Begin your transition from Tactical to strategic

Learn how to use the Creative Strategy Framework to organize your creative process in four columns:
target, facts, features, and benefits, to achieve the objective or message you want to communicate.

Organize your research and pull out the resulting threads from the previous exercise. To wrap up the course, Douglas teaches you how to develop these into a scenario analysis ready to present.

Begin your transition from tactical to strategic today >

See the public path to a creative career, visit the Emmy-Award winning COMD @ City Tech >

Get the Business skills Every Creative needs

Remaining relevant as a creative professional takes more than creativity—you need to understand the language of business. The problem is that design school doesn’t teach the strategic language that is now essential to getting your job done. Creative Strategy and the Business of Design
fills that void and teaches left-brain business skills to right-brain creative thinkers. Inside, you’ll learn about the business objectives and marketing decisions that drive your creative work. 

The curtain’s been pulled away as marketingspeak and business jargon are translated into tools to help you: Understand client requests from a business perspective, build a strategic framework to inspire visual concepts, increase your relevance in an evolving industry, redesign your portfolio to showcase strategic thinking, and win new accounts and grow existing relationships.

You already have the creativity; now it’s time to gain the business insight. Once you understand what the people across the table are thinking,
you’ll be able to think how they think to do what we do. Audiobook now available >

Strategy and creativity are a set of choices and leaders seek how to think about those choices vs looking for a recipe, template or formula. Creative leadership is about developing the discernment needed to listen less for what to do and more for how to take what you’re hearing and turning that into a decision making process in your situation. As we work together in coaching sessions, I’ll help you retrain the way you listen. Shift your perspective now >

Our passion for the work is part of the gift of being creative. We are an emotional people. We’re trained to channel our emotion into tangible concepts using words and pictures that achieve client objectives. Yet most of us aren’t actively trained on how to manage those emotions in the context of a presentation. We walk into a room full of people we’ve never met before and present something we’ve poured countless hours of love, creativity and effort into. From the informal internal presentation to the formal new business pitch, every creative knows this comes with the territory. Knowing that the presentation is coming doesn’t make giving it any easier. Many of us have worked for the “creative genius” who yells. I now understand that those creatives were promoted for how well they executed the work and were completely unprepared to lead. The skillset that it takes to be a successful creative is not the same skillset to be a successful creative leader. As we work together in coaching sessions, I’ll help you develop the way you lead. Develop creative leadership now >

Most of us are juggling the stress and adrenaline of having multiple projects and deadlines. In an instant, the same emotions that enable us to create can become our worst enemy to finding the words to articulate what we’ve created. So when someone says, “I don’t like it,” it can sound like, “I don’t like your nose.” It takes active training and experience not to take it personally because it is personal. On top of all the emotions, it’s in the forefront of our minds that if the presentation is bad, your idea is going to die. As we work together in coaching sessions, I’ll help you develop the confidence to defend without being defensive. Begin the transition from tactical to strategic now >

WORK EXPERIENCE

PHILOSOPHY: WORKING, TEACHING, AND LEARNING ARE INSEPARABLE IN A PROFESSION THAT KEEPS CHANGING. 

INCREASING THE VARIETY OF VOICES MAKING A LIVING WITH THEIR IMAGINATION

My agency experience, current role, and personal mission to increase the variety of voices making a living with their imagination align perfectly. I believe in representation both in front of and behind the concept, storytelling, or execution. My involvement and contribution to advancing EDI have been both as advocate for inclusion and an activist for change. 

I didn’t have an example of color though I studied design at Hampton University, a Historically Black College. After graduating Hampton, I moved to Brooklyn for graduate school at Pratt Institute. Soon after breaking into advertising, I realized adding strategy to my creativity would give me an advantage so I applied to NYU. When I look back, there wasn’t one Black design or strategy professor across three institutions. And then I became a design and strategy professor.

Providing an example is the idea at the core of, Imported From Brooklyn. As an advocate for inclusion who remembers having to overcome the reoccurring burden of a lack of resources, I’m hopeful because of the accessibility to high-quality college options like our program. See my mission in action >

STRATEGIST, AUTHOR, AND PROFESSOR

Brooklyn-based Douglas Davis enjoys being one of the variety of voices needed in front of and behind the concept. His approach to creativity combines right-brained creative problem solving with left-brained strategic thinking. Douglas’ integrated point of view has enabled his natural evolution from designer to strategist, author, and professor. His expertise spans advertising, design, and business education, and has found an international audience through presenting his tools on combining the three to produce more effective creative business solutions. In 2016, Douglas wrote Creative Strategy and the Business of Design, a title that was translated into Mandarin in partnership with Beijing Normal University Publishing Group in 2020. He is a former co-chair of AIGA’s National Diversity and Inclusion Taskforce and regularly contributes to the business of design discourse in Printmag.com, Applied Arts, and The European Business Review.

In 2011 Douglas founded The Davis Group LLC and continues to offer strategic solutions to client branding, digital, and design problems. In addition to client work, Douglas leverages his professional experience to inspire high school, undergraduate, and graduate students. He is former Chair of the Emmy-Award winning BFA in Communication Design program at New York City College of Technology in Brooklyn and serves on the advisory boards of the University of Oregon’s Masters in Advertising and Brand Responsibility and City College’s Masters in Branding and Integrated Communications. Douglas holds a B.A. in Graphic Design from Hampton University, an M.S. in Communications Design from Pratt Institute, and an M.S. in Integrated Marketing from New York University. Emmy award-winning Strategist, Author & Chair, B.F.A. Communication Design ....who depends on what day.

It's my opinion that the business or design education that qualifies us to service the client as a team of professionals doesn't equip us to talk to each other. Bridge this communication gap and add business skills to your creativity. Whatever your professional development, coaching or creative direction needs, I’m interested in working with talented people who take risks when seeking solutions. I'm open to the range of possibilities from speaking engagements, podcast interviews to custom course design. Let's begin the conversation.

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