[Interview] Mario Zaradic, Creative Director, DEPT

DEPT recently appointed Mario Zaradic as Creative Director in Berlin, co-leading its DACH team. With 15 years at agencies including Scholz & Friends, DDB, and MONKS, Zaradic brings a rare mix of craft, brand strategy, and tech-driven creativity.

In this interview, he explains how he plans to raise creative standards, harness AI and data without losing human judgment, and help DEPT deliver work that travels globally while staying locally relevant.

Your 15-year career spans top German agencies like Scholz & Friends, DDB, and international firms like MONKS. What key lessons from each role are you bringing to DEPT?

I’ve learned very different things at each stage, and most of them only make sense in contrast. Early on, I learned craft. How much detail and discipline it takes to make something feel right. In more traditional agencies, I learned how to build big, coherent ideas that can travel across channels and markets. At MONKS, I learned that technology can do more than speed things up. It can expand what creativity looks like in the first place.

What I’m bringing to DEPT is that perspective across different worlds: from classic brand thinking to more technology-driven ways of making and evolving work.

How do you see the creative landscape in the DACH region evolving right now, and what unique opportunities does that present for DEPT and its clients?

The DACH region is in an interesting tension right now. On one hand, there's still a strong legacy of craft and brand-building. On the other, the performance and digital side has matured enormously, and clients are asking harder questions about what their creative investment actually returns.

The opportunity (and I think this is genuinely where DEPT is well-positioned) is to not choose between those two things. The agencies that will win in this market are the ones that can hold brand and performance together without one cannibalizing the other.

What’s the biggest creative challenge agencies face today, and how should they respond?

The biggest challenge isn’t any single technology or platform shift. It’s the pace, and how the industry has responded to it. We’ve gotten very good at producing more work, faster, across more channels. But volume and quality haven’t scaled together. We are facing a quiet loss of creative standards.

The answer isn’t to slow things down, that’s unrealistic. It’s about raising the bar within that speed. Building environments where "should we make this at all?" is a legitimate question. And ultimately, being more selective about what actually deserves to be made.

How will AI, data, and automation shape the future of creative direction at a digital agency like DEPT?

AI is changing the role of the creative more fundamentally than most people admit. The value of “having ideas” has diminished, whether we like it or not. It shifts our role from creating to curating. From starting on a blank page to directing machine outputs. That sounds efficient, but it also creates a new risk: an endless sea of sameness. There’s more content than ever, but very little of it breaks through the noise.

That’s where the real value of creative direction sits: in taste, judgment, and a deep understanding of what actually resonates with people. It’s the ability to shape meaning, and create work that feels relevant, not just algorithmically optimized. Data can tell us what works. But it doesn’t tell us what matters. In that sense, creative direction becomes the human layer in an increasingly machine-driven process.

How do you approach maintaining consistency in global campaigns while still ensuring local cultural relevance?

I think people overcomplicate this. If the core idea is strong enough, it can travel. What changes is how you express it.
The mistake is trying to control everything globally and ending up with something that feels generic everywhere. I’d rather have a clear idea that adapts than a fixed execution that doesn’t really belong anywhere.

What role does purpose-driven storytelling play in your work, and how important is it for brands today?

It matters, but I think the industry has over-indexed on purpose as a creative strategy in ways that have backfired. Audiences are more sophisticated than we give them credit for. They can tell the difference between a brand that genuinely has a point of view and one that's retrofitted a cause as a marketing layer. For me, it only works if it’s embedded in what a brand actually does, not just what it says. Otherwise, it becomes decoration.
The more interesting question today is not “What do we stand for?” but “What do we contribute?” That’s a higher bar, and a more honest one.

How would you like your tenure at DEPT to influence the broader creative industry?

I’d like to leave behind a body of work that speaks for itself.

Right now, there’s a lot of talk about the future of creativity in our industry. I’m more interested in showing what that actually looks like. If in a few years people can point at DEPT and say, “they’re doing things differently”, not because of what we say, but because of what we put out, that would be a success.

www.deptagency.com

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