More Original Creators in Marketing Please

Recently I was having a discussion with a few people who are just about to graduate from college. They were explaining to me how they all want to really work for an innovative company doing innovative marketing. When I asked them what innovative marketing meant to them there were talks about Snapchat and Instagram filters. I bit my tongue because I didn't want to get caught in a fixed mindset but this group had fallen into the "platform-centric" category discussion where marketers become trained to do things using a pragmatic approach around networks rather than behavior. To draw within the lines given to us rather than concocting entirely new possibilities.

I started my podcast three years ago because I was tired of being the one person at my agency who was looked at like they had two heads when trying to do things out of the box that connected with people. I guess speaking into that microphone took the place of a shrink. Now I realize there are tons of other voices out there like mine too. The end result is I've created something out of nothing. Sure, it's just another audio file but the content within it is original. If I've learned one thing as a parent of two awesome daughters, it's that they rarely use the toys I've provided for them in the way I perceived they would be used. They imagine and recreate with them things that are simply outside the box or don't follow the "rules" of intended engagement.

Lately I find social media marketing and the majority of marketing channels to be stifling and boring as hell due to the "practitioners" language and vision (or lack thereof) of how to approach media. I'm speaking at a number of events this year and I almost think there will be a riot after my sessions with people telling me that I'm a rule-breaker and I don't follow enough best practices.

To me, the manipulation of media is the language of the 21st Century.

Lately being a creative/analytical hybrid can be tough in a world filled with mathematics everywhere. Math makes order out of chaos, but it rarely is correct if you still can't measure everything meant to be measured. I think there was a quote from Albert Einstein about this topic. It went something like this, "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."

The world is always going to be filled with people who want to direct you, manage you, help you become more efficient. That usually will be through rigorous data inputs. It's rare to find people who want you to be inspiring, creative or to really look at the world and analyze it holistically. The world is a pretty complex place. This is where data altered to be an output becomes much more powerful than simply the collectors. Even every job recruiter who contacts me is always trying to mold me into a box rather than letting me define what that box should or shouldn't be shaped like. Marketing is extremely complex. This doesn't mean we should scurry away from trying to solve the most complex issues we face as a species. If anything we should be tackling these head on. We should be looking at these problems we need to solve with a #BringItOn outlook.

However I think business needs to realize that no matter how much they want baselines so they measure against them and figure out how they are performing they're missing the point that we live in a world that has been usurped by behavioral change as a result of democratized communication.

"You can analyze the past, but you have to design for the future," is how Edward De Bono approached those who still think historical analysis is the main emphasis to determine the future. De Bono emphasized that lateral or critical thinking integrated into design rather than an emphasis on historical performance would be the best way for organizations to find the future.

While we have tons of solutions and platforms and countless marketing tech companies to utilize to our advantage in this day and age to help pull and analyze data, the lack of platforms that exist to help with actual creation and execution of ideas means there still is room for growth in this often overlooked area of the marketing world.

It's going to take a lot more original creators and creations to usher these much needed solutions into reality.

Are you a creator?

Geoffrey Colon is a Group Product Marketing Manager at Bing Ads. He writes weekly on LinkedIn, tweets on Twitter, takes photos on Instagram and follows all the social media best practices as noted by practitioners. Listen to his podcast DISRUPTIVE FM on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spreaker or YouTube. Check out his upcoming book Disruptive Marketing: What Growth Hackers, Data Punks, and Other Hybrid Thinkers Can Teach Us About Navigating the New Normal which is certain to be refuted by marketing "gurus" and practitioners worldwide.