What the heck happened to the creative industry?

The invention of the internet was like a nuclear bomb going off.

I don’t mean that hyperbolically. I mean the impact was enormous, mushroom-shaped, and expanded ever outward. It changed things that changed things that changed things that are still changing things that will someday change yet more things. Even the 125 million-year-old goblin shark hanging out at 4,200 feet beneath the surface of the sea has, in indirect ways, been changed by the internet.?

One of the myriad things it changed, and continues to change, was my industry. The one that was once called “advertising” but now goes by many names.?Let's call it the creative industry for now.

We immediately went from a few creative formats – radio, TV, print, and outdoor – to hundreds of them and everything shifted into hyperdrive. At first, everyone thought the transformation in advertising would be fairly straightforward. Big, slow agencies, long fattened by 15% media margins, 17.65% production fees, and multi-year retainers would either change, die or be eaten. New agency models would take their place. You trim a plant, it grows back –?just differently. It was hard, at first, to see how the change would change things that would change things.?

Because change is messy that way.?

Speed obliterated process. Advertising was always a business that ran on a strict adherence to both process and deadlines (and wet lunches, but I digress). But when the internet sped everything up, the tried and true process crumpled. Essential stages of the creative process were skipped over or done so poorly as to be worthless. Most notably the creative brief.?

The creative brief turned to trash. Once the cornerstone of how good work got done, and arguably an art form unto itself, the creative brief simply did not get written. Or it was scribbled so haphazardly as to be just a bit better than nothing – a two-legged chair of strategic thinking. As a result, amidst the massive volume of marketing being done, precious few things of quality were created. Today, few people even know how to write a proper brief, or even what one would look like. And almost nobody is teaching it. Which brings us to another issue.?

Zero training for newbies: With all of the new formats, platforms and channels created in the digital age, there were also hundreds of thousands of new jobs. Which meant new people. People who did not know industry best practices, creative strategy, proper timelines and process steps, how to brief a creative team, how to assess the quality or strategic effectiveness of creative work, or how to give creative feedback. None of it. The smart ones paid attention, listened and learned. Others just blundered and bulldozed their way into getting massive amounts of crap work done very quickly while (sorry…tantrum alert) crushing the souls of creative people everywhere.?

Timelines killed creativity. A month became a week. A week became a day. A day became an hour. When I was at CBS Interactive, I often found myself with 10 minutes to come up with concepts and headlines. No time to feel into the problem, explore the world of possibilities, and come up with 100 bad ideas for every good one. Between the breakdown in process and the lightning-fast ideation process, the creative output became a big vanilla ice cream cone. No intrigue. No cleverness. No surprises. Nothing that appeals to the consumer’s curiosity or real feelings about what they want. Nothing stands out. (No offense to lovers of vanilla, by the way.)

Data was crowned king: Everyone became obsessed with data: How many people saw the marketing? How many clicked? How many bought? Sensible though it sounds (and I’m a fan of data), this tunnel vision entirely neglects brand building: the collective effect of marketing that sings the same tune, creates an impression over time, and helps companies generate trust with their audiences over multiple touch points. Persuasion doesn’t generally happen in one go and brand affinity is a journey with many stepping stones. That’s something that, historically, the industry cared about quite a bit. Also, it was mysteriously difficult for the ones actually creating the work to GET the results of their efforts from the ones who were tracking it.?

Clients took work in-house. Clients thought, “Well shit… how hard could it be to do this ourselves for far less money?” So they did. A few in-house agencies were run by industry vets who figured out how to keep the marketing machine fed and happy while still doing quality work. Apple, Twitter, Google, Lego, etc. Those were the exceptions. Most internal shops churned out a firehose of meh (or worse). Some clients noticed that and reserved some high-profile work for the agencies. Some clients went back and forth, sending work out and bringing it back in. In fact, they tried a lot of things: centralizing and decentralizing creative, creating imaginary currency to help them allocate resources between departments, etc. Many company leaders are still trying to figure this out.?

A primordial soup of agency models. After many big advertising agencies caved in on themselves or were eaten, the survivors tried many things: outsourcing internationally, white labeling, leaner teams, less oversight, distributed workforces, smaller office footprints, big pools of contractors, cheaper talent, and so on. PR shops started making ads. Ad agencies were writing white papers. Social media agencies were trying to sell pay-per-click ads. Everyone was gobbling as much of the client pie as they could, even if it meant doing something they didn’t really know how to do. We’re the zebra print of service industries.?

Massive unemployment. During all the gobbling, morphing, and experimenting, a lot of great talent either got burned out or found themselves in a game of duck duck goose - which, if you remember, is a game that randomly leaves people with no place to sit. Loads of people were laid off and suddenly some best creative talent was outside of the agency world entirely.?

Those that didn’t leave the business now compete with each other for projects wherever they can find them. In this very large group you can find some of the greatest creative minds in a generation. Minds wizened by thousands of creative projects done in every format, channel, platform, and circumstance yet imagined. Minds that have successfully sold 100s of different kinds of products. Minds that know how to spend time with, nurture, and get the best work out of their creative child. They know how to capture imaginations and Venn diagram the shit out of audience needs, branded qualities and product benefits. Minds that have explored vast regions of the universe of creative possibilities and know how to do that at hyperwarp speeds. This group of individuals is a gold mine of business success for both clients and agencies – if they knew how to harness them.?

Small shops exploded. Thanks to the internet that keeps on giving, some of these displaced creatives (and others) used their handy dandy internet connection, mad skills, and gold-plated industry contacts and started their own shops. There are now about 40,000 of those agencies in North America competing with each other in the sport of cheapest, fastest, bestest. Clients get direct contact with senior-level experts doing the work, less bloat, and more responsiveness. However, the work is often project-based and the clients are fickle, which means high client turnover and a need to keep the funnel packed with prospects. Every small digital shop struggles with packing their funnel because nobody has yet created a great, trustworthy aggregator of digital agencies that clients could use to shop. So most clients either don’t know they exist or only know a few of them.?You get business through word of mouth.

Agency collectives emerging. With client churn, competition, and funnel problems of their own, some non-competitive agencies are banding together to share client opportunities. With agency collectives, clients get a more comprehensive service offering and a full suite of best-in-class experts across every specialty. In other words, tailored solutions for every kind of problem. This allows small agencies to compete with big generalist agencies (and THEIR parent-company networks) that are mostly average at everything and terrible at partnering. Clients also save time by avoiding the extensive search for trustworthy agencies and the tedious, fraught process of vetting them individually. And the partner agencies can work together to share client insights, results, and ideas to drive success across the client’s business. That’s the dream, anyway.?

Let’s not forget AI. Meanwhile, generative AI was unleashed with a promise to democratize the creative industry. The smart marketers and creatives are currently figuring out how to harness the power of AI to improve the work, the process, and the margins –?and they have made significant inroads.?

The clients who always wanted everything immediately and never understood why it took so long to do it now had the answer to their uninformed, misguided prayers. And those hacks are using AI to create a Great Pacific Garbage Patch of content and marketing that Google calls “slop.” It’s zombified, context-free plagiarism littered with misinformation and hallucinations. A toxic sludge that will kill any brand dead (and sucks the air right out of your SEO balloon). In short, the atmosphere is one of both destruction and rebirth, chaos and innovation. Which is ironic, I suppose, since that is the essence of creativity itself.?

What does the future hold? It’s anyone’s guess. Hopefully, companies will start treating creativity as a powerful force to be harnessed instead of a commodity to be purchased. Perhaps they’ll infuse it into their entire operating system and use it as a driving force for differentiation and consumer connection. Imagine a massive infusion of creative thinking into HR, finance, fulfillment, customer service, research, product, sales, purchasing, all of it. Perhaps leaders will realize that in any situation where we lack absolute certainty, it is unwise to think and act in a purely linear and rational way. To succeed in the future, companies need a new motion that incorporates perception, reflection, playful creation, and iteration. These skills, as well as the ability to work with uncertainty and ambiguity, are fundamental human characteristics that simply cannot (yet)? be learned by machines. And those are skills that creatives know like the backs of their hands.?

That’s a future that I’d LOVE to see. What about you??