I'm Jacques Gross, a Strategic Creative Director from Johannesburg. I bridge business strategy and human behaviour to build clear message systems that teams can use and consumers act on. I've spent 18+ years across agency and client-side, moving from Art Director, to Creative Director, to Creative Lead and currently independent consultant. My constant is a meticulous eye for detail and a bias for decisions grounded in human behaviour: define the ask, craft the solution, make it land. The same discipline carries into a live rollout, where I adapt to what the account throws up without losing the strategy underneath it. I keep my work sharp by staying close to culture, art, AI, music, photography, travel, well-made things, and behavioural science.

I like fast learning, clean craft, clear thinking, and a curiosity that doesn't stop at "Oh, ok." I work directly with decision-makers and visionaries to shape a Strategic Platform. From there, I build it into a messaging matrix and run it through rollout myself. I've run this process solo on accounts including AWS South Africa and Apple's reseller networks. I prioritise objective outcomes over optics or vanity metrics. I don't guarantee ROI or KPI numbers before the work starts: too much of that sits outside anyone's control once an account goes live. What I promise is resonance and clarity, from strategy through to what ships. If that matters more to you than a guaranteed number, then you're the kind of client I work best with.

Design

I didn't grow up inside the traditional ad-school system. I studied graphic design at VUT, then landed my first job at Metropolitan Republic with almost no idea what I was doing. The first few weeks were a crash course: software, terminology, office politics, all at once, while everyone around me seemed to already know the ropes. Three months in, I got my first Loerie Award finalist, for a TV commercial I shot, edited, and conceptualised myself, mostly because nobody else was around to do it. That's when it clicked that the real job was thinking. Design was just how that thinking showed up: typography, layout, rhythm, resonance, restraint. Every choice needs to be carried by a clear decision.

I now focus on building systems: a Strategic Platform that informs a coherent message and executional language across every touchpoint. A line in a deck has to carry the same weight as a shelf display, a product screen, or five minutes at a live event, so people feel it and believe it. Over the years that's meant I’ve had to get my hands dirty working across messaging and layout, logo, experiential, product and packaging, web, user journeys, illustration, live events and activations, photography, even sound and production design. <Insert cliche line about the golden thread here, because man aint that the truth>

MentorSHIP

At King James II, a small agency that grew into one of the top mid-sized shops in Africa, I spent four and a half years watching my job expand past campaigns and into people. Nine months in, I was made Group Head of Art. A year after that, Creative Director. Mentorship split into two lanes: craft (design, layout, the technical stuff) and thinking (audience insight, brand development, the journey people actually go on). Neither one works without the other, in my experience.

Agencies are strange places to grow a career. The energy and diversity in the room can push your creativity somewhere it wouldn't otherwise go, but the same room is often unforgiving, stressful, and running on deadline. That combination sharpens instincts fast. It can also wreck someone's curiosity if nobody's watching for it. So the real job of mentoring became protecting the skills people pick up under pressure, precision, speed, the refusal to let a deadline beat them, while still leaving room for the kind of unrestrained, slightly ridiculous thinking that got them into the industry in the first place. That balance turns a junior into someone who understands why a choice worked, and can repeat it at will.

COnceptual thinking / Strategic Creative thinking

A good idea by itself doesn't move people the way it used to. It has to pair with how people actually feel and decide, and that's where behavioural thinking comes in. I'm the person who keeps asking why long after everyone else in the room has had enough of me, until there's one element or angle strong enough to hold up the rest. That element then runs through everything: the deck, the assets, the channels, every single actual thing, so it all speaks with one voice instead of ten slightly different ones. Once it's live, I watch how it actually performs, adjust, and go again. That's the whole game: getting work out there that earns attention instead of demanding it.

Guidance and collaboration

Somewhere in the middle of my career I realised I liked collaborating and coaching people at least as much as I liked making the work myself. Paired with the behavioural-science habit, that turned into an actual skill: sitting between the people who commission a project and the people who plan and run it, and making sure both sides are working off the same incentives instead of past each other.

At iStore I took multiple graduates and grew them into properly skilled designers who got promoted and even head hunted. In agency settings the pattern repeated: internal promotions to mid-level within 10 months, juniors who went on to land jobs at top South African agencies, three people with zero formal ad-school training who became genuinely capable creatives. On the numbers: mentees picked up 3 Loeries finalists in 2015, 6 in 2016, 4 in 2017 (inside the first six months of that junior's job), plus 3 Pendoring finalists and a Lürzer's Archive entry, both in 2017.

Just making it happen

I don't really do "we can't." A few years into my career I found myself learning to operate a water bottle filling machine at 11pm, because that was somehow the last thing standing between a shoot and a finished ad. Nobody assigned it to me. If something needs to get done and the only way there is getting your hands dirty, I'm usually the one who ends up doing it, mostly because I get curious about how things work: what's that, how does it do that, could I use it, cool, I'll go figure it out. That's the same instinct that had me learning Illustrator from scratch and picking up guitar chords for a soundtrack in my first week at my first agency job. It's just how I get things over the line: find the gap, stand in it, work it out as I go.

2017

CRISTAL AWARDS [Gold] 

Kwése Great Escape TVC

CRISTAL AWARDS [Gold] 

Saxonwold Shebeen - Innovative use of Social Media

CRISTAL AWARDS [Gold] 

Saxonwold Shebeen - Best use of Promo & Activation

CRISTAL AWARDS [BRONZE] 

Siemens Him, Her & Me  - Craft certificate: Branded Entertainment

Ciclope Awards

Kwése Great Escape TVC

Cannes Lions Finalist

Kwése Great Escape TVC

Loerie AWARDS [Finalists]

Saxonwold Shebeen Live activation and events

Siemens Him, Her & Me TVC

Kwesé Great Escape TVC

2016

Loerie AWARDS [Finalists]

Metro FM Mic Drop TVC

5FM Live Loud Integrated campaign

2015

Loerie Awards [Craft certificate] 

SABC 3 Real Comedy - Radio 

2014

2013

Loerie AWARDS [Finalist]

The Aveng Group 200 Days - Print

2011

Loerie Awards [GOLD]

MTN Ayoba - Integrated Campaign

2008

Loerie Awards [GOLD]

MTN Free Ad - TVC

Loerie Awards [SILVER]

MTN Free Ad - Integrated Campaign

2007

Loerie AWARDS [Finalist]

MTN Fingers - TVC