"Scare everyone. Be the fresh, fearless, new talent that makes everyone envious of what you bring to the party."
Like many starting out their careers, Caroline Paris’s route into advertising was inspired by a brilliant tutor at her university in Loughborough where she was studying graphic design. It was on his recommendation that she found herself a creative partner, Rob Butcher and embarked on, by her own admission, “quite a linear path to CD, compared to many.”
This path saw her and Butcher absorbed into the D&AD New Blood programme before being offered a job “quite quickly” at integrated agency Billington Cartmell. “This was 10 years ago when digital, social and content were emerging as new creative avenues to explore.” However, the team decided they wanted to work on more above the line campaigns, so they moved to Brave almost seven years ago.
I think the ability we possess as an industry could be used for greater things.
Caroline Paris
To date, the incredible feat of becoming Creative Director at the age of 30 is her proudest moment. She says it was difficult to take that leap because “people potentially can still see you as you were rather than as you are” when you’ve stayed in the same place for a number of years. When she was offered the role, she initially wasn’t sure about taking it. But then, after a little bit of a push, she thought “you know what, yes I can do this.”
Up until 18 months ago, Brave was an independent agency which had grown from 20 people to 60 since Paris started. When it was bought out by Lagardère, a French publishing house, Paris says the most vital thing for the agency was that they “wanted to protect who Brave are, our identity, what we stand for.”
I would love the industry to continue to celebrate and award the passion creative individuals have to do good and change the world.
Caroline Paris
In the last year, she says, she has started to do more judging, having been voted as one of Campaign’s Top 30 Future Leaders, something she calls a “pivotal point in my career in terms of being on the map.” She believes that it is through getting involved in more external events off the back of that award that has allowed her to be “recognised as a leader alongside other industry names”.
With a documentary filmmaker fiancée, Paris admits to watching her fair share of “strange documentaries” including brilliant things like ‘Tina Goes Shopping’ one of the very first examples of scripted reality TV. For her it’s the parallels and crossover between advertising and TV and film that she finds consistently “helpful and inspiring.”
Scare everyone. Be the fresh, fearless, new talent that makes everyone envious of what you bring to the party.
Caroline Paris
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