“You can either view life as a telenovela, or you can just really enjoy it. And I tend to try and do the latter.” Chaka Sobhani and I are discussing life in the advertising industry and specifically her role as global chief creative officer at the DDB network, which she joined last year after eight years at Leo Burnett, first as CCO and from 2021 as global CCO.

While job titles such as Sobhani’s have long existed in the agency ecosystem, I have often wondered how such roles actually work, in practical terms. Is it really possible for one person to oversee the work of hundreds of creatives across multiple countries, with different needs, cultures, languages and clients?

When I put this to her, she’s surprisingly frank, explaining that much of it for her is down to “maximising time”, in order to maintain some kind of work-life balance. “How do you have any impact in a global role? Obviously, when it comes to geography, your planning has to be immaculate in terms of just making sure, most importantly, that you are not missing in action from your family. My wife and my kids, thankfully, are still the most important things to me. So I want to be home for my children. I don’t want to be an absent parent. So you have to make travel really count. I’m not a loose traveller, you know, I fly in with intent and I fly out with intent. I don’t swan around when I’m somewhere. The schedule is really packed, so I’m maximising time.

“But I think whether you’re running an agency or whether you’re running a global network, the principles are the same, which is your job is to turn up in service of helping people. Whether that’s in a practical way of helping potentially with a client, with certain projects, or whether it’s also just conversation and support. It’s lonely being any kind of leader, there’s lots of decisions to be made. And I do think we’re better together.”

McDonald’s Squad Down Under campaign, DDB Sydney, 2024