About David Willis
I’m an Executive Creative Director with more than 26 years across design, digital advertising, performance media, and creative operations. I started as a hands-on designer and front-end-minded creative. That foundation still matters because I believe leadership is strongest when it stays connected to how ideas are made, how systems behave, and where quality can break down.
Leadership
Over time, my work expanded from making the thing to building the conditions around it: clearer strategy, stronger teams, better briefs, more useful feedback, practical production systems, reliable QA, and tighter connections between creative, media, measurement, development, and client leadership.
Systems
I’m especially interested in the point where creative judgment and operating design meet. The Audience-First Creative System came from a simple frustration: agencies were becoming increasingly precise about who they targeted while still giving different audiences essentially the same creative. I built a system that makes the message as intentional as the media plan and turns response into learning the next campaign can use.
AI
I use AI as an efficiency and intelligence layer, not as a substitute for creative leadership. It can accelerate synthesis, first drafts, variation, QA, documentation, and analysis. People still own the strategy, the concept, the craft, the context, and the decision.
Business
I also understand that a creative department has to work as a business. I have led scoping, capacity planning, forecasting, staffing, workflow design, and margin discipline alongside team development and creative quality. The goal is not only to make better work. It is to build a healthier way to make it repeatedly.
I’m based in the Denver/Boulder area and open to local, hybrid, or remote ECD and VP-level creative leadership roles.