Time for another visit to Creative Leaders Corner. Pull up a seat for insights from industry leaders as they share their creative journeys and how they guide others on theirs.
Next, we speak with Shrey Doshi, Founder and Creative Director at Yellow.
Shrey reflects on the shift from creative immersion to creative leadership, and why he sees the latter as building the conditions where great ideas become inevitable rather than controlling the ideas themselves. He also shares why client trust, built over time through clarity of thinking and consistency in the work, is critical to enabling creative risk, and why the greater risk for most brands is often blending into a category where nothing feels distinctive.
He also discusses Yellow’s work building brands, including skincare brand d’you, as well as launch and market campaigns for global names like Fenty Beauty and Rare Beauty, and how AI is expanding early concept development and visual exploration at Yellow — with taste, cultural intuition, and strategic clarity remaining deeply human skills.
What do you miss about being a creative without the leadership role, and what do you enjoy most about creative leadership?
What I occasionally miss is the freedom of creative immersion, the ability to disappear into an idea without thinking about timelines, teams, or business realities. When you’re purely a creative, the world narrows to the work in front of you.
Leadership shifts that perspective. Your responsibility expands from the idea to the environment in which ideas are created.
But that’s also what makes it rewarding. Instead of one mind solving a problem, you’re cultivating a culture where many minds are doing it simultaneously. When someone on your team pushes an idea further than you could have taken it yourself, that’s incredibly satisfying.
Creative leadership isn’t about controlling ideas; it’s about creating the conditions where great ideas become inevitable.
Was there a particular ad or ads that inspired you to focus your creative talents on the ad industry?
There wasn’t a single ad that pulled me into the industry. It was the gradual realization that advertising, at its best, can quietly shape culture. The work that stayed with me was always the kind that felt bigger than marketing. Campaigns that slipped into everyday conversation, that people referenced, shared, or remembered long after the media spend had ended. Those moments revealed that advertising could operate as more than persuasion. It could be storytelling, design, psychology, and cultural commentary all at once.
That tension between cultural impact and commercial responsibility is what makes advertising such an endlessly interesting space to work in.
What fascinated me was that unusual intersection where creativity meets commerce. Few industries allow ideas to influence both how people feel and how businesses grow at the same time.
That tension between cultural impact and commercial responsibility is what makes advertising such an endlessly interesting space to work in.
How do you persuade clients to take creative risks?
Creative risk often becomes uncomfortable when it feels disconnected from business logic. The role of an agency is to close that gap.
When a bold idea is rooted in a clear cultural insight, a strong understanding of audience behaviour, and a sharp brand strategy, it stops feeling like a leap of faith. It begins to look like a calculated and intelligent move for the brand.
In many ways, the conversation is not about convincing clients to take risks. It is about helping them see that the greater risk is often blending into a category where nothing feels distinctive.
Equally important is the relationship itself. Clients rarely embrace risk with partners they are still learning to trust. Persuasion therefore does not begin in the presentation room. It is built over time through clarity of thinking, consistency in the work, and demonstrating that creativity and strategy are not opposing forces but complementary ones.
In many ways, the conversation is not about convincing clients to take risks. It is about helping them see that the greater risk is often blending into a category where nothing feels distinctive.
When the strategic foundation is clear, bold ideas rarely feel reckless. They simply feel like the most.
What are your strategies for inspiring and motivating your creative team to push boundaries and challenge the status quo?
Creative people rarely need motivation in the traditional sense. What they need is the right environment. In my experience, the biggest threat to creativity is not lack of talent but the gradual weight of process, deadlines, and predictability. So a large part of leadership is making sure curiosity survives inside a structured organisation.
At Yellow, we focus on three things.
First is clarity of ambition. Everyone in the studio understands that our goal is not simply to deliver work, but to create work that feels distinctive and culturally relevant. When that expectation is clear, people naturally push themselves further.
Ultimately, creative teams do their best work when they feel both challenged and trusted. My role as a leader is to raise the bar while making sure people still feel free enough to reach for it.
Second is psychological safety. The best ideas often begin as fragile, unfinished thoughts. If people feel those early ideas will be judged too quickly, they simply stop sharing them. Creating an environment where half-formed ideas can exist without immediate criticism is critical to getting to stronger creative outcomes.
Third is exposure. We constantly encourage the team to look beyond advertising. Inspiration rarely comes from studying more ads. It comes from architecture, fashion, cinema, product design, and the wider shifts happening in culture and technology.
Ultimately, creative teams do their best work when they feel both challenged and trusted. My role as a leader is to raise the bar while making sure people still feel free enough to reach for it.
How is AI influencing your team’s creative process and the way you approach creative work for clients?
AI is fundamentally expanding the range and speed of creative exploration.
In the past, many creative decisions were limited by production timelines. Visualising an idea, prototyping a direction, or building a convincing world for a concept often took days. Today, those same explorations can happen within hours, which means creative teams can test far more directions before committing to one.
The real advantage of AI is not replacing creativity but expanding the surface area of imagination.
At Yellow, we increasingly use AI during early concept development and visual exploration. It allows our teams to rapidly experiment with visual styles, environments, storytelling frameworks, and aesthetic territories. Instead of presenting one or two routes to a client, we can explore a much broader creative landscape before refining the strongest idea.
What AI is really changing is not creativity itself but the creative workflow. The early stages of ideation have become far more fluid and iterative. Teams can move quickly from abstract thinking to something tangible, which helps sharpen conversations around the idea much earlier in the process.
However, AI generates possibilities rather than judgment. Taste, cultural intuition, and strategic clarity remain deeply human skills. The role of the creative team is becoming more about directing, curating, and refining rather than simply producing.
The real advantage of AI is not replacing creativity but expanding the surface area of imagination. It allows us to explore more ideas, faster, and ultimately arrive at stronger creative outcomes for clients.
What advice do you have for people making their way into the creative industry for the first time?
Focus less on trying to impress and more on trying to understand.
The best creatives are often the most observant people in the room. They notice shifts in culture, behaviour, design, and human emotion that others overlook. Develop taste. Stay curious outside advertising. Read widely, watch films, and explore architecture and technology.
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Creativity rarely comes from staying within one discipline; it comes from connecting ideas across many. And perhaps most importantly, be patient. Creative careers compound over time.
What are some campaigns you worked on during your career that you are most proud of?
The projects that stay with me the most are rarely just campaigns; they’re moments where we’ve helped shape how a brand enters culture.
At Yellow, we’ve been fortunate to work on both sides of that spectrum. One of the most rewarding journeys has been building brands from the ground up. For example, working with d’you, which has gone on to become one of India’s fastest-growing skincare brands, involved defining far more than a visual identity. We helped shape the brand’s voice, its design language, and the way it communicates with a new generation of skincare consumers who value transparency, intelligence, and simplicity.
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On the other end of the spectrum, working on launch and market campaigns for global brands like Fenty Beauty and Rare Beauty has been equally exciting. With brands that already have such strong cultural relevance, the challenge is less about defining the brand and more about translating its global ethos in a way that resonates meaningfully with local audiences.
Those are the projects I’m most proud of, where strategy, storytelling, and craft come together to influence how people experience a brand.
Because ultimately, great branding doesn’t just communicate what a company does, it shapes how people feel about it.
Quick Hits
Most useful app or tool you’ve started using recently:
I’ve been experimenting a lot with tools like Runway and Midjourney for rapid visual exploration, and Claude for faster strategic research. What’s interesting is how these tools compress the early stages of thinking you can test visual directions, narratives, and references within hours rather than days. The real value isn’t replacing creativity, but expanding the number of ideas you can explore before committing to one.
A book everyone in the industry should read:
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
Something you want to learn or wish you were better at:
I’m always trying to sharpen my ability to spot emerging gaps in the market and translate them into meaningful creative opportunities. What interests me most is understanding how shifts in culture, technology, and consumer behaviour create spaces that brands have not yet fully recognised.
The real challenge is not just identifying those gaps, but designing thoughtful solutions around them. That intersection between insight, creativity, and problem-solving is something I’m constantly trying to get better at.
Ultimately, the most valuable skill for a creative leader today is the ability to recognise where the world is moving and help brands arrive there a little earlier.
