They Hired Me to Fix What They Broke — And Nobody Wanted to Hear How Bad It Actually Was

The call always sounds the same.

"We need someone to come in and help us build a content series. Something with real storytelling. Something that connects. We've seen what the good ones look like and we want that."

And I always ask the same question: "What have you tried before?"

There's always a pause. Sometimes it's two seconds. Sometimes it's five. And in that pause lives the entire truth of why they're calling me — a fractional Creative Director, a work-for-hire gun brought in for 12 to 18 months to do what their internal team couldn't, or what their agency already failed at, or both.

"We've had a few attempts," they say. Which is code for: we burned through resources, we produced content that went nowhere, someone internally lost their job over it, and now we're hoping you can come in and make it look like none of that happened.

I take the job anyway. Every time. Because I actually believe the work can be done. And because someone has to.

Let's Be Clear About What This Role Actually Is

There's a lot of romantic bullshit floating around about fractional executives. The pitch is usually something like: "You get senior-level expertise without the overhead!" Which is technically true but misses the point entirely.

What a fractional CD actually is — at least the version that works — is someone who comes in with full creative authority, zero institutional loyalty to the way things have always been done, and the operational clock ticking from day one. You don't have the luxury of a six-month onboarding. You don't have the comfort of a long-term political relationship to protect. You walk in, you assess the damage, and you build.

And here's the part nobody tells the brand before they sign the contract: the building almost always has to start with demolition.

Because when I walk into a brand and ask to see everything they've produced in the last 18 months, what I find — consistently, almost without exception — is not a storytelling problem. It's a clarity problem. The brand doesn't know what story it's trying to tell. It doesn't know who it's telling it to. And it has spent a significant amount of money producing content that looks busy without meaning anything.

That's not a creative failure. That's a structural one. And you can't content-create your way out of a structural problem.

The Industry Just Handed Me a Dozen New Job Listings

Here's the context that nobody in the room ever acknowledges out loud: the fractional CD role is exploding right now partly because the traditional infrastructure that used to do this work is visibly collapsing.

WPP — the company that was until recently the largest advertising holding company in the world — just announced a $676 million cost-cutting plan, restructured its entire operation into four divisions, and declared that it is, in their CEO's own words, "no longer a holding company." Agency-specific titles inside GroupM — now rebranded WPP Media — are being "sunsetted." Mindshare, Wavemaker, EssenceMediacom: no longer distinct business units.

And Omnicom just swallowed IPG for $9 billion and immediately retired DDB, FCB, and MullenLowe. Gone. Three of the most storied names in the history of this industry, dissolved into a merger, taking roughly 10,000 jobs with them across both companies combined.

Ten. Thousand. Jobs.

Let me say that again so it lands: DDB — the agency that gave the world "Think Small" for Volkswagen, the work that literally changed what advertising was allowed to be — is gone. Retired into a corporate reorganization.

So when brands call me, it's not just because they want better content. It's because the ecosystem that used to provide creative leadership is actively dismantling itself. And someone has to step into that void. Right now, a lot of the time, that someone is me.

That should feel significant. It does. And it scares the shit out of me in the best possible way.

Walking Into the Room

The first 30 days of any fractional engagement aren't about creating anything. They're about listening. Auditing. And having the honest conversations that nobody else in the building is willing to have.

I look at the content archive. I look at what performed and why — not just the vanity metrics, not the follower counts, but the actual behavior. Did people share it? Did they save it? Did they leave comments that indicated they felt something? Or did the posts just sit there accumulating impressions the way furniture accumulates dust?

Then I look at the brief — if one exists — and figure out where the story the brand thinks it's telling diverges from the story its audience is actually receiving. That gap is always where the problem lives.

And then I have the meeting nobody wants to have.

The one where I tell the marketing director that their "behind-the-scenes series" isn't a series — it's a tour of facilities nobody asked to visit. The one where I tell the CEO that their idea to "be the face of the brand's content" is going to make everyone uncomfortable, including the audience. The one where I say, directly and without apology, that the content they've been producing isn't failing because it's bad — it's failing because it's about the wrong thing.

It's about the product. When it should be about the people.

That conversation costs me political capital every single time. And I have it every single time. Because if I don't, I'm just another expensive consultant who nods along until the contract ends. That's not the job.

Building the World Before You Film a Frame

Here's what I actually get paid to do, underneath all of it: I get paid to build the creative philosophy that makes a series possible before a single camera is picked up.

That means defining the emotional territory first. What does this brand have permission to make people feel? Not what does it want to sell — what does it have the cultural credibility to make you feel? Those are completely different questions, and most brands have never been asked the second one.

It means finding the intersection of what the brand stands for and what the audience actually gives a damn about — and understanding that those two things are not always the same, and the audience's version always wins.

When we built FAV 5 for Laced SouthBay — produced by Taylor Smith + directed by Johnathan Champion — the entire creative philosophy fit in one sentence: center the human, not the shoe. That was it. Every creative decision ran through that filter. Every interview question. Every edit. Every frame.

And what came out the other side was something that had nothing to do with retail and everything to do with memory, identity, fathers and sons, neighborhoods, and the cultural weight that a pair of sneakers can carry when you understand what shoes actually mean to the people who wear them.

That series worked not because we made great content. It worked because we made the right decision first — and then made great content in service of that decision.

That's what the architecture phase produces. Not a shot list. A reason for the camera to exist.

Month Four Is Where Brands Go to Panic

Here's the reality of the 12-to-18-month fractional engagement that nobody puts in the proposal: month four is where everything gets tested.

The series has launched. It's building. The audience is growing, but not at the rate someone in the C-suite projected in a slide deck based on nothing. And suddenly the conversations start. "Should we mention the product more directly?" "Can we run some paid behind this?" "What if we pivoted to something more trend-responsive?"

This is the moment. This is where brands either commit to the story or abandon it for the illusion of faster results. And I have to be the person in the room who holds the line — not because I'm being precious about the creative, but because I've seen what happens when you break narrative continuity to chase a quarterly metric. You don't get the metric. And you lose the story. And you have to start over. Again.

The brands that win are the ones who stay in the room past month four. The ones who trust that story compounds the way interest compounds — slowly at first, then suddenly. The brands that bail are the ones who six months later are on the phone with the next fractional CD, explaining that they've "had a few attempts."

What You Leave Behind

The deliverable at the end of a fractional engagement isn't the content. It's the infrastructure — the creative philosophy, the editorial POV, the story architecture — that lets the brand keep telling the story after you're gone.

That's what success looks like from this seat. Not the views. Not the engagement rate. The moment where the brand's internal team can look at a piece of content and ask "does this feel like us?" — and actually know the answer. Because you built the language. You built the world. You handed them the keys.

And then your contract ends. And you walk out of a brand you've fallen in love with, a story you'll never get to see fully realized, a community you helped build but won't be there to watch grow.

That's the emotional cost nobody talks about in the pitch.

Damn. It hits every time.

But you do it anyway. Because the work matters. Because culture built on honest human stories is the only marketing that was ever worth a damn. And because somewhere out there is another brand sitting on a story it doesn't yet know how to tell — waiting for someone willing to walk into the room and tell the truth.

That's the job.