Dear marketers, give creativity a chance.

I’ve been working in agency life now for 18 years and I’m still coming to terms with the creative process and how to get the best out of it. Yet I do believe I’ve learnt the one magic ingredient creativity can’t do without and this is to let you what it is and why it?matters.

When someone asks (and surprisingly a large number of people do), “Can you please just give some creative thought to this quickly?” or “Let’s brainstorm that idea” or “Can you just brief this in quickly?”, I realise how few people understand how creativity works. Most people grasp that it needs bravery and fearlessness and great talent and trust and and and but all of this needs one more thing above all?else.

I assume, if you’re still reading this, you understand and appreciate the unquestionable link between creativity and effectiveness — the sheer power of creativity to create distinctive brands, emotionally compelling stories and standout work that moves the needle. So, I’m therefore going to assume you’re here because you demand creativity from your agency and for your brand,?right?

Ok, good.

So here goes.

Creativity is a set of actions and processes. There’s a dangerous and fundamentally flawed belief that creativity comes in the form of a lightning bolt. Sometimes that does happen but so, too, could you win the lottery but that’s not a very good retirement?plan.

The no.?1 ingredient in the creative process?is…

Time.

What?

That’s right. Time. There’s no shortcut to producing consistently great creative work. Sometimes it CAN happen quickly but mostly it doesn’t. When it does happen quickly, however, that’s down to luck not skill (another reason pitches suck but more on that another?time).

Our agency creative leadership has just taken part in a two-month creative mentorship and coaching programme with Jason Bagley, ex-Wieden + Kennedy ECD, on his recently launched?The Audacious School of Astonishing Pursuits . Bagley has a?personal career showreel ?better than 99.9% of agencies around the world. He made the Serena Nike ad, the Colin Kaepernick Nike ad, the?I’m on a horse?Old Spice Ad, the Terry Crews Old Spice series and many more. He knows how to create truly great advertising?work.

The course was fantastic but, in reality, it reaffirmed what our team already?believed.

Time.

To create quality, you have to create quantity. In Bagley’s words, the greatest creative directors can’t force great ideas out of their teams but they can get lots of ideas, and lots of ideas is the path to great creative work. The creative process starts with spending time on a problem, letting it stew and then coming up with as many ideas as possible until you find the magic — and the only way that happens effectively is, obviously, with time. You can’t begin to get to grips with a problem until you’ve spent a lot of time agonising over?it.

Still don’t believe me? Here are some non-advertising examples of creative pursuits, some of the greatest of all time:

The Lord of the Rings?took 17 years to write.?Harry Potter?took 16.?Gone with the Wind?took 10 years. On average, it takes 800 days to make a Hollywood feature film from start to finish. In 59 years, The Rolling Stones have released 31 studio albums; that’s basically two years per album and not all of them have achieved success. What we see released at the cinema, the bookstore or on Spotify is never advertised with a prep?time.

The reason this is so important to understand is that most great advertising is, first and foremost, entertainment. Great ads seldom look like ads. If some of the best entertainment understands the time investment to make, brand work deserves the same,?too.

Time matters to marketers for four major?reasons:

1. Simply giving agencies more time and longer deadlines will result in better and more entertaining work. There’s almost no Christmas these days without a compelling John Lewis film to look forward to, and it’s impressive how they have consistently delivered great work year in, year out. Well, JL briefs their agency for the Christmas campaign in January, giving the agency 11 months to make such magic. As one finishes, the next one begins. The John Lewis agency is essentially always working?on?it.
2. Buying hours (rate cards and retainers are a big part of this problem) will hurt your creative output, especially if you’re continually renegotiating fees or cutting budgets and leaving that job to procurement, whose main job is to pay less for more. Less fees, therefore, has a direct result of less hours and less time spent on the creative output. Said another way, the work you’re getting is suboptimal because you’re getting what the bought hours allowed. You can’t expect a slow-cooked lamb ragu if you’ve only bought a single hour of a chef's time. I can’t say it better than this:?goedkoop?is?duurkoop.
3. Less is more. Spend more time creating fewer but more meaningful, impactful and effective campaigns, rather than pushing out loads of meaningless, rushed and average work. Think back to the great series of Allan Gray ads from King James that seemed to come out every two or?so?years.
4. Lastly — and I can’t express this enough — pay creative talent more. Creativity still is the cheapest media out there. So, pay as much as you can for the top creative minds to be thinking about your brand as much and as long as possible. Try it. Move 2%, 5% or 7% of your media budget towards creative fees and, if you don’t see a significant difference in a year, then you’re probably with the?wrong?agency.

The very act of creativity is making the complex seem simple. The unfortunate illusion with brilliantly simple ideas, though, is that they also seem so simple to make in hindsight. As Woody Guthrie said, any fool can make something complicated; it takes a genius to make it?simple.

Creative genius isn’t some lightning bolt; creative genius is actually just damn hard work. And, for hard work, you need?time.

This article first appeared in Marklives.com

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