Creativity Squared: Paul Glazier on Working with Your Heart on Your Sleeve

Paul Glazier is a lifelong creative, born and raised in California. Currently living in Portland, OR, Paul is a comedy writer and actor as well as a professional advertising copywriter. Having been all over sets and stages and in writers rooms for the last 25 years, Paul brings a unique point of view, commitment, instinct and insight to his work. He can always be found jogging or biking, fixing his motorcycle, and wandering around the weird parts of the internet.

Person

I’d call myself a passion-led creative. I try to stay excited about the work and pump up the team around me whenever possible. I like to work from a place of confidence and fervour, so I try to create group energy on that wavelength. That includes giving space for people to freak out, feel overwhelmed, vent, etc. We’re not a road crew. We’re a group of sensitive creatives, strategists, and producers—our game requires focus, passion, mental finesse, and a lot of emotion to play right. No room for fragile egos, so you may as well do it all with your heart on your sleeve.

I like to use bad ideas, awkward first passes, and expected approaches to guide the journey to better, new, interesting concepts. You can feel a cool idea when it hits, like searching for chords on a guitar: sharp and off until you find it, and the sudden resonance opens up worlds of creative possibility. 

Product

How do I judge the creativity of a piece of work? This is a funny question. Context I guess? What’s the brief? What’s the expected outcome? WHAT’S THE BUDGET? If it’s a banner ad for a healthcare system, copy variance and a slightly new design system application. Their world is deeply regulated and runs on trust and consistency, so coming at them with huge creative leaps and funny copy just isn’t gonna work. 

If it’s a launch campaign for an athlete’s newest shoe drop, I press for a unique insight, fresh idea, and emotional manifesto that gives a person the chills when they read it. That way, whenever a creative feels stuck or veers off track, they can refer back to those three things to reignite or realign their thinking and stay within the world we’re building.

Success comes from being a good creative partner. As creatives, sometimes we can get into the habit of trying to marry the idea we’re most in love with. Even if it’s a bit off-brief, creatively aggressive for the budget, or makes the client a little sweaty. I’m definitely in favour of presenting the exciting one next to the safe one. Remember, safe isn’t bad. You need the safe option to prove that you can fully answer the creative brief with a straightforward solution and still give it teeth. Then, once convinced, you hit them with the dreamy one while they’re nice and receptive. That's a creative partnership. Successful work shows skill, helps clients relax, and then dazzles at the right moment.

Process

I like to make creative work rooted in strategic truth. Truth is key, especially when trying to get a desired response. Here’s an annoyingly sudden story:

I do a lot of comedy and comedic acting, and I learned early on that asking for a laugh is never funny. The story goes: during a dinner scene, a famous actor asked for salt every night, and it killed. But, as the show ran night after night, the actor stopped getting that laugh at all. After talking to his scene partner about it, they said simply, “you used to ask for the salt, now you’re asking for the laugh.” It’s simplistic and probably apocryphal or whatever, but it’s 100% true for comedy, and advertising as well.

If we’re watching an ad and we can tell that they desperately want us to buy in or are begging us to have a certain POV, we’ll resist and tune it out. We won’t give them a laugh.

Ideally, I make creative work that doubles as good entertainment - content we’d consume anyway - and do it based on strategic insight. Insights like “Gen Alpha finds sports to be too competitive” are the foundational truths of my work, which is aimed at really serving an audience and helping them remember brands when it comes time to make a decision about shoes, meals, whiskey, or which edgy water they want to shotgun at the skatepark. Et cetera.

You can always go back to the truth and find the laugh again.

Press

I grew up in Nevada City, CA - the angsty, hardcore, punk rock son of a Mormon dentist. I came to advertising and creative agency life at 30 from the acting and comedy world. I was working as a waiter and had a few regulars who loved me. I asked them for a job as a half-serious joke, and they got me hired as a PA-type guy on the Admin team.

This admin job included writing new employee intro emails to the company. I would write funny, out-of-pocket stories about chequered pasts and secret careers, which people loved. The staff writers told me I should write copy, so after looking up what the f a copywriter was and googling “copywriter salary,” I started telling people I wanted to be one and never looked back. 

The lives I lived before helped me be the creative professional I am today. Manual labour, waiting tables, improv, theatre, film and TV acting—on the surface, they might seem unrelated to advertising, but each of those experiences taught me about the relationship between intentional structures and necessary chaos. 

I like systems. I love processes, operational efficiency, and team dynamics. I spend as much time talking to my producers as my strategists and creative team. Because in my experience, when the structure and processes are defined and regularly tuned up, the fragile mayhem of creative thinking has a safe place to emerge.

Also, I am big on emotional support and personal relationships with my team. If someone is travelling and calling in at 3am their time, going through a breakup, has a newborn, or has been overwhelmed on their other projects, I factor that into my approach.

Gosh, I sound just terrific.

I should note that although this is my aim, I’m also a sensitive creative, so I can also get frustrated and stressed out in front of my team - never, ever at them, but in front of them for sure. I just don’t let it go unaddressed, I always call myself out, apologise, and welcome the eye rolls.

So humble. Wow, again, just terrific.