[Interview] Ben Williams, Global Chief Creative Officer, DEPT

DEPT Agency recently appointed Ben Williams as its first Global Chief Creative Officer, marking a new chapter in the agency’s evolution.

With over 25 years of senior creative leadership experience, including at TBWA\Worldwide, Ben brings a career-spanning perspective across brand, design, experience, and technology-driven creativity.

He spoke to Marketing Report about his first priorities, fostering collaboration across disciplines, time zones, and cultures, and ensuring that creativity is directly linked to tangible business impact.

Ben, congratulations on being named the first Global Chief Creative Officer of DEPT.

You’ve held senior creative leadership roles for over 25 years, including at TBWA\Worldwide. How has your past experience shaped your approach to leading creativity at a global level?

It’s definitely an exciting time for DEPT and I’m energized to have found a home leading a broad set of incredible creative capabilities and teams.

I’ve spent my career moving between independent agencies and holding-company networks, across brand, design, experience, and technology-driven creativity. That range matters. I’ve seen the power of iconic brand thinking, and I’ve also seen where traditional models start to strain as creativity expands beyond campaigns into products, platforms, services, and systems.

What that journey has given me is clarity: creativity today isn’t just about expression, it’s about orchestration.

As agency models and definitions of “great work” are being rewritten in real time, DEPT is already built for what’s next. My focus is to harness that advantage, align our creative firepower globally, and help define a modern standard for creativity that’s culturally relevant, technologically fluent, and commercially impactful.

As DEPT’s first Global Chief Creative Officer, what are your top priorities in your first 12 months?

Most immediately, to align our various global creative teams.

DEPT has an incredibly rich mix of creative capabilities, from brand and product design to campaign creative, social, experience innovation, and CRM.

The opportunity is to bring that together under a clear, ownable creative north star and a shared set of standards.

When teams are aligned around ambition, craft, and outcomes, they can move faster, collaborate more fluidly, and deliver work that feels coherent rather than fragmented. That alignment is the foundation for modern creativity.

DEPT emphasizes “creativity that moves the needle for clients.” How do you define creativity in this context, and what differentiates DEPT’s approach from other agencies?

For far too long, creative work has been allowed to exist at arm’s length from real business impact.

Some of it has hidden behind soft metrics, or has confused industry recognition with effectiveness. That era is ending. Expectations of creativity have changed, and rightly so.

At DEPT, we think of creativity as intentional bravery. It starts with absolute clarity on the business challenge, and then applies bold, distinctive thinking to solve it in ways that cut through the noise and stand out in culture. We don’t see creativity as a single campaign or moment in time.

We take a broader, more modern view, combining creativity, technology, experience design, media, and behavior to build solutions that live where audiences actually are. That’s how creativity moves the needle for brands today.

What are the challenges and opportunities of managing a globally integrated creative team, and how do you intend to foster collaboration across time zones and cultures?

Both a challenge, and an opportunity, is alignment without uniformity. Globally integrated teams only work when there’s a shared north star paired with deep respect for craft and each other. The goal isn’t to flatten differences, it’s to connect them.

At DEPT, collaboration works when every discipline understands the value of the others. No single craft dominates. That mindset allows us to assemble truly multidisciplinary teams that bring different perspectives to the table, challenge each other, and ultimately produce stronger, more original solutions.

How do you measure the success of creative work beyond awards, and how do you ensure campaigns drive tangible business results?

It all starts with intention.

Before a single idea is developed, we need clarity on what problem we’re solving or what opportunity we’re unlocking. That clarity allows us to define meaningful metrics from the outset and measure success against real outcomes, not just opinion or taste.

When creativity is grounded in intention, evaluation becomes more objective. Awards can still matter, but they’re no longer the sole proof of excellence. Impact for the brand and business is.

With emerging technologies like AR, AI, and immersive experiences, how do you see creativity evolving in the next 3–5 years?

Creativity isn’t evolving, it has already changed.

Many agencies are still reacting to that shift. DEPT is built around it. When creativity and technology are integrated from the start, ideas can live more naturally across channels, platforms, and experiences.

In the coming years, brands will need to rethink not just what they say, but where and how they show up. The old model of brand building through a handful of broadcast moments is over. Brands will be built everywhere, across physical, digital, immersive, and increasingly invisible spaces. Creativity has to adapt accordingly, becoming more dynamic, more experiential, and more useful to stay relevant.

Finally, paint a picture of success. Eighteen months from now, what would a headline about DEPT’s creative work under your leadership look like, and what key metric would you point to as proof of concept?

“DEPT is redefining what modern brand creativity looks like.”

That’s the headline I’d love to see. In eighteen months, success looks like the industry clearly understanding what DEPT stands for creatively, and clients feeling the tangible impact of work that blends creativity and technology in new ways.

Awards are great, and I hope we win them. But the real proof will be clients seeing DEPT not as a vendor, but as an indispensable creative partner helping them win today and build for what’s next.

Any other thoughts?

Creativity is being disrupted. It’s facing both a reckoning and a revolution. For some, that’s uncomfortable. For me, it’s the most exciting moment to be a creative.

www.deptagency.com

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