincts you've been building your whole life, whether you've been paying attention to them or not.

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The through-line of Susan's early story is one of the most important lessons in this entire course:

Where you start your career has nothing to do with where you can go.

Receptionist. Bathroom break cover. Script typist. These are not the credentials of a future Global CCO. And yet, every single one of those roles gave Susan something she needed. The receptionist position gave her access. The informational interviews gave her relationships. The script typing gave her craft.

She wasn't waiting for the right opportunity to fall into her lap. She was building her education in real time, using whatever materials were available to her.

Susan also walked into the industry with an unusual mindset: she felt welcome. She'd read about women like Mary Wells, Charlotte Beers, and Diane Rothschild — women whose names were on doors, who ran companies, who led creative departments. She came in believing that advertising was an industry that valued women. That belief shaped how she carried herself from day one.

The lesson isn't that every industry is equally welcoming to everyone — it isn't, and Susan's story has its own chapters of challenge and resistance. But the starting posture matters. She didn't walk in apologizing for herself. She walked in ready to learn, ready to contribute, and ready to grow.

That's where every great creative career begins.

Before you move on: take five minutes and write down the three experiences — formal or informal, professional or personal — that you think have most shaped how you see and make things. Don't overthink it. Just write. You'll return to that list throughout this course.

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In the lessons ahead, we'll dig into the specific campaigns and creative philosophies that defined Susan's career — from the M&M's characters to her thinking on brand storytelling, creative leadership, and what it means to push culture forward rather than simply reflect it. We'll also keep returning to the AI question: not as a threat to creative work, but as the context that makes creative thinking more essential than ever.

But keep this foundation in mind as we go: a girl in a neighborhood yard, directing Cinderella with total seriousness. A teenager in a library, listening to Mozart through borrowed headphones. A young woman walking into an advertising agency to serve a subpoena and walking out with a glimpse of her future.

Creativity starts early. It starts small. And if you tend it carefully, it compounds.

The question is: what are you tending?