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It’s around halfway through my conversation with Shannon Washington, GOTHAM’s global chief creative officer, that I’m reminded of ‘Cloud Atlas’. David Mitchell’s 2004 literary classic charts the lives of six people separated by oceans, cultures, and thousands of years. It’s an exploration of what parts of humanity are capable of transcending those barriers – in other words, of what makes us fundamentally human in spite of how different our lives and challenges might be. 

An appreciation of all things truly human is something that Shannon has built up over the course of a career that’s seen her hold senior positions at R/GA, TBWA\Media Arts Lab, Deutsch, Droga5 and more before heading up the creative team at GOTHAM. It’s given her an instinctive, reflexive understanding of human behaviour and emotion on a global, cross-cultural scale that she’s been putting into practice on behalf of brands including Google, Nike, and more recently Maybelline through GOTHAM in New York. Along the way she’s picked up Cannes Lions, Webbys, Clios, AICP Awards, with many others besides. And it all started, she tells ��������, with bad behaviour. 

“Oh, I was a very bad kid,” Shannon confesses. “I always talked when no one asked me anything. I remember my disciplinary record well – I was often in trouble for talking out of turn.” 

And when she did talk (which was frequently), she tended to be inspired by wild flights of fancy originating from inside her own mind. “I was known for making up incredible stories about myself – none of which were true. Well, not none, but I had a wildly active imagination,” she says. “I should also say that I went largely undiagnosed with ADHD until I was about 11. Looking back, it all makes sense. I mean consider that I was once literally tied down by nuns in a Catholic school because it was the only way they could figure out how to make me sit still.” 

While it all made for a turbulent childhood, it’s an impulse that she still feels today. The difference, however, is that she’s mastered how to channel it. 

“My imagination was an escape, but I �徱���’t know how to harness it. Now, I work in possibly the best industry for it,” she posits. 

Even if it wasn’t immediately obvious that creativity and advertising would be Shannon’s calling (“I thought I was going to be a physician,” she says), right now it feels like the most obvious thing in the world. Not only does it provide a constructive outlet for those same wild flights of imagination, it’s also an environment where she’s been able to make a space for people just like her. 

“One of my ways of helping is creating spaces in this industry for people who think differently—who speak in a tangled way like I do,” she explains. “I want to open up more pathways for people like me—not just people who look like me, but who think like me. People who understand the role media and marketing play in society and want to create something better.” 

Speaking with Shannon, it quickly becomes apparent that this commitment to – and curiosity for – people is one of her defining characteristics. It plays out in the way she approaches her role at GOTHAM, but it was originally inspired and nurtured by another of her passions: travel. Besides working on groundbreaking creative projects for some of the world’s biggest brands, Shannon is also the founder of – an experience and content platform with an emphasis on solo travel for women. 

“My passion for travel comes from my Mom,” she notes. “I was raised as an army kid, with both of my parents in the military. My mother, Sergeant Connie Washington, had already traveled to four continents before I was even thought of.”

And it’s through that passion that her understanding of people – irrespective of borders and cultures -- really began to take shape. 

“Ignorance Is Man-Made”

“Even as a kid I knew the world was bigger than PG County, Maryland, or Trenton, New Jersey,” Shannon tells ��������. “My mom would talk to me about nights out in Berlin where she was mistaken for Donna Summer. Those kinds of experiences have always been so special to me.” 

And so she started up Parlour, which began as a blog where Shannon simply wrote about her own experiences of solo travel before evolving into a platform where other women could arrange their own journeys. “My awareness of people has deepened and evolved over time” as a result, she explains. 

“Travel is a powerful connector, but it also reveals just how divided people can be. It helps you realise that experiences happening in your country are mirrored elsewhere in completely unexpected ways,” she continues. “A friend of mine used to say that no matter where you go, people share similar struggles, joys, and ways of life, even in places you wouldn’t imagine.”

In David Mitchell’s ‘Cloud Atlas’, those kinds of links between people are the heartbeat of the story. The six protagonist characters, living distinct lives in faraway places and times, appear to be reincarnations of one another (depending on your own spiritual inclination). But that link of blood or ideology is less important than the link of shared humanity in the face of struggle that unites them all. It’s a reminder that, no matter the context, we’re all human beings. And that there can only ever be so much difference between us. It’s an alternate interpretation of one of the book’s many oft-quoted lines: “Travel far enough, and you’ll meet yourself”. 

It’s a realisation that has shaped Shannon, both personally and professionally. “People often tell me that I have a heightened awareness of the world, and I try to weave that into my work,” she states. “I want to emphasise that the world is as small as it is vast, and that borders – whether physical, emotional, or mental – are ultimately man-made.”

And there are two key takeaways from her experiences of travel (both her own and those of the people she’s worked with through Parlour). “The first is that life is short; we need to make the most of it and do meaningful things,” she says. “And the second is that ignorance is man-made. Just as you can grow up believing one way, you can unlearn and expand your perspective just as easily. If nothing else, being open-minded means you’ll have better conversations,  and definitely eat better food!”

Not content with crossing borders in the literal sense, it’s an approach that bleeds into Shannon’s creativity, too. Having started out as an art director, it wasn’t until she joined Droga5 that she began to write as well – another pivotal moment in her career to date. 

Servant Leadership

“I started as an art director who was too afraid to write,” Shannon concedes. “Looking back, I think I really struggled with communication until I was properly diagnosed [with ADHD].  Understanding that my brain was wired a little differently – that I wasn’t neurotypical – helped me make sense of my challenges. I used to get tongue-tied, mix up my words, and shut down when trying to explain things.”

But she always excelled at communicating visually. “It was easier for me to express emotions through visuals rather than words,” she continues. “So, I learned to communicate through design, piecing together culture, sound, and memory into narratives. That’s what led me into art direction.”

The shift towards writing came later and, in her own words, she’s “still chasing the level of my copy heroes like Kevin Brady”. But by grappling with her own thought process and coming to terms with her own way of thinking, writing came more naturally. “Therapy helped, too”. 

And all of that feeds into the kind of creative leader that Shannon wanted to become. The process began by figuring out who she �徱���’t want to be. 

“I remember being a kid, constantly getting in trouble for how I expressed my ideas. The feedback was always the same: ‘You had the right idea, but you went about it the wrong way’,” she recalls. “And I’d think, ‘Okay, so teach me the right way’. But no one could. That stuck with me.”

So now, that’s what she’s doing: Showing the right way. “I try to approach things from my team’s perspective, even when delivering tough feedback,” she says. “I believe in ‘servant leadership’ – creating optimal conditions for others to succeed. My goal isn’t to overshadow people; I’m strongest when my team is strong.”

That mindset is a combination of personal experience alongside a generational shift in how we understand leadership. At 45, Shannon is a young creative leader, but she’s grown up professionally in a very different culture to the one that preceded her. 

“The old-school mentality was: ‘Just get it done. Feelings don’t matter’,” she posits. “As an elder millennial, I see leadership differently. I understand when someone is struggling, but my job is to help them improve,  not simply coddle them.”

For Shannon, it’s all about creating an environment in which the best creative people often get things right, but are also prepared to be wrong. “Because if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never do anything creative”. 

Measuring The Unmeasurable

There’s a tension in that last point which is at the heart of something that frustrates Shannon about the industry in 2025. 

“We spend so much time trying to operationalise something that is inherently organic: Creativity,” she says. “Creativity moves fluidly, but when we sell it on paper, it looks structured. Good leaders understand that, but we often try to box it in, and that frustrates me.” 

At that point, Shannon catches herself. “Ironically,” she restarts, “the other thing that frustrates me about this industry is how quick so many of us are to complain about it!”&�Բ�����;

The GOTHAM CCO points out that, in adland, a prophecy of doom is never too far away. At the present moment, it’s the spectre of AI that’s causing anxiety and insecurity. “I’m just like, get over yourself and go write a damn good script,” she retorts. “This is a very privileged industry. And that’s not exclusively a bad thing. I’m very privileged to have this job. It’s helpful to remember that.”

It’s a privilege, Shannon continues, to be able – or to have the talent -- required to distill creative ideas into something tangible. “When I hear creatives frustrated with clients, I remind them: We are the special ones here. Not because we’re better than anyone, but because we’ve trained our brains to do something others can’t,” she says. “Clients find comfort in numbers and metrics, and we ask them to think like us – that’s not easy for them. We have to find their language.”

So, just as she has throughout her career, Shannon is finding the right language through which to express her ideas. “Everything we do is about love languages,” she surmises. “There aren’t just five of them; that’s something a dude came up with to sell a !”&�Բ�����;

And through that creative multilingualism, cultivated through hard-earned experience, Shannon is helping brands to win in a challenging world. “The intersections of media and culture are more invisible than ever,” she says. “It used to be TV, and radio; clear channels. Now, my neighbor is a TikTok star. The convergence of all these platforms is so intimate, and it requires intimate humanity to cut through.” 

Like in ‘Cloud Atlas’, Shannon sees clearly those human connections. The ones strong enough to withstand time, borders, and events. If the book is a study into the fundamentals of the human experience, that’s something that Shannon has spent her career discovering for herself;  through travel, through leadership, and through creativity.