The Super Creative
Back in 1999 I wrote an article for CMYK Magazine called "The Super Creative." (Summer-Fall 1999 issue, page 8, for those keeping score.) CMYK's been documenting and extolling student advertising and design excellence for over 10 years. I was a mere Senior Copywriter on the VW business at the time. And I'd forgotten I'd written this piece until I bumped into Curtis Clarkson, CMYK's long-time publisher and editor at the One Show last month.
One deep dive into those never-unpacked moving boxes later, and I found an original copy. I think it's still kind of relevant, considering it was written nine years agoābefore the first Internet bubble collapsed. Before YouTube. Before the 3G iPhone was even a pipe dream.
Enjoy!
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The Super Creative
by Tim Brunelle
She was the third headhunter to call me that week. There was a financial-services client "desperate" for someone "creative." Someone who could write in a compelling, interesting way. This someone didn't have to understand the nuances of finance; they'd teach all that. Was I interested?
It seems like the world is clamoring for more and more creative people lately. Are artists in short supply? By artists I mean business-minded artists, the kinds of brains that can understand the subtleties of a marketing dilemma and turn that problem into opportunityāinto gold.
Michael Wolfe nailed it in his new book, The Entertainment Economy. It seems like practically every corporation is hell-bent on being entertaining in some fashion. Gas station pumps play commercials while processing your debit card. Web sites are fast becoming corporate broadcasting platforms.
It's all about content development. Relevant, entertaining, creative content brought to you by Mr. and Mrs. Worldwide Corporate Brand.
At some point, corporations realized that entertaining content equals more sales. Every transaction with a customer has to have some percentage of entertainment. Fortunately for artists, this is not easy to do (effectively or successfully). Just try writing a killer Top Ten list. Just try composing a pop album that sells 100,000-plus units. Just try developing an ad campaign that captures the public conscious, sells loads of products and wins awards.
So whom should the corporations call? Whom can they trust? That headhunter and her desperate financial services client know. Michael Wolfe knows; he said they should "trust the talent." That means you.
There probably isn't a better time than today to get into advertising. There are more venues, more clients. But maybe "advertising" isn't the right word for the industry I'm talking about; it's creativity. The world is devouring creative content, which is great for movie studios, magazine publishers and Internet millionaires, since they just host creativity. They own the (try not to gag) "content buckets." Someone else has to develop all that creativity. Someone else has to fill the buckets.
It's important to realize most of the creativity being sought today isn't traditional advertising or design. Mark Fenske called advertising "subsidized art." With the increasing importance of the "entertainment factor," all levels of corporate communication have become subsidized art. It's where the future of creativity lies. This means you and I need to look beyond four-color consumer magazine spread ads or TV spots for opportunities.
The Internet is the biggest example. Every brand has a site. Heck, some brands are just sites. With the public's appetite for content and the Web's almost unlimited ability to serve it, there are huge opportunities for creativity. Of course, with so much churn on the average site, it's pretty easy to get burned out. Sort of like writing for Baywatch.
Then there's internal corporate communication. Someone had to script and direct all those grandiose product launches at Microsoft. The fact is that there are tremendous opportunities to think like an art director or a copywriterāto be creativeābut not necessarily in the context of traditional ads.
The attention given to award shows has made us all jaded. We sit in some pretty high towers, crapping on anything for which we can't win a gold pencil, all that stuff we can't enter in CA because there isn't a category for it. Yet, walk into any decent creative department today, and you'll find writers, art directors and designers working on non-advertising, business thinkingācreatives concepting marketing solutions. And they can't win a pencil for any of it. But to be honest, I think it's just as interesting and occasionally just as much fun. (And if they had MBAs, they'd get paid a lot more for the same thinking.)
Blame the consultants for these opportunities. This changing of roles and breaking down of traditional assignments is happening in every other industry. So why not in advertising? Why shouldn't creative people be creative in all aspects of a piece of business? After all, everything is a brand today. And brands have stories to tell. Who's going to create, script, direct and produce all those stories? It's time for the ad brains to step up.
Truly gifted, experienced advertising creatives have a unique ability to unearth relevant emotional connections. And it's those connections that make brands successful. Spend all the money you want, but if your brand isn't respected and well-liked, the money's a waste. You can look at a marketing problem, and while you might not have the analytic skills taught at Harvard, you see the answer. You bring to the party a different type of useful thinking that usually has more impact at the cash register and in the public conscious.
Look at it this way: Most theories of brand advertising assume numerous connections exist between a consumer and a brand. From TV to the Internet to statement stuffers to the music you hear on hold. For the brand to succeed, all of these connections must be nurtured in a relevant manner. So if your ad brain can concept a killer billboard campaign or write some amazing TV spots that solve a marketing problem, why couldn't you tackle other marketing assignments traditionally reserved for the kids with the MBAs? I bet you'd solve them just as creatively and just as successfully. The opportunities are out there. The trick is not shutting the door on them. Don't close yourself off from creative opportunities just because they don't initially appear to be creative. In today's entertainment economy, every opportunity is a creative opportunity.
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[Illustration by Moby Francke, from the original magazine article.]