Brendan Vincent

A blank sheet of paper is the best thing anyone can put in front of you.

Brendan is Creative Director at Fuel, which means he owns the creative output of the studio and sets the standard everything is measured against. Brand, campaign, film, event, the discipline shifts constantly and he rather likes that, because the big idea almost never belongs to one of them. He’s usually in at the start, when nobody’s quite sure what a thing wants to be yet, shaping the thinking early and then staying close as it gets made. What he’s really good at is seeing things clearly when the route in front of everyone else is still overgrown. He’ll cut a path through it, work out which direction is genuinely worth walking, and get the team moving before the overthinking sets in.

Brendan is as comfortable in a room full of marketing people as he is looking over a storyboard or an edit. He’s built and led creative teams, pitched and won work, and sat opposite enough boards and marketing directors to know that a great idea still has to make sense to someone with a number to hit. He’s led teams for long enough to know that the best work almost never comes from the loudest voice in the room, and that a creative director’s job is largely about making it safe for people to say the half-formed thing out loud that turns out to be the answer. He’ll tell you what he thinks, directly and without much of a run-up. It comes from the same place as everything else, which is a genuine interest in getting to the best version rather than the comfortable one.

Experience & Expertise.

The simple solution is almost always the hardest one to arrive at, because it means throwing away four decent ideas to protect one good one, and holding your nerve while a room full of clever people suggest additions. He’s rather good at that conversation, and he’s rarely wrong about which idea is the one worth keeping, which is the part of the job that only comes from having made a lot of work and watched what happens to it afterwards. Emotional intelligence does a lot of the work there too, reading what a client is genuinely worried about underneath what they’ve actually said, knowing when a team needs pushing and when it needs leaving alone.

What holds it together is a belief that ideas are worth very little until somebody makes them, and that the making is at least half the pleasure. He’s happiest in the gap between the two, when the thinking has landed and the studio has picked it up and started running, and the thing on the wall has begun to look better than the thing in his head. Seeing idea come alive – from paper to screen to realised in real life – he’d tell you, is the best bit of the job.