How I Work: Jason Kreher, Chief Creative Officer, Accenture Song
Jason Kreher likes to have fun at work. Images: c/o Jason Kreher .
Accenture Song’s Chief Creative Officer for brand, Jason Kreher has been hiding rubies in his commercials for the last 10 years. (If you look closely at his reel, you can really start to spot them.) That’s but one of the things we recently learned how he operates. Kreher’s client list is strong–Uniqlo, the Golden State Warriors, A16Z, to name a few–and so are his answers below.
Read on to learn about why he never actually writes in his notebooks, the dream studio he is building, and more.
Rise and Shine
I have two sons; one is four years old and the other is six months. Most mornings start at 7 a.m. when the eldest crawls into bed and asks me things like what snakes taste like, or if ladybugs have penises. I’m not really my best before about 10 a.m., but this routine does start the day off on a kind of free-form thought-association vibe. Which is probably good for creativity.
Work Uniform
A plain T-shirt, jeans, and comically-large Nikes.
How I Structure My Day
After I make breakfast for the boys and help get them off to school, it’s anyone’s guess how my day will shape up… I take most meetings from the dining room table or from a weird little nook I’ve carved out in my spooky basement. I spend a lot of time arguing with my partners Alex Woods and Amber Higgins on video calls, but in the fun productive way and not the toxic asshole-y way. If I need to think or write, I block off time and try to get outside of the house, but tbh none of my good ideas come from those little structured moments where I Step Away To Be Creative. It’s always some half-thought that makes me laugh while I’m brushing my teeth or something.
I generally spend my evenings cooking dinner, chewing on the baby’s cheeks, stomping around the house pretending to be a garbage truck and then, after bedtime, staring at my Tumblr feed like a preteen girl in 2012.
Playlist Favorites
Anita Baker (my husband calls this “music to dust the house to” but I think she’s top notch).
Tools of the Trade
One grubby computer and five dozen beautiful blank notebooks that I constantly buy but never write in because what thought could I possibly have that would be worthy of this perfect little vessel?
Dream Studio
I’m building it right now! I rented an abandoned DMV at the Lloyd Center Mall in Portland, and am turning it into a kinda creative studio / art experiment. It’s like a WeWork meets a Spirit Halloween. I think I like it so much because it feels as if the space itself is an invitation to change something. But there’s a loose concept too, so you gotta keep the larger idea in mind while you make. The plan is for this community to execute as many creative projects as humanly possible and then shut the whole thing down in a year.
One Unique Thing About My Work Process
I’ve been hiding rubies in my commercials for over a decade. I worked with art director Max Stinson on some Old Spice campaigns years ago. That old ruby hound was always wanting me to write scripts with rubies in them! I guess it just stuck. If you look close at my reel you can really start to spot them.
Inside My Process
For purposes of brevity I’ll speak about a project we just wrapped up for a large iconic brand I can’t talk about yet. They came to Accenture Song with an assignment to use AI to make something incredible. Beautifully simple brief. For two weeks I spent half of each day hearing these absolutely insane ideas from creatives in Cape Town, Kuala Lumpur, Portland, London, Sydney and Paris, and then the other half talking with neural learning experts and tech wizards from other parts of the globe. It was as humbling as it was inspiring.
The hours were erratic, but this was the first time I’ve experienced working so closely with people all over the globe who can take a great creative idea and make it smarter, stronger and more technically feasible in real time. It’s really expanded my appetite for what’s good and what’s possible. Now the job is trying to replicate that at scale.
Mantra
If you stay ready, you ain’t got to GET ready.
My Bright Idea that Never Saw the Light of Day
My old partner Matt Sorrell and I had a campaign marketed specifically for stepdads. If you own a snack food that features protein, please contact us and we will straight up give it to you for free.
To-Do List Item That Keeps Me Up At Night
So many people spent so much time over the last few decades helping me not be terrible at this job. I need to be constantly giving this energy back to different looking and thinking and acting types of creative people.
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