A Recall on Rationality: The Importance of being Creativity Curious

Here’s a question. How is it, in an industry that’s about creativity, that we can be so amazingly un-creative? Not in terms of the things we make (there’s plenty of mind-blowing stuff around). But in terms of how we do it ?– that dreaded agency creative process. I mean, given how many hundreds of agencies there are around the world, and the decades we’ve all been doing it, there’s a pretty standard formula. Why aren’t we more open to change?

Take, for instance, client presentations. The client expects a deck, so we give them a deck. We take them through the strategy first. Then we get to the creative. We give them routes to choose from. We put our hearts and souls into it. Then we hope they get back to us.

But I think sometimes we treat a presentation too rational. And the way to disrupt that is to remember something simple: the humanity of the client is across the table.

Because I have an admission to make. I don’t even care that much about advertising. I just like to be moved. I also think that we all know perfectly well that the average person doesn’t care at all about advertising either. They want to be moved too – whether that’s moved to laugh, cry, or just smile inside for a few seconds.

So why do we spend so much time thinking about ticking boxes with advertising, when we actually should be more looking for ways to connect with people?

Maybe the answer is to be more ‘creativity curious’. To break out of the mould, escape the rut, bring together skills and capabilities that don’t immediately look like a natural fit. Be the outsider that really, every creative person should be.

That’s why I think like a musician. Music can be a mainline shortcut to that visceral feeling of connection to something greater than yourself. It’s the feeling I think every creative person is chasing.

For me, the way that a piece of music is crafted, the combination of rules, technique, skill and intuition can teach a lot about the creative process more generally.

This is why I’ve never understood why the big advertising companies have never fully leaned into the world of music. Why, for example, couldn’t an advertising group acquire or build a record label? After all, music is one of the biggest communication tools there is.

With music, you can protest, you can get communities together. And it's a form of communication. But for some reason the ad industry has never fully leaned into it. Which is nuts when you consider how important it is to young people in particular. I mean my kids have their earbuds in constantly. Just like every kid.

If you want to reach young people, music is the way in. They look at film, they listen to music. That's the way where they get information from.

When there's music involved it sets a different tone. This circles me back to the original point. About approaching the way we work differently, as well as what we produce. Particularly when it comes to selling ideas to clients.

We were in a pitch meeting a while back – a couple of years ago, during Covid.. The pitch was for the Dutch railway – we were sitting at 1,5 meters from each other going through slides. And there were customer journeys and storyboards. All that stuff. But somehow, we wanted to touch the heart while telling a story, because that’s how you connect.

So I went to the piano that was standing next to them and said: well, imagine you have those pianos right? On the station concourses. And someone gets behind the piano like this. And next thing I was sitting at the piano and started to play a song. The song became the center of storytelling and that song actually tells the story of the films we ultimately went on making. And this all started behind the piano.

It was definitely a goosebump moment. And you don’t often have those in concept presentations. But maybe we shouldn’t be quite as comfortable about that as we are. People often talk about these presentations as being ‘theatre’, but is it a show you’d want to buy a ticket to? If the answer isn’t yes, surely there’s something wrong.

There’s so much to think about in this industry right now. But the more we think, the less we feel. We know, because it’s been researched, that people make decisions based on feelings, more than they rationally weigh things up. But we still treat creative work as if it can be evaluated with a score sheet.

In the end, it comes back to that over-used Angelou quote: ‘People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them ‘feel’.