State of the Creative Industry: Its Democratization Benefits Us All

This post is part of a series in which LinkedIn Influencers analyze the state and future of their industry. Read all the posts here.

The creative industry is rapidly changing, along with the way we manage our own creative careers. The state of the creative industry is not only relevant to “creatives,” it affects all of us. Every innovation that compels us to buy, to understand, to engage, and to be inspired is ultimately made by a creative mind. No doubt, design has become a competitive advantage in nearly every product and service offering.

So, it’s a worthy question: What are the risks and opportunities facing the creative industry?

Creative Talent Now Works On Their Own Terms

Every creative individual now has the opportunity to be a business. The internet has removed nearly all the friction to sell your work, market your expertise, raise money, bill clients, hire a team, and more. More than ever before, those with the ideas are empowered to take the reigns on their own destiny. Products like TicTail (online stores), Kickstarter (financing), Harvest (billing), Behance (marketing your portfolio), among others, have made this possible.

As a result, creative people in larger teams and companies work with an entirely new set of expectations. Salaries have gone up, and top design talent is now as coveted as top engineering talent in Silicon Valley/Alley and the broader technology industry. There are even venture capital firms that are focusing on design-founded companies, like DesignerFund and Kleiner Perkins, who just recently named John Maeda, former President of Rhode Island School of Design, a Partner.

Within a company, the creative team has moved from the periphery to the center. The days of outsourcing design work are numbered. The easier it is for companies to find, source, and manage creative talent, the more we will see creative teams move in-house and become more influential over the entire business.

Crowd-sourcing(As We Know It) Will Be Rendered Obsolete

The early “crowd-sourcing” initiatives in the creative world have been nothing more than vast spec contests. The open calls for ideas and free labor from anyone has hurt everyone. Given the low odds of getting paid for work, this form of crowd-sourcing has incentivized careless engagement. You just spend a few minutes on something and lob it in. Not surprisingly, the quality of creative output suffers, and attributing careless work to your name could hurt your career.

The good news is that people are starting to catch on. Top talent now avoids these crowd-sourcing programs. New, more sustainable models are beginning to take hold. Quirky has revolutionized crowd-sourced product design by ensuring that every contributor gets paid. Our team is also experimenting with new models for “sourcing” groups of top talent and guaranteeing payment for contributions. Regardless of what new models emerge, the old and destructive form of crowd-sourcing will become obsolete as we have more options and develop better judgment.

The “Credible Mass” Will Determine Quality

Of course, empowering creative careers starts with finding great talent wherever it may be. Relying on personal networks and headhunters won’t cut it. We need a way for the best talent to rise to the top based on merit.

The greatest challenge we face is how to measure the quality of talent. The solution will be community curation, using things like “endorsements” on LinkedIn, “Likes” on Facebook, “Appreciations” on Behance, etc. Anything from fashion design, written content, to pieces of art can now be sorted based on consensus.

But the insights of the critical mass aren’t enough. For example, when evaluating the quality of a photograph, the opinions of 100 seasoned photographers should matter more than that of 1,000,000 random people. This is the difference between the “critical mass” - how many people like something - and the “credible mass” - who likes something - that I have written about about previously. The future of curation and matching talent with opportunity starts with tapping the “credible mass” through algorithms and new ways of understanding the correlation between online interactions and quality. At Adobe, we talk about the “creative graph” and how the creative world is collaborating more than ever before. I hope the creative graph becomes a reality and helps emerging creators get the spotlight they deserve.

A New Genre of Advertising Will Educate Us

There’s a lot of talk these days about “paid content” and content strategies for large companies. New businesses like Contently and Percolate have been founded to help companies develop content for their brand.

But with brands in the hands of the people (these days, people on Twitter spread a brand more than an ad campaign), we expect more from the advertising that surrounds us. Rather than be “sold to,” we want to be educated and inspired. The art in advertising matters more than ever before.

A new genre of advertising is emerging that is authentic and educational. Maybe you want to learn about GE’s smart grid from the scientists behind it? Perhaps you would enjoy a behind-the-scenes perspective on how a newspaper is assembled every single day from the New York Times? Great things happen when companies leverage their expertise for public interest. It also makes for powerful advertising.

The Static Portfolio Has Been Replaced by the Connected Portfolio

Not too long ago, creative professionals across industries relied solely on their “book” – a physical portfolio that was sent around to headhunters and prospective clients whenever an opportunity presented itself. These books were expensive, heavy, and instantly outdated from the moment they were sent. They also accumulated a lot of dust. Over the last decade, most creative professionals transformed their portfolio book into a website. Whether you build it yourself of use services like Squarespace, your portfolio site is only seen by those who visit it.

The next step is the “connected portfolio,” a set of projects that live not only within your own personal portfolio site but also on other galleries and networks around the web. The way our team at Behance thinks about it, the “connected portfolio” is both a personal portfolio website as well as a powerful dissemination tool that showcases your work wherever you want it – always keeping your work properly attributed and under your control.

Removing the friction between creativity and expression.

I’ve been at Adobe for about 15 months now, since our acquisition. I’ve been most struck by a brewing desire in the company to help creative people and teams be more efficient and reach beyond the usual “core creative” community. Once the “tools” company that brought us Photoshop and the Creative Suite, Adobe is becoming a services company to better connect the creative process and help people create in new and profound ways.

David Wadhwani, who runs Digital Media at Adobe, often talks about the billions of people in the world who have ideas and a desire to express themselves. Lately, he has pushed Adobe to focus less on “creativity” and more on removing the friction between creativity and expression. Because, the truth is, we all have creativity. The friction that gets in the way is, often times, a skills gap, accessibility to tools, or our own self-doubt. No doubt, services and communities that help us express ourselves will vastly increase the number of “creators” in the world. The creative industry will ultimately benefit as more people create and, in turn, gain appreciation for the creativity that surrounds all of us.

Photo: Flickr / muffett68

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Enjoyed this post? Read what other Influencers had to say:

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• Rachel Zoe on the State of Fashion: The Democratization of Style