Don't try to be creative, let the Creatives be

There’s a reason why you don’t have an album on Spotify right now. There’s a reason why you’re not currently embroiled in the thralls of a novel’s plot.?

It’s because not everyone is Creative. I’m going to use the capital C to describe an inherently creative individual with a talent for lateral thought that leads to new and surprising outcomes. As opposed to someone else, most people, who have a capability for occasionally thinking in a creative way. There is a difference.?

For some context, and to support my position, I was a straight A student in Art and Design at school. I got my BA in Fine Art after studying for four years at National College of Art & Design , Dublin, Ireland. For a decade I solely made artwork and exhibited it internationally. I established SMBH online photography magazine which ran for the best part of another decade, showcasing the work of hundreds of artists both new and established. I wrote reviews, edited, designed, lectured and discussed thousands of images and projects at universities, galleries, fairs and festivals. So I’m more than qualified to talk about the subject of creativity. In fact, I’m more than qualified to consider myself Creative.?

One of the reasons I’ve enjoyed my shift of career into marketing is the fact that I’ve not had to suppress my creativity. While working in the cultural sector means I’ve had an advantage for sure, partly because of my formal training as an artist and partly because I have a fundamental connection to the things being put out there. Marketing allows for this to be a benefit. Admittedly I have had to learn to pull back and stop interfering in our designer’s work, because we’re paying them to do their job (and for their thinking), not mine. So there’s that side too.?

Anyone in the marketing world who thinks that one can simply learn to produce something like The Cure’s A Forest, or Shakespeare’s Macbeth, or the wonderful adverts AMV BBDO has produced for Guinness is smoking crack. Stop that nonsense. Stop it. All of that is the result of brains wired in such a way that the rest of the population just don’t do. It’s not your fault, it’s natural. It’s more than that, it’s good. If the entire population thought like a genuinely creative individual, the world would be more fucked than it is right now. We’d be trading fingernail clippings for units of time.

Recently I listened to the Black T-Shirts Podcast with Professor Mark Ritson (S2 E2) describing his previous work with 酩悦·轩尼诗-路易·威登集团 . He said during the chat on creative process “One of the things you learned at LVMH early was, you learned how to brief. We spent inordinate amounts of time training our marketing teams how to brief and there it ended. Because then you hand over the brief and you trust the people you’ve selected, you protect them. What are the skills of the marketer, with creativity in my opinion: to select and choose, to support, to protect, to brief, you know, this is the job. And most importantly, stay the fuck out of the creative process. ” This is not smart, it’s wise. Wisdom is application of knowledge at the right time, and Mark was wise to know his limitations on a particular subject and step back. More recently Mark wrote a post on LinkedIn fixing his colours to the mast, which I wholeheartedly echo here:?

There was another post on LinkedIn that caught my eye from another experienced individual whose opinion I value. Julian Cole wrote this:

Now, it’s with delight that I read this post as the common groupthink is that you can simply throw Sheila from Accounts, Derek from Creative and Martin from Sales into a room one Tuesday morning to have a “brainstorm” about the future of the brand. In my own experience I’ve had the President and Vice-President literally trash and redesign an advert in three sentences over two emails. Neither having any marketing or creative credentials to speak of, but both being of the opinion that their “creativeness” counted for something. It doesn’t on a Tuesday morning with Sheila, Derek and Martin and it didn’t in those two emails either.

You can teach someone with a talent for this kind of thinking how to perform this way, but you can’t teach them the talent for this kind of thinking.

If you’re really interested in hearing two Creative people being creative while talking about marketing you should listen to a Sweathead podcast with Mark Pollard, Strategy Friend and Julian Cole from 2020 (Communications Planning Basics, 24 Feb). Around the 34 minute mark the conversation turns to analysing communications and strategy on a quick fire basis for hypothetical scenarios put forward from #ShowYourStrategy. It struck me how fast and in what directions their thought process moved to build a final picture of a concept that both serves a marketing purpose and relates to the human behaviour driving it all. You can teach someone with a talent for this kind of thinking how to perform this way, but you can’t teach them the talent for this kind of thinking. Similarly, trying to train someone to think less rigidly is not the same as training creativity. We don’t hear silly notions of “everyone can be a statistician” or “everyone can be trained to be a theoretical physicist”. Limitations exist.?

Why do non-creative people want so badly to be considered creative? Is it romantic? Do they think it’s a kind of superpower? It can feel more like a disability sometimes to be honest. Your brain isn’t built particularly well for mathematics, or logic, though you can build furniture without diagrams. Your brain is literally wired in a particular way that it dances around a problem before landing on a solution (this isn’t my opinion either, there have been legitimate studies). The value of that is incalculable as it’s what drives innovation. But it can’t half piss off your boss, colleagues or wife.?

For those of us in marketing who consider it a creative industry we should be very, very careful. One can be creative with copy, one can be creative with strategy and one can be creative with media and design. Some aspects aren’t in the slightest bit creative. In fact they need to be cold and logical and anything but creative. As marketing professionals we need to recognise the whole thing and not the fancy bits that help us feel special even if it is delusional. It’s OK to not be creative, but please can we let the Creatives just be.?