Women, Doors, and the Industry That Surprised Her

When Susan Credle walked into advertising, she wasn't bracing herself for battle. She wasn't steeling herself against a boys' club or preparing to fight for a seat at the table. She walked in expecting to be welcomed — and that single shift in mindset made all the difference.

This lesson explores Susan's perspective on gender, creative leadership, and what it truly means to be a trailblazer in an industry that has the power to shape culture. But more than that, it asks you to do something harder than reading someone else's story: to hold it up against your own career, your own habits, and the industry you're navigating right now — including the AI-powered version of it that's arriving whether you're ready or not.

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Before Susan ever set foot in an agency, she had already done her homework. She'd read about Diane Rothschild, Mary Wells, and Charlotte Beers — women whose names weren't just in the credits, they were on the doors. Running companies. Leading creative departments. Shaping the industry from the top.

This was something Susan had never encountered anywhere else in her life. In the world she grew up in — a modest upbringing in South Carolina, watching her mother work hard to keep the family afloat — women in positions of that kind of power were rare and pretty much invisible.

But advertising had them. And not just one or two as token exceptions. There was a generation of them.

Key Insight: The stories we hear before we enter a room determine how we feel when we walk through the door. Susan didn't inherit a narrative of exclusion — she inherited one of possibility. That's not luck. That's the power of visible role models doing real, documented, celebrated work.

For anyone working in creative leadership today, this is a reminder worth sitting with: the stories we tell about our industry — who belongs, who thrives, who leads — are actively shaping the next generation of talent before they ever send their first application.

Reflect on this: Who shaped your mental model of what was possible before you entered your field? And whose mental model are you shaping right now, whether you intend to or not?

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Here's the thing that makes Susan's story so instructive: she didn't walk into advertising feeling like an outsider hoping to be tolerated. She walked in feeling welcome.

"I actually came in with this mindset of I was welcome," she has said — and that framing is everything.

Think about how differently a career unfolds when you're not spending energy defending your right to be in the room. When you're not waiting for someone to question your presence. When you assume, from day one, that this is your industry too.

That assumption of belonging freed Susan to focus entirely on the work — on learning, on growing, on turning BBDO into her personal university by calling department heads for informational interviews and moonlighting to type scripts for senior creatives. She wasn't fighting for legitimacy. She was building craft.

Pro Tip: If you're in a leadership position today — creative director, ECD, department head — ask yourself: what signals are you sending to the people entering your team? Are you creating an environment where they walk in feeling welcome, or one where they have to earn the right to exist? The answer shapes everything about the talent you attract and retain.

The mindset of welcome isn't naive. It's strategic. It's generative. And it's something that can be deliberately cultivated — both in individuals and in institutions.

Put it into practice: Think about the last time you entered a new room — a new job, a new team, a new brief. Did you walk in with ownership or with apology? What would change if you consciously chose the former? Write it down. That gap between where you default and where you could be is the work.

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Susan's perspective on diversity in creative departments goes beyond the ethical argument — though that argument stands on its own. For her, the case is fundamentally creative.

When a team lacks diversity — of background, gender, race, life experience, perspective — it can only reach the ideas that team would naturally think of. And that's a ceiling. A hard, invisible ceiling on the quality and reach of the work.

Advertising, at its best, speaks to the full breadth of human experience. It has to resonate with people who grew up nothing like the people who made it. It has to connect across cultures, contexts, and lived realities. You simply cannot do that with a room full of people who all see the world the same way.

Key Insight: Homogeneous teams are efficient at producing predictable ideas. Diverse teams are capable of producing surprising ones. And in creative work, surprise is the whole game. The idea that stops someone mid-scroll, that makes them laugh unexpectedly, that makes them feel seen — those ideas almost never come from the obvious place.

Susan's work on campaigns like M&M's — building characters so human and specific that audiences believed they existed — required deep understanding of personality, humor, and relatability across a wide audience. That kind of work demands creative teams who collectively know more about the world than any one person could.

Now apply this to AI: Here's the uncomfortable truth about the tools reshaping your industry. AI systems are trained on existing data — which means they are, by definition, optimized for the predictable. They are extraordinarily good at producing what has already worked. They are far less capable of producing what has never been thought of before. The human creative who brings an unexpected perspective, an unusual life experience, a point of view that no training dataset has fully captured — that person is not competing with AI. That person is doing something AI structurally cannot do. Diversity of human perspective isn't just a creative advantage anymore. In the age of AI, it's a competitive moat.

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When Susan moved from BBDO to Leo Burnett to FCB as Global Chief Creative Officer, she brought with her a conviction that's easy to overlook: agencies are brands too.

FCB wasn't just a place to do client work. It was an entity in need of a new reputation, a personality, a promise — and that promise needed to be built with the same creative rigor that any great client brand demands.

This is a trap many agencies fall into. They pour extraordinary creative energy into their clients' brand identities while treating their own agency brand as an afterthought — something that emerges from the work rather than something that's intentionally crafted.

Susan understood that building FCB's creative reputation required the same discipline as building a consumer brand: clarity of purpose, consistency of expression, and the courage to stand for something specific rather than trying to be everything to everyone.

Pro Tip: Whether you're running an agency, a creative department, or even your own freelance practice — treat your brand with the same strategic seriousness you'd give a client. What do you stand for? What's your creative point of view? What would be lost if you disappeared? These aren't abstract questions. They're the foundation of a sustainable creative reputation.

In the AI era, this question is more urgent, not less. When AI can generate competent work at scale, the differentiator for any agency — or any individual creative — is not output volume. It's point of view. It's the specific, human, irreplaceable perspective that makes your work yours. If you can't articulate what you stand for, you're not competing on creativity. You're competing on speed and price. That's a race you will lose to a machine.

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One of Susan's most provocative and important ideas is the distinction between creative talent and advertising talent — and the industry's tendency to conflate the two.

For decades, agencies recruited from a relatively narrow pool: advertising programs, portfolio schools, a specific pipeline of people who'd been trained in a specific way to think about briefs and executions. The result was an industry that was technically skilled but culturally narrow.

Susan's view is that the industry needs to cast a wider net — to seek out creative voices from theater, from literature, from music, from communities and disciplines that have never thought about advertising at all. Because the freshest ideas rarely come from the people who've been taught exactly how ideas are supposed to work.

This connects directly to the diversity conversation. It's not just about demographics — it's about the range of creative experience and perspective that a team brings to the table. A playwright thinks about character and tension differently than a copywriter. A musician thinks about rhythm and emotion differently than an art director. Those differences are features, not bugs.

The industry that surprised Susan by having women's names on its doors has an ongoing opportunity to keep surprising itself — by opening those doors wider, to more kinds of creative minds than it's ever thought to invite in.

Put it into practice: What's the most non-advertising thing about you — your background, your obsession, your unusual frame of reference? That thing you've been quietly downplaying in interviews or briefs because it didn't seem "relevant"? That's your edge. Name it. Use it. In a world where AI can do the expected, the unexpected is your most valuable professional asset.

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Susan doesn't wear the "trailblazer" label heavily. She's not someone who leads with her gender or frames her career primarily as a story of barriers overcome. But she's also clear-eyed about what her visibility means.

When you're one of the first — or one of the few — in a room, you're not just representing yourself. You're shaping the mental model of who belongs there for everyone who comes after you. The women who came before Susan gave her permission, through their example, to walk in feeling welcome. She carries that forward.

That's the quiet, compounding work of trailblazing: not dramatic acts of defiance, but the steady accumulation of presence, excellence, and visibility that rewrites the story of who this industry is for.

Pro Tip: You don't have to be a CCO to be a trailblazer. Every time you mentor someone who doesn't look like the typical person in your role, every time you advocate for a voice in the room that wouldn't otherwise be heard, every time you do excellent work in a space where people didn't expect to see you — you're writing the story that the next person will read before they walk through the door.

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Susan's perspective on gender and creative leadership isn't a detour from the main story of her career — it is the main story, woven through everything. The mindset she brought in, the role models who shaped her, the creative case she makes for diversity, the responsibility she feels to the people coming up behind her.

The lesson isn't that the industry is perfect, or that the work is done. It's that the story we tell about the industry — and about who belongs in it — has real, measurable consequences for the talent we attract, the ideas we generate, and the culture we build.

But none of that matters if you read it and move on.

So before you close this lesson, answer three questions honestly:

1. Where in your career are you waiting for permission instead of assuming welcome? What would change if you stopped?
2. What is the most distinctly human thing you bring to your work — the lived experience, the unusual perspective, the creative instinct that no AI system could replicate? Are you leaning into it, or hiding it?
3. Who are you writing the story for? Someone is going to walk into a room you've been in and feel either welcome or like an outsider, partly because of what you did or didn't do. What story do you want them to inherit?

Susan walked in expecting to be welcome. The question worth asking is: are we building an industry — and a creative practice — where everyone can? And in a world being reshaped by AI, are we clear-eyed enough to know that the most human thing we can do is exactly that?