Anna Benson

My name is Anna, I am 34 years old. I live in Stockholm, Sweden currently. I'm from Sweden as well. My job is currently creative producer. I've changed a little bit from digital producer, which I used to be before.

What does a creative producer do? That is a great question, which has many answers.

What I do is I work at an agency currently. We are a team of different departments at an agency that have different expertise. So we have designers, for instance, we have copywriters, some developers or coders , different types of experts working all together to deliver products for our clients. And I sit in between all of these projects and people as a bit of a spider. I usually think about it like in a spider in a web.

I have of these projects and different people that I need to manage or take care of and make sure that everything keeps moving. That's literally my job. I just make sure things keep moving along.

I will take in requests from clients. They will come to us saying, hey, we might need a new website or we need help making a campaign for this new product that we're releasing and we wanted to run on all of these social media platforms, or we wanted to run out of home on big posters outside.

And then I will sit, I will talk to the client first, and then I will talk to my teams internally and figure out what it is that they need, the client, what their ask is about, to help their business. That's essentially what we're here to do.

And sometimes it's not clear, sometimes the clients doesn't know what they want , right. So we talk with them, we talk with our internal teams, our professionals in different departments. We figure out what is it that we're gonna make for this client? Is it a campaign? Is it a logo for their new brand identity, maybe? Then we talk about what team do we need to make this happen? Who needs to work on this from our side to make this the best it could possibly be?

And we talk about how much time it's gonna take to do this. Some projects are really, really long and can take months. Usually websites take really long time. Some projects are really small, like making a poster print for someone can be small.

Then I will make a project proposal and I will send this to the client and then they will say, yay or nay. And then hopefully they say, yay.

One of the fun things about my work is that there aren't really typical days. I will say there's a lot of emails involved, I write a lot of emails. I run different projects for different clients at the same time, so there's always this need for me to stay on top of what's happening.

My clients will expect me to check in with them and tell them how things are moving along. Same goes with my team, I check in with them. So I will have a couple of meetings usually, like we call them check-ins, where we just talk about how's it going, what should we prioritise, are we running into any issues, that we need to figure out together.

Sometimes I will have bigger presentations for clients showing our work. I will then help prepare those presentations and I will also lead them together with some other team members. I run workshops sometimes, could be something like a retrospective that we call it.

It's when you talk about how you think the collaboration is going in the team and talk about how you can improve things together. I really like this part actually because it's a lot about making processes better and improving things.

The best thing would be that I get to try a lot of different things and work with really creative people. I have dabbled in creative expression myself but I never wanted to become a creator. But now I get to work with a lot of these really cool, smart, creative people and I also get to do creative stuff.

I can be involved with business decisions and then analyze and see how to best move forward with a question from a client. But I also get to give my opinions on design and crazy campaign ideas and see what works and what doesn't.

So it's a very diverse role and I get to be around really great people and I think that's the best thing.

The worst thing, the worst thing about my job. It can be a bit stressful. It's a quite fast paced industry. Sometimes, you know, stress doesn't make people very nice always, and I have to manage a lot of these people. So sometimes that can be a little bit overwhelming if I have a lot of projects running at the same time.

But luckily I feel like I can always then tell that to my team and then we will help out. Or they will help me out. It's like what makes it fun, but it can also sometimes be just a little bit too much.

Why did I wanna become a creative producer? I honestly didn't. I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grew up. Kind of still don't always, to be honest.

I never really had a clear career path or idea in my mind of what I wanted to do. So I tried lots of different things. I started an education in visual communication but then, like I mentioned before, I realised I did not want to become a creator.

So instead, I left that education and started another one. And at this school, it's called Hyper Island, I met my first boss who actually introduced this role to my class. It's not really your normal school, like we didn't really have tests and lectures and stuff.

We more got to work with client briefs from real clients actually, like Spotify or SAS. They came into us and they would ask us for creative concepts or campaigns or what have you. So we got to work with real clients and like mini agencies almost. And I realised that I was sort of doing this role naturally 'cause I thought it was fun and I was quite good at it.

And then my first boss came and gave this lecture and talked about producing as a role. And I had such an aha moment and I was like, oh, this is what I'm actually doing. I just didn't know it had a name. So I kept in touch with him actually and then at the end of my education we had to do our internships, and he offered me one. So I moved to Amsterdam to do that and then I stayed for six years . So I kind of really stumbled upon it.

I've learned so much in the past six years or seven years but the biggest thing, especially for my job, I think was that when you plan a project and there are so many moving parts, which there always are in this profession, when the plan that you set at the beginning, that's just an informed decision. Things change then throughout the course of the project. Maybe a client gets a different idea of what they want or maybe it turns out that the technology you wanted to use doesn't work very well.

I think looking back, what happens a lot, and I think a lot of people do this as well, is you are so focused on this plan that you made, right? Because you're so proud of this plan that you've made and it's so nice and you have this timeline and you have everything is in check. I like organization. I'm not sure if you can tell. Something comes in and kind of derails that or changes it

So learning how to change and adapt and instead of being stressed out that something is not working out as you planned, being able to take a step back, pull everybody up from their stressed out little minds and just be like, okay, we have to change. How can we change this to still make it work?

That's something I really carry with me, overall.

I never really had a clear idea of I wanted to do. I think I would've loved to hear that it's hard to know what you wanna do to figure that out but that's okay. And that just getting out there, you're gonna figure it out along the way.

You know, when you start working or even interning or whatever, you're gonna meet people with jobs you never even heard about before, and that's gonna inspire you to go further or to maybe change to something else. I think I would've needed to hear that. I didn't have to have everything sort of figured out before I started, if that makes sense.

I think just go and try and see what sticks. And then also that part of the journey is to also learn what you don't want. And you can only learn that by doing.

So, yeah, just don't be so scared about having everything figured out before, just go along with it.