One of the stranger parts of agency life is how often you’re expected to become an expert in something by tomorrow.

Clients hire experts. Agencies, meanwhile, are frequently handed an industry, technology, or subculture they’ve never touched before and told the meeting is Tuesday. So you dive in. You learn the language, understand the market, figure out what everyone else is saying, and, most importantly, develop an actual point of view about it.

I’ve always thought that’s one of the more underrated skills creative leaders develop. Stick around long enough, and you get remarkably good at walking into unfamiliar worlds, understanding them quickly, finding the interesting part, and figuring out how to make other people care. I often wonder where else that skill might be useful. You know. Just in case.

Arculus was one of those worlds.

To help build and market the Arculus brand, we had to understand crypto, fintech, Web3, NFTs — even though everyone was already getting bored of saying NFTs — digital security, and the very different cultures, motivations, and anxieties that existed inside each of those spaces.

And we couldn’t bullshit our way through it. The team at Arculus was really damn smart. They knew the technology, knew the market, and would immediately see through some agency showing up with a few buzzwords and a mood board.

So we learned.

Justin Girard was my creative director on the account and fully owned the content and brand experience, constantly pushing both into better places. It became that beautiful version of creative direction where someone stops treating a brand like an assignment and starts treating it like something they’re responsible for protecting, nurturing, and growing. He watched over Arculus like it was his own baby. That’s why he’s the best in the biz!

Meanwhile, I got the fun part: figuring out how we could take startup dollars and make Arculus feel much, much bigger than a startup. How do we enter a loud, skeptical, rapidly changing category and actually get noticed? How do we build credibility without becoming boring? How do we explain complicated technology without sanding away everything interesting about it?

Oh, the fun of creative leadership.

We learned a ridiculous amount. We made some great work. And, for a little while, we got to become crypto, fintech, Web3, digital-security experts.

At least until the next meeting, where we had to learn something entirely new and also be experts.