Welcome to the Subjectivity Business

[This was originally published in my newsletter about Creativity.]

How do we know any idea is the right one?

In the marketing and advertising businesses you have the opportunity to be entirely right, and entirely wrong simultaneously! We all do, from client marketer to agency copywriter. How fortunate for us! Everyone, all together, gets to be right and wrong at the same time. Because we’re working with nebulous things—words, colors, sentiment, tone, style, attitude. We’re all ruminating in the fog of perception. “This is great” can be as accurate as “this is shite.” And the inherent subjectivity can drive some people mad. They even made a TV show about it.

To be ridiculously clear, I am talking mostly about the stages before ideas are alive in the world and measured in some fashion (transferring the “great vs shite” question to robots and algorithms). Those earlier months, or even years of conjecture and proposition are the distillation of business issues to strategic insights into initial creative presentations. I’m talking about the space when, quite honestly, no one really knows.

This is the period when the most important thing to do is embrace subjectivity. To acknowledge subjectivity is natural, structural, and indelible to the businesses within Creativity. We will be both wrong and right. That it is part of our communal roles, and it is fundamental to our processes.

That subjectivity is a responsibility.

You will resist this, of course. We all do.

Mostly because we are too often addicted to certainty.

There’s a reason very few of us work in fringe maths, questioning reality. We’ve found greater efficiency and comfort in things like brand style guides—whose entire premise is to shortcut subjectivity. But only if everyone takes the responsibility to be trained, together, to understand how the rules work. Better yet, why the rules create benefits for us. When was the last time your team was trained in the benefits derived from your brand’s style guide? In my 30 years, I recall this occurring maybe twice.

What about creative briefs? Aren’t they an agreement, of a sort?

I’ve suggested a brief does two things: Inform and inflame . It’s a guide pointing in more fruitful directions. Is it a rule book? Lord, I hope not. “But we had the client review and sign the brief,” is folly. After all, who interprets if and when and how the work accurately follows the brief?

Alas, we must take responsibility.

We must acknowledge, “you know—this situation doesn’t have a clear answer, it’s subjective which means it’s personal and contextual—so let’s dive in…” We can build comfort and certainty simply by talking about the keen balance between rightness and wrongness of a given creative element.

That is hard work. So the other solution is to assert power.

My chart above would probably be more accurate if there was an even larger circle labeled Politics.

This is right because I say it is.

Asserting power lets a lot of people off the (subjective) hook. There’s no longer a need to reason or argue. “She or He has decided.” The appearance of efficiency wins out.

Unless you disagree.

And here’s a second reason why Subjectivity is brushed aside: It’s really hard to entertain conversations around who has or does not have power. [Insert every DEI conversation had ever here.] Or at the very least, who could have a seat at the table when we try to wrangle certainty from the fog.

But subjectivity demands it of us.

And how fortunate are we to have that responsibility.