JULY 15, 2025
Get off the conveyor belt: 22 leaders on
the secret to great work
#NoCode
#DesignProcess
#Inspiration
By Tessa Reid
Assembly lines are out. Real creative partnerships are in. In our latest guide, 22 top creative and marketing leaders unpack how great work really gets made—from bold ideas to buy-in.
“It can’t be an assembly line. You have to bake in collaboration—brainstorms, thought starters—before your jump to production. That’s where the best ideas come from.”
Kevin Branscum, Senior Director of Brand Marketing at Typeform, shared this thought when we interviewed him for our latest guide. And he wasn’t the only one. The concept of partnerships—true collaboration between marketers and creatives—came up over and over again as the lynchpin for any successful campaign.
That’s why we called the guide, Inside Great Creative Partnerships.
It digs into hard-earned, real-life lessons from 22 top creative and marketing leaders shipping great work, together. We’ve already spilled their number one secret. But there are many more big ones, like:
...and of course, what role the robot in the room should (and shouldn’t) play.
Here’s a sneak peek of these secrets, courtesy of marketing and creative leaders at Wistia, Leonardo.Ai, Typeform, Booking.com, Twilio and yours truly, Superside. For the whole pot of tea, grab the guide.
The source of great ideas
No, it’s not ChatGPT. Though it can certainly play a role, which we’ll touch on in a sec.
But first and foremost, great ideas can come from everywhere. That really narrows it down, doesn’t it?
Before you bounce, consider what that really means: Being open to inspiration from every source, both internally from every person and department and externally from every brand and vertical. At Wistia, fostering an environment where great ideas can, and do, come from everywhere is one of the creative and marketing team’s secrets to standout campaigns.
The source of great ideas
No, it’s not ChatGPT. Though it can certainly play a role, which we’ll touch on in a sec.
But first and foremost, great ideas can come from everywhere. That really narrows it down, doesn’t it?
Before you bounce, consider what that really means: Being open to inspiration from every source, both internally from every person and department and externally from every brand and vertical. At Wistia, fostering an environment where great ideas can, and do, come from everywhere is one of the creative and marketing team’s secrets to standout campaigns.
The best ideas come from all over. We get a lot of inspiration from brands outside our industry. And we have a creative inspo channel in Slack where people from all over, not just the marketing team, can share examples of social posts, advertisements, and anything related to creative to spark ideas across the team.
Taylor Corrado
Senior Director of Brand Marketing at Wistia
But Wistia’s Taylor Corrado, Senior Director of Brand Marketing, and Adam Day, Creative Director, didn’t just talk the talk. They walked the walk, sharing examples of SNL skits inspiring the format for a “live show” launching their annual State of Video Report and Hinge’s phonebook campaign sparking the idea for their own physical Webinar Guidebook.
These creative campaigns landed to the tune of thousands of downloads. Of course, figuring out which ideas will land is a whole other topic. Thankfully, Day and Corrado had some thoughts there too, starting with focusing on the best idea to achieve your goals while considering audience resonance.
The best idea is so subjective. What’s the best idea for the outcome you want? What’s the best idea for the goal?
Adam Day
Creative Director at Wistia
Day went on to share simple frameworks for both sourcing and validating ideas, as well as advice for fostering an environment where creativity can thrive. The bottom line: Teams need to feel safe and supported to do their absolute best work.
Now as promised, let’s talk about AI.
Though ChatGPT may not be the source of all great ideas, it can expand your thinking, leading you down a path full of possibilities.
Jessie Hughes, Senior Creative Technologist at Leonardo.Ai, and Cristian Ginori, Marketing Strategy Manager at Superside, both agreed that rapid iteration and the expansion of possibilities AI offers is invaluable in the ideation process.
A lot of the point of generative AI is iteration. It’s having iterative, variable, constantly-evolving and changing imagery, which I find very helpful for improving or getting closer to a good idea.
Jessie Hughes
Senior Creative Technologist at Leonardo.Ai
But the key to unlocking AI’s value? Human input. Hughes leans into the happy accidents that arise when using AI tools in design, but knows when it’s time to refine and ensure the final aesthetic of an image aligns with the creative brief. Ginori does the thinking—shares structured information on audience, pain points, past campaigns, brand and more—to ensure AI’s output aligns with the business problem at hand.
It’s all about input. The way I see it, I’m the brain and AI is the hands. So now, what I focus on is being very precise about what I need, how I need it and how I frame it.
Cristian Ginori
Marketing Strategy Manager at Superside
How to actually do more with less How many times have you heard the phrase “do more with less” this year?
Has anyone ever explained how to… well… actually do that?
The creative and marketing teams at Typeform have some tangible advice. In addition tounderscoring the importance of alignment, Tess Ramsey, Creative Operations Manager at Typeform, has built structured processes to scale sustainably: A tiering model that categorizes projects by complexity and creative involvement, and a point system to guide monthly and weekly planning.
Bell broke down what those foundations look like at Booking.com, including their brand guidelines and creative principles, and shared how these constraints can actually spark creativity. The best example: Booking.com’s Muppet-forward Super Bowl ad starring the iconic Miss Piggy.
There’s no singular formula for breakthrough creative.
But if there were, it would include emotion, value and targeted formats.
Darren Suffolk, Creative Director of Video Services at Superside, emphasized the need to provide value in every interaction. But that value doesn’t need to be information. It can be emotional: A moment of levity or validation. In fact, the more your content moves, the more attention-grabbing it will be.
Twilio’s Adam Morgan, VP of Brand, and Nicholas Kontopoulos, VP of Marketing, Asia Pacific & Japan, know a thing or two about selling a creative vision upwards and downwards. This duo combines masterful storytelling and a powerful brand-to-revenue model to build the trust, relationships and excitement needed to get company-wide buy-in.
Kontopoulos then takes Morgan’s vision and translates it into the “love language of sales in the field.” In its simplest form, that means tying creative initiatives to pipeline and revenue. Explaining creative in these terms helps in-market representatives understand how storytelling can expand conversations (and deal sizes). A perfect example: Twilio’s
Tessa Reid
Sr. Content Marketing Manager
Tessa is a Senior Content Marketing Manager at Superside with a background in conversion copywriting and B2B marketing for SaaS companies. As a publishing graduate and a digital marketing agency veteran with almost a decade of experience, she has a deep appreciation for the art of storytelling and the power of human emotion combined with creativity.
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