PATTAYA, THAILAND – Susan Credle’s career rise is the kind of story Peggy Olson could only dream of. She didn’t just navigate the boys’ club — she rewrote the rules.
Starting as a secretary in 1985, she worked her way up with sheer talent and determination. By 1987, she had earned her place as a junior copywriter, and by 1989, she was crafting the kind of work that made her indispensable. Her ascent continued — associate creative director, vice president by 1994, and senior vice president two years later. By 1998, she wasn’t just part of the conversation; she was leading it as Creative Director.
In 2025, Susan has become one of the advertising industry’s biggest global creative leaders. As FCB’s Global Chief Creative Officer, she has reshaped the agency’s creative reputation, driving business impact for brands like AB InBev, Bank of America, and Walmart. The creative force behind iconic campaigns such as M&M’S human and Allstate’s Mayhem,
Since joining FCB in 2016, she has ignited a culture of creative excellence, leading the network to win over 170 Clio Awards and produce Grand Clio-winning campaigns like McEnroe vs. McEnroe for Michelob ULTRA and Whopper Detour for Burger King. Under her leadership, FCB has been named Cannes Lions North America Agency of the Year for four consecutive years and Global Network of the Year in 2020/21, while also earning top honors from the Clio Awards, WARC, Fast Company, and Adweek.
A decorated industry figure, Susan has been named to Ad Age’s “100 Most Influential Women” and Business Insider’s “Most Creative Women in Advertising.” She was the first woman to chair The One Club for Creativity and has been inducted into multiple halls of fame, including the AAF Hall of Achievement and the Clio Lifetime Achievement Award. Beyond her creative legacy, she remains a passionate advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion, working to open doors for the next generation of industry leaders.
Last January 2024, Interpublic Group announced the advertising maven as their first-ever Creative Advisor. Anyone will agree that this is the logical next step in her career. Susan isn’t just known for her trailblazing campaigns and accolades. The industry is also no stranger to her ideas about creativity as a driver for business success and impact.
Amid her packed ADFEST 2025 schedule, where she served as a Grand Jury President, Susan sat down with me for a deep dive into the evolving intersection of creativity and business. In a candid and compelling exchange, the industry titan shared her insights on the shifting landscape of creativity — and why it remains the ultimate game-changer in an era of transformation.
Beyond her accolades and influence, we saw firsthand the kind of leader Susan is. Relaxed yet razor-sharp, generous with her wisdom, and deeply nurturing, she exudes a passion not just for great ideas but for the people who create them.
When a storyteller becomes a business leader
Susan’s career is proof that creative storytelling and strategic business leadership go hand in hand. When reflecting on how creativity is evolving beyond storytelling into business transformation, she naturally looked back on her formative years at BBDO. After all, it was there that she started out as a copywriter and eventually rose to executive leadership.
“I was fortunate that when I started in this business, I started at BBDO under Phil Dusenberry, and Phil believed that everything that we did creatively would lead to brilliant business outcomes,” she said.
“I’ve always said that creativity is an economic multiplier,” she continued. “If I find a creative way for you to remember something that I think will influence your purchasing decisions, your brand decisions… I guarantee you, if you apply creativity to it, I win – the business [wins] economically.”
For Susan, this idea has never just stayed in the hypotheticals. Her portfolio has proved time and time again that a creative idea doesn’t have to remain just a creative idea. It can also be something that impacts the bottom line for the better.
A campaign she looks back on later in the conversation, The Whopper Detour, is a great example of this. She recalled a conversation with Fernando Machado, who was the CMO for Restaurant Brands International (which had Burger King among its subsidiaries) at the time.
“Fernando Machado understood affinity advertising for the brand, but he said, ‘Susan, I never really realized how creativity could solve a business problem’.”
It was then that FCB showed him exactly how. Back when Burger King was struggling to get the app on people’s phones, FCB came up with The Whopper Detour. The idea had customers stunned, amused, and thrilled: you can unlock a coupon for a 1¢ Whopper if you open the app near a McDonald’s.
“It was just a fun way to get people to download the app,” Susan recalled. “But when [Fernando] saw the idea that we were playing with, he said, ‘This will work for my business problem.’ And instead of it costing him to get people to download the app, he made money because people got the Whopper. So, he actually went from losing money to get people to download the app to making money.”
“That was the first time I was like, ‘Wow, not only did we get a lot of apps downloaded, but we’ve made money in the process.’ That’s where I [realized that] creativity is absolutely an economic multiplier.”
The importance of creative and business intelligence
There’s no doubt that Susan, alongside the brands and teams she has worked with, has proven that creative intelligence is a powerful business asset. But as AI, automation, and efficiency take center stage, the real challenge emerges: How do we not only preserve the value of human creativity but elevate it as the driving force behind the future of brands and businesses?
For Susan, the answer lies in acknowledging that yes, AI can get us to good, but what comes after that is still in our hands.
“There’s that cliché line, ‘Good is the enemy of great.’ I don’t think it’s ever been more true. AI will get us to ‘good’ fast, really fast. So, ‘good’ will no longer stand out. Great is going to be the win,” she explained.
That’s not to say that she’s anti-AI. In fact, she uses AI quite often and even talks to ChatGPT – which she has affectionately called “Chappy” – daily.
“Now, [with AI,] I think we can get to ‘good’ in about a second and a half,” she posited. However, while she is consistently fascinated by how quick she can get feedback on ideas, she finds herself questioning what more it can do.
“Okay, if that’s where ‘good’ sits,” she started, repeating what she asks herself when she gets output from AI, “how does it become great?”
For Susan, AI can’t answer that. “AI looks back and gathers. But AI is not yet visionary. AI cannot be as visionary as we can be.”
The nurturer-leader
Here’s the thing, though: while humans are visionary, sometimes there are glass ceilings you have to break through to fully realize those ideas. Women in the male-dominated ad industry know this struggle all too well — just ask Peggy Olson, who spent years proving she was more than just Don Draper’s protégée.
Susan reflects on this with insights shaped by navigating the evolving world of advertising as a woman since the ’80s.
“I remember when I first got into this business, I tried to act like a guy. Like I could smoke a cigar, I could drink whiskey, I could kind of play poker…but it didn’t feel like me,” she recalled. “And I guess it came to the point where I looked around, and said, ‘There are enough guys here. Maybe we need a little more of the female presence.’”
Susan goes on to say that she believes that leadership transcends gender, focusing instead on the qualities each individual brings to the table. And those don’t have to be categorized according to gender, either. A woman could have a more masculine leadership style, while a man had a more feminine one.
It just so happens that Susan has always tended toward the more feminine style.
“I personally identify with a more feminine approach to how I show up. I am more of a nurturer,” she affirmed, mirroring one of the many leadership styles she discussed in her keynote talk at ADFEST 2025.
She emphasizes, however, that her advocacy for diversity isn’t something that’s borne out of her tendency towards a more nurturing style. It’s because she believes it paves the path towards fostering better teams.
“I’m a huge believer in diversity, not because it’s a nice thing to do, but [because] I believe it makes us all better,” she asserted. “And if I see you behaving differently than I am behaving, and I see the positive outcomes of that, then I might take a little bit of that in myself.”
Anyone who has welcomed diversity into their teams knows this. When the minds on your team come from different walks of life and are informed by more varied experiences, the bigger the range of ideas you have access to. That means more chances for the next big thing to come from your collaborators.
This angle of diversity’s value first came to her in an aha moment back when she was working in BBDO. The agency was about to lose the Pizza Hut account, and their boss got everyone in the room and laid out the hard truth.
“He was tough. He was like, ‘[If we lose this account,] three of you won’t be here in a couple of weeks.’ I looked around, and all the guys looked exactly the same. And I was like, well, I’ll be here, because nobody looks like me!” she recounted with a laugh. “I’ve got stories you all don’t have, and I’ve got points of view you all don’t have.”
“Be proud of your differences. Don’t be afraid of them,” she asserted. “Celebrate them and tell people, ‘I see the world slightly differently, which makes me interesting, and my stories might be slightly different, which might be good for us all.’”
Legacy in creativity
It’s difficult to talk about diversity and inclusion without touching upon something that people tend to conflate these topics – as well as other advocacies – with, which is the concept of making an impact and creating with purpose.
Susan is not one of those people. In fact, she makes a point to emphasize that purpose and cause marketing are not the same things. “As an industry, we’ve [treated] the word ‘purpose’ as [meaning] doing good in the world.”
“Your purpose as a brand or a business might be to irritate the fool out of somebody,” she offered as an example to why purpose doesn’t equal advocacy. “Like, what’s your brand? ‘We irritate people.’ Okay, go. Let’s see that work. So, purpose is not doing good. Purpose is living into what your business or brand is committed to.”
As the conversation shifted to the idea of purpose in creativity, Susan reflected on what drives her work and the lasting impact she hopes to leave on the industry. Without hesitation, she pointed to FCB’s tagline, Never Finished — a mantra she shaped, embodying her belief that creativity is an ever-evolving force with limitless potential.
“When I wrote ‘Never finished,’ I was looking back on my career and thinking, what am I proud of? What will I remember? What am I glad I did? And [the answer to those were] the ideas that are never finished.”
These ideas that are never finished aren’t just an abstract concept for Susan. Her portfolio is full of them, including one that’s become a pop culture icon – the M&M’s mascots.
“I remember the day we came up with the idea of this comedic ensemble based on the colors in the bag, and the vision we had for that, the stores, the merchandise… None of that existed yet. And I [don’t just love that] Steve Rutter and I got to birth that idea – not just a TV spot, but a big idea for that brand – but [I also love knowing that] other people will work on it.”
“I met with the Mars client a couple of weeks ago,” she continued. “And I was like, ‘These people weren’t even born when we came up with this idea.’ And yet, their careers are being made by an idea we had. There are creatives and business people that are looking at these things that we created and are figuring out what to do with them next. That’s so fun!”
The passion and excitement as she recounted this brand-defining campaign was palpable, and rightfully so. After all, not everyone can say they were integral in creating a campaign that people still ask about a quarter of a century later. However, that campaign was far from the peak that creative ideas could reach under her leadership.
Turning good into great
Susan believes that true creative excellence isn’t just about innate talent — it’s about relentless practice. “This is where I find that what we do is special,” she says, pushing back on the idea that “everybody’s a creative” just waiting to tap into it.
Instead, she aligns with Nick Law’s perspective: “The way that we get to great is by practice. You know, the old Carnegie Hall—how do you get to Carnegie Hall? You practice, practice, practice.” She recalls her early days in the industry, admitting, “When I first started doing this, I didn’t know what I was doing.”
That’s why she stresses the importance of experience, warning against a rising “era of exceptionalism” where raw talent is mistaken for expertise. “We throw them in and put them on things before they’re ready, because we think, ‘Oh, anybody can write a piece of film.’ It’s like, no, not really. Not really.” In her view, great creatives aren’t born—they’re built through time, effort, and repetition.
In the decades that followed, she went on to lead teams to be great, creating and building upon more of the very things she’s proud of in her career – ideas that are never finished. Which is why her work as a CCO was something she brings into this discussion of legacy and career-defining benchmarks.
“When I look back, besides the work, I get the most excited about thinking about the people that I’ve had the opportunity to work with that have gone on to be Global CCOs, CCOs, award-winning ECDs…That gets me the most excited,” she said. “The CCO should be making the great people, and those great people should be making the great work.”
As Susan reflects on what defines her career, it becomes clear that creating ideas that are never finished goes beyond just doing good work. It’s more than just creating great work, even.
For the business of creativity to thrive, it needs more than bold ideas — it needs leaders who cultivate a culture that empowers the people behind the work. With visionaries like Susan paving the way and the teams built on the foundation she’s laid, the future of the creative industry isn’t just in good hands — it’s set to soar. If Mad Men had been written with more women like Susan in mind, the ending might have looked a whole lot different.
