Frits Pearson

Camera in LA. Directed in Michelin-star kitchens, and led creative across the NBA, Liverpool FC, and the world's biggest sport brands. The title is creative director. The work is to see what wants to exist next, and to serve the people building it.

I'm Group Creative Director across four brands, Liverpool FC Retail Africa, the Old School brand, Springbok Retail, and Locker Room.

Most weeks I'm directing. Film, brand, social, campaign. The other weeks I'm building the operating system and training the team. The system and the people are what let the team direct without me.

For just over a year I've been helping take Old School from a supporter merch organization into a leisure brand within sport and culture. The company now holds the NBA, Liverpool, Real Madrid, Manchester City, Barcelona, Tottenham, LIV Golf's Southern Guards, the Springboks, Orlando Pirates, and Kaizer Chiefs.

None of that happened because I'm “great”, although it would probably be best to say that. It happened because we changed what the agency believed about itself before we changed anything else. We hired for character before craft. We wrote briefs that opened doors the old briefs would have closed. And then we built the systems that let the team compound, so the next campaign was always sharper than the last, without anyone having to work harder to make that true.

I shoot most of the campaigns I lead. I write briefs. I write essays. I've built three custom tools the agency runs on, because building tools is one of the ways a creative leader makes the team faster without making them work harder. But none of that is what I'm here for. I'm here for the gap between where each person on my team started on day one and where they are now. The work that came out under my watch matters. The people who made it matter more. That's the only metric I trust.

I started as a filmmaker. Camera in Los Angeles, freelance, learning the craft on the jobs that came in. Nike Air Max Day. Moët. Hennessy. Years of work that made me ready for the rooms I'd later lead.

What I didn't know then was that I was already paying attention to something other than the work. I was paying attention to the rooms. Which sets felt alive. Which crews wanted to be there. Which directors were building something the team would still believe in next year.

Then JAN Group. A year working with Chef Jan Hendrik van der Westhuizen, South Africa's first Michelin-starred chef. Slow work. Patient frames. The opposite muscle from the LA hustle, and the one that made me a better director.

Back to South Africa, into Superside. I was hire number five in the video and photography team. By the time I left, the team was thirty. I saw and helped build what it actually takes to grow a creative team at that scale, the hires, the systems, the standards, the things that compound and the things that quietly break.

Then Amazing Life, where I started leading creative for Grammy-winning artists and major podcasters. Lecrae was the headline, but the bigger lesson was about systems. How do you scale a content practice without losing the talent's voice? Format libraries. Shoot patterns. Briefs that hold the centre while letting the edges move.

And then Old School. The repositioning. The new client roster. The four brands I now lead.

Looking back, the thread is obvious now.

The work isn't the work. The work is the future you're building, the kind of place teams want to be in, the kind of company a team member chooses to stay in, the kind of organisation a client wants to bet on. Get that right and the campaigns make themselves. Get it wrong and no amount of craft will save you.

That's what I'm here to build. That's been the whole project from the beginning.

Direction, not novelty.

AI is changing what one creative can do. I treat it as direction, not novelty. My team is being trained to direct AI the way they'd direct a DP, taste-led, brief-led, output-led.

We run an internal upskilling roadmap focused on directorial AI capability. The operational stack, Claude, Higgsfield, Figma MCP, Notion, ClickUp, is wired together for production output, not demos. A daily-use AI agent platform runs automated briefing, summary, and update flows across the agency.

The point isn't to use AI faster. The point is to direct it well.

Spoken at conferences with audiences of 10,000+. Comfortable on stage, in front of clients, and in the room when the brief gets hard.