Welcome to In Her Words, New York Festivals Lady Liberty’s monthly interview series celebrating women innovators across the industry. As part of the Lady Liberty Leadership Program, the series offers audiences an opportunity to connect with the voices, ideas, and experiences shaping today’s creative landscape through thoughtful conversations, personal reflections, and an evolving monthly focus.
Meet Ellen Chandler, Strategy Director at Arnold Worldwide.
Ellen Chandler is a Strategy Director at Arnold Worldwide in Boston, where she leads several Progressive Insurance campaigns and consults on CRM and CX. With an academic background in both cognitive science and film, she blends research and storytelling to build cross-channel campaigns that drive real business results while capturing audiences' imaginations.
Over the past decade, Ellen has informed the launch of Hilton’s “For The Stay” rebrand, which AdAge dubbed the Best Rebrand of 2023, helped Lexus quadruple their customer engagement with dynamically personalized communications, and won multiple effectiveness awards for her work on Farmers Insurance.
As a guest lecturer at several universities, an active industry mentor and a volunteer with Catchafire, Ellen is passionate about putting her know-how to work not just for clients, but for nonprofits and the next generation of marketers as well.
Lady Liberty: What’s something about you that isn’t widely known, but really shapes who you are or what drives you?
Ellen Chandler: My dad is a theoretical physicist and did most of the childcare growing up. For example, me and my sisters went to bed with math problems instead of bedtime stories. He’s been working on the same theoretical issue (an incongruity related to string theory) for 30 years! He taught me early on that math and problem-solving can absolutely be creative. In my work, I connect dots between incongruities, steep in the data, and test out hypotheses all the time. The input and output looks a lot different of course, but I think much of my love for strategy is rooted in the same joy my dad gets from mentally grabbling with blurry ideas in his line of work.
Lady Liberty: What does creativity mean to you today, personally, and professionally?
Ellen Chandler: I went on a delightful retreat with Ladies Who Strategize earlier this year, and Lisa Prince's session about ideas was one of the highlights. Can you define what an idea is? Many people can’t, and so she offered hers, "A novel and valuable solution to a problem.” Creativity is about creating, bringing something to be that wasn’t there before. Personally, I love being creative through music, filmmaking, and planning games and events for friends. But professionally, in advertising, creativity looks more like playing with ideas than with self-expression. I’ve been coming back to Lisa’s work a lot—the creativity inherent in a good idea is rooted in a problem and offers the world some value (even if it’s just a better, funnier way to sell you something). As a strategist, across the daily deliverables and collaboration, creativity is everywhere. Adding value and solving problems is what I do!
Lady Liberty: How is AI changing the way you approach creativity? And where do you draw the line between it as a tool and your own creative thinking?
Ellen Chandler: AI is making it easier and cheaper to create something new, which shifts the value from the output to the idea itself. Of course, there are skilled craftsmen whose human touch can’t be replicated by a machine, but whatever they make starts with an idea, and I think that’s where creativity gets interesting. In film school, we used to say that you have everything you need to make a film in your pocket, and I think it’s no different with AI. The tools are different, but to create something of value, you need to know what problem you’re solving and what you’re trying to say. I use AI as a sounding board and research tool to get sharper on both those fronts, but ultimately it’s my intuition and discernment shaping the idea that becomes the brief, analysis, or on the rare occasions I’ve used it for personal creative projects, film.