Susan Betteridge is the Chief Creative Officer and a founding Partner at Dame Creative, a female-led advertising agency she helped launch in early 2020. Since its inception, Dame has weathered a pandemic, a rebrand, leadership transitions, and today, five years in—is hitting its stride with new business wins and industry accolades.
Before founding Dame, Susan spent two decades leading creative teams at some of Chicago’s top agencies, including FCB, Ogilvy, and dentsu, where she worked on iconic brands like Volkswagen, Disney, and State Farm. A proud graduate of Michigan State University’s Honors College, Susan began her career as a copywriter and still finds her greatest joy in storytelling and seeing ideas come to life through production.
A lifelong documentarian, Susan has always been drawn to capturing the extraordinary in the everyday—filming and photographing the quiet, beautiful moments that often go unnoticed. She lives by the words of Emily Dickinson: “Forever is composed of nows.”
Passionate about mentorship and advocacy, Susan is an active leader in the advertising community. She has served in various roles with the American Advertising Federation, Chief (a women’s executive network), and was named a Working Mother of the Year by She Runs It in 2019. She also serves as Vice Chair of the Board of Directors at the Center on Halsted, the Midwest’s largest LGBTQ+ community center, and is an angel investor with The Josephine Collective, which supports startups led by women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ entrepreneurs.
Susan is a proud working mom and wife, raising two amazing daughters (ages five and seven) with her partner. The family loves to travel, spending summers in Michigan and winters skiing in the mountains.
Let’s meet Susan!
What’s your Chicago story?
I moved here in the summer of 2000 after college with a portfolio and the wide-eyed dream of being a Copywriter. I knocked on doors and schlepped my book from agency to agency with a paper map in hand (and I now know the grid system as well as anyone in Chicago).
After two months of hustling, I got two offers on the same day. I lived in Boystown for a few years and was an early adopter, moving up to Lincoln Square in 2003. I love this neighborhood, the walkability, the food, the parks, and libraries. I can even say I love the neighborhood school my two daughters to go to, it’s a pretty special community.
How did you break into advertising?
My uncle, Steve Perrin, was a Creative Director at Donor, and I looked up to him and his career success in awe. In college, he helped get me an internship at Donor in London, which gave me some early agency experience.
And once I got my first real job in Chicago, I had some wonderful mentors who believed in me as a writer and a leader. Pete Dufner let me write my first radio spot. Janet Barker-Evans hired me, sent me on my first shoot and promoted me to CD.
Joe Gallo taught me what it meant to be visionary and a good human. And the legendary Tom O’Keefe tapped me to lead (and win) my big first pitch for Volkswagen at what was then DraftFCB.
How has Chicago influenced your creative journey?
We are fortunate enough to be in a city that is an arts and culture mecca, and I appreciate it all. From the Lyric Opera to Lolla and everything in between, I love the access and exposure we have to diverse art, street art, food, music, and fashion. I also think our “second city” status makes us work harder, proving you don’t need to be in NY or LA to make cool shit.
Chicago is known for its grind and resilience. How has that shaped your
career?
Hustle has gotten a bit of a bad rap lately, but I think it, combined with our “Midwest nice” nature, sets us apart. This is a city where hard work is valued, sometimes more than talent, which isn’t always great for our industry. But when you combine talent, hustle, and yes, being good to other people, that is a force—a force for good work and fostering more good talent.
What’s a creative risk you took that paid off?
I would hope that most of us are taking creative risks every day; they don’t always pay off, but with each push, you are shifting the expectations or the narrative with a client, a brand, a project. The one notable risk was walking away from big agency life after 20 years to help open our independent shop, Dame Creative.
When it started, I thought I knew what opening and growing an agency would take, but I was completely clueless. In just five years, we’ve been through a lot, but we are still here and starting to see some momentum in the press and the awards shows with some recent work. It is both unbelievably hard and unbelievably rewarding to try and create the kind of agency culture that I always wanted as an employee.
Chicago has given us Michelle Obama, Oprah, Joan Cusack, Shonda Rhimes, Linda Kaplan Thaler, Barbara Proctor, Lena Waithe, and so many powerhouse women. What’s it going to take to create even more opportunities for Chicago women?
We all stand on the shoulders of those who have come before us and now our job is to be there to empower the women coming up, advocate for them in diverse and powerful places, and show them what’s possible because they will go further than we ever have.
Movements like “See It, Be It” demonstrate that you must see those before you to dream where you can go next. I love that, but want to reiterate how important it is for all women, including working moms, queers and people of color to be part of that movement, because that adds a deeper level of complexity and challenge. If 12-24% of Creative Directors are women, that’s huge progress from where we were 10 years ago, but how many are also moms?
And furthermore, how many are black, brown, queer, or differently abled? The answer is not enough.
What’s your take on the rise of AI?
Like any technological leap, I think it’s super exciting and a bit unnerving. I don’t worry about AI replacing the best storytellers of our time, as that takes a human heart and lived experience to capture the nuance, but if AI takes away our entry-level writing and art direction jobs, I worry about the pipeline for talent.
If you don’t first learn how to write a banner ad or social post, you likely won’t be able to craft a great TV commercial. It takes years of failing forward, and if we don’t let our emerging artists cut their teeth anywhere, we are asking them to break through with brilliance, which is a tall order. I also worry that my daughters will never have to experience the joy of a term paper based on Encyclopedia Britanica set.
Are you bringing back Soul Train or American Bandstand?
Soul Train and black culture have always had more influence and impact, and I’d love to reimagine a platform like Soul Train today. But what I want, to quote Money for Nothing, “I want my MTV” — nonstop music videos every hour of the day, like in my childhood.
Sure, music videos still exist and are beautiful expressions of creativity, but they don’t have a mass platform for viewership. Music videos shaped culture in our day. Today, they are rarely seen, and that makes me sad.
How do you balance ambition with self-care?
Balance is an anomaly; every day is a dance, and not always a pretty one. No two days or weeks are the same, but I do my best to prioritize myself when I can. Sometimes that means blocking myself out for a lunchtime yoga class or saying no to a client meeting when it’s during my daughter’s school music show.
I also have rediscovered tennis recently, and very few things get in between me and my weekly classes. I also resist the urge to overshare. Saying, “I have a conflict” is a transparent way to let someone know you are not available; they don’t need to know more.
You’re writing a memoir. What’s the title?
I am actually writing a memoir. I started back in 2017 during my first maternity leave, and I have yet to take it to the finish line, perhaps because I’m waiting for its conclusion. It is called Mother Me and is about the year that I lost my mother as I knew her to a devastating stroke (she is now paralyzed and mostly non-verbal), and I also became a mother for the first time.
It was incredibly hard and sad because my mom had waited so long to become a grandma, to share her wisdom with me, and then it was stolen from both of us. But it has become a happy story too, one of resilience and redefining roles, recognizing that motherhood is messy and imperfect in all its stages. But still really damn beautiful.
Go to karaoke song.
I grew up with Van Halen, Guns & Roses and Madonna on my cassette player, so it would likely be Jump, Borderline or Sweet Child of Mine depending on my mood and the crowd.
Susan’s Socials:
Insta: @sheshelife, @wearedamecreative.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/susan-betteridge-6843241
Website: damecreative.com
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