Is a creative operations manager the same thing as a Project manager?
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I've only ever worked in big traditional creative ad agencies. Got laid off last year, now work in-house. I'm shocked at how much nicer & down-to-earth my current coworkers are. Realizing in retrospect how cliquey & competitive my creative peers were, and how extensively the agency model relies on social hierarchy
Tell me if this is normal/okay: I’m in a Sr AD role and wrote a concept for us to shoot, promoting an experience that was my idea. It was well thought out and I wrote a script. The day of the shoot, my CD decided to direct the talent with my script. I was on set thinking “wtf” and wasn’t sure if that was normal or not. The worst part is that they totally tanked with the direction and we ended up scraping the footage and the idea. I feel like if I wrote it, I should have directed. Thoughts?
No. Project managers focus on getting projects to run smoothly. Creative ops is about managing the department. It involves staffing, utilization, thinking about how to structure the team and what roles are needed to ensure ability to deliver on work that gets sold, etc. Nothing whatsoever to do with managing projects, other than perhaps the initial staffing. It is a job for an operations person, not a PM, but specifically an ops person who understands creatives and creative work. Google designOps, devOps or even literally just creative Ops to learn more about discipline-specific operations roles.
This is a great explanation. PM you’re managing the project deadlines. CRM (creative resource manager or creative ops) you’re making sure the agency has the tools it needs, (aka employees/staffing), to do the work. They both address mostly internal needs. To compare, a Producer executes and guides the work on the outside, (out of pocket costs, exterior vendors etc).
Hell no.