GOOD CEOs: Issue 9

Creativity
Meets Capital
🤝

There are two stereotypes that exist in the world of talent. They’re to do with whether we label someone a creative or a commercial brain. Conventional wisdom states that if you have the former, then you’re blessed with a natural flair for ideas, storytelling and craft. If it’s the latter, then you’ll possess an incisive ability to spot opportunity and cut into the numbers.

If you have a creative brain, then it’s likely that you work in the art department of an agency, or you’re the artistic director of a theatre or gallery. You’re a writer, a photographer, a poet, a designer, a fine artist. You wear a beanie, and work in Shoreditch – or Soho.

If you have a commercial brain, then it’s likely that you work as an analyst in a big consulting firm, or you have come up through the ranks at an investment bank. Maybe you’ve diverted into VC or angel investing. You wear a gilet, and work in the City – or Mayfair.

I think that there is a serious problem with these caricatures. It lies in what we assume each category is bad at. People who opt for creative jobs are viewed as commercially naïve. While commercial people are seen as having a dearth of imagination.

Pushing this view to its maximum, we get the archetypes.

Starving artist
100% integrity
0% prosperity

Sell-out capitalist
0% integrity
100% prosperity

The thing is: these images aren’t real. But they survive because we have, in recent decades, cultivated the belief that creativity and capital live on opposite poles from one another. Each one is everything that the other isn’t.

But if we can hold off on all the oppositional (it’s not that, it’s this) thinking for a moment, it is clear that there is a set of striking similarities between the spheres of creativity and capital. Also, I feel like they have more points of intersection now than at any other point in history.

Here are a few ways how – and a few reasons why – I’ve come to this conclusion.

The gilet-beanie combo

I feel like there has never been a more urgent moment for these two groups to learn from, and understand, each other. In recent years, the image of creativity among finance people has shifted, and more who work in the category are grasping that imagination, intuition and innovation are the acts that drive value creation (and way more than anything else).

Which is part of the reason why private equity is throwing funds behind agencies, and creativity is now thought of as an asset class. In the first quarter of 2025, PE-backed buyers accounted for 65% of acquisitions in the UK's media and marketing services sector, according to Moore Kingston Smith. The sharpest creative leaders that we speak to at UNKNOWN are getting familiar with the mechanics and philosophies that reside in Wall Street or Canary Wharf. Because understanding capital helps in a number of ways.

 
New brooms

Agency founders or execs are used to reporting to parent companies. Culturally, this doesn’t feel like a stretch, because those larger networks are staffed and run by people who they recognise. It’s advertising/marketing/ design people dealing with advertising/marketing/ design people.

With PE entering the chat, creative leaders are discovering that their new paymasters have a different angle on the value of the work, and the direction of the business.

When private equity, venture capital or institutional investors get involved, the operating system changes. Return expectations are introduced, and bosses think in terms of

• growth models

• ownership structures

• risk

• debt

Creative decisions, like hiring an art director, or designing a client campaign, start to be viewed with an investor mindset: as ways of deploying capital. More than a few agency founders we’ve dealt with have been stunned by the sudden imposition of cold logic on their businesses. For instance, a drop in revenue automatically triggering a drop in headcount.

Crossing the linguistic moat

The most valuable creative leaders know how to apply the principles of capital to their agency businesses. They understand how to satisfy the growth demands of investors, while protecting the culture and brand of the company they’re building, too. Part of this is having an ability to cross what we call a ‘linguistic moat’ – the fact that the worlds of creativity and capital often have drastically different ways of describing the world. The language of finance is technical terms and acronyms (think EBITDA, CAGR, IRR), while the language of creativity is more philosophical (think stories, quotes, ideas). Being able to speak in tongues is an underappreciated ability for leaders who must attend a board meeting in the morning, then oversee the creation of the work in the afternoon.

The boundaries between creative leadership and capital deployment are blurring. Which is why the modern agency boss increasingly looks less like a traditional CEO, and more like…

A founder.
Someone with a clear philosophy. And an intent to use it to alter the world.

An operator.
Someone with a builder mindset. And who is using that to constantly improve the business.

An investor.
Someone who understands the link between meaning and money.

When you boil it down…

Capital is the greatest enabler of creativity. It determines which ideas get built, which companies thrive, and whose visions become reality.

Creativity is the greatest multiplier of capital. It drastically increases the perceived value of products, services, and businesses.

 
Capital ideas

Creativity and capital have a lot to gain with closer integration. And the best in either arena will adopt the skills and thinking of the other. The future belongs to people who are able to clearly see and apply the strengths of both. It’s time to throw out the idea that these two worlds are poles apart – in reality, they’re more like neighbouring cities.

We’ll be exploring the idea of creativity meets capital much more in the coming weeks