Overheard at a Mad Ave function the other day:
"I'm sorry but I HATE
the word 'creatives' - as if it's something reserved for the anointed few. At
our agency we believe everybody is creative."
Three words that creatives come across a lot these days.
A passable sentiment in a toddlers' art class, perhaps; in a professional setting it isn't just deeply insulting but plain wrong.
Yes, everyone has the
capacity for creativity.
Just as everyone has the capacity to sing.
But while few of us would
compare our efforts in the shower to Adele, it seems that in the field of
creative advertising everybody is Adele.
Imagine anybody in any other occupation getting away with such a thing:
"We've completely
changed out the chef and staff. They were getting so precious about
every little detail. I mean it's just food. It all ends up in the same place,
right?"
"No, he isn't a
qualified surgeon, but he has real healing powers. Ok, relax: here comes the
general anesthetic..."
"Steven Spielberg was asking for too much money so we got Steven Spilkus."
Ludicrous, right?
Not as far as marketing
services are concerned, it seems.
I'm not alone in believing that the "everybody's creative" refrain gets you the Kendall Jenner Pepsi spot.
Or that it gets you that
nice, personable young bureaucrat as your 'creative director' (you can tell
(s)he's creative because (s)he wears jeans and a tee shirt in the office) and
the umpteenth anodyne campaign featuring a car driving along a road
to music; or two homemakers in a kitchen discussing the finer points of their
bleach/detergent/vacuum cleaner by name; or people eating/chewing/drinking
something cool and everything around them frosting up; or young people jumping
about to music and close-ups of sneakers/clothes/cellphones/candy; or
middle-aged people talking to camera about computers/insurance/banking/pensions/healthcare;
or beer/trucks/restaurants described by Sam Elliott.
And so on and on ad f*cking infinitum.
The "everybody's
creative" refrain has also led directly to the canning of
the genuinely creative folks - such a huge,
critical problem in a Mad Ave in apparent meltdown, that I and many, many
others are stunned it isn't THE conversation in the ad industry right
now.
Nothing - digitization,
automation, Big Data, blockchain - nothing matters, no delivery system is worth
a damn if what's being delivered stinks.
Everybody is absolutely NOT
creative in any sense that helps brands, products and services become and/or remain famous.
In fact very, very, very few
people are creative in that true sense. And the bigger the talent, the rarer it
is - and the more expensive.
Just like it is in every
single pursuit and occupation from sports (What? You want Aaron Rodgers to take a pay cut?) to silversmithing.
Every day we read stories
about how Mad Ave is failing - none bother to explore the obvious link between
this and the dearth/exodus of true creative talent.
Every conversation revolves
around the next big thing, none on the critical need to focus on what
never changes. (Like Jeff Bezos, whose focus on the old-fangled low prices/fast
delivery/vast choice trifecta made him the world's richest man.)
For some time now, Mad
Ave's most senior executives have got away with the "everybody's
creative" lunacy. It has allowed them to take millions upon millions of
dollars-worth of so-called top creatives off their payrolls and, with nobody to stand up for quality - i.e. "This Kendall Jenner spot blows,
bring me a good idea" - countless time and angst off the creative process.
The niceness of your
agency's staff, the brilliance of your strategists, the newest new technology,
the sharpness of your tailoring/dentistry, the exclusivity of your country club - none of this matters if the work is poor.
Superb strategy is
meaningless without executional excellence. It's hot air, fog. It's big talk.
It's Mike Tyson's catchphrase:
"Everybody has a strategy until they get hit in the face."
Continued exciting advances in digital technology gave the digerati and their followers first-mover advantage. This always happens at the start of every social revolution. And, as throughout human history, the 'new' is rapidly ingested by all until it's nothing but the norm.
While the digerati ruled, the creatives, the poets, and
everything else that's been around forever because it works, was deemed run-of-the-mill, or better
yet 'traditional'.
'Traditional' stuff like creativity being pushed to the bottom of the totem pole makes it seem accessible by all. Hence smart young people, clever with laptops, became the new creatives.
Easy to see how tiny a hop
it is from there to "everybody's creative."
But all science and no poetry makes the world a dull place: driving home the other day listening to sports talk ESPN on 98.7 FM, former Steelers and Jets lineman Willie Colón set to discuss the Jets' quarterback problem, suddenly piped up out of the blue with:
"By the way, we watch
a lot of tv in the holidays. What happened to the advertising? When did it get
so boring? What happened to stuff like 'Wassuuup?' and "Where's the beef?'
I had about 50 over for Christmas and everybody agreed how bad today's ads
are."
Everybody is NOT creative
in any way that is commercially viable - unless quality is merely a
nice-to-have.
At their very best, advertising creatives are artists and poets and showpeople with a commercial edge who engage people's feelings and make brands and products famous.
Here's how one of America's
greatest ever poets, ee cummings, put it on accepting the Academy of American
Poets annual fellowship in 1949:
"A poet is somebody
who feels, and who expresses his feeling through words.
This may sound easy. It isn't.
A lot of people think or believe or know they feel - but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling - not knowing or believing or thinking.
Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or believe or know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself.
To be nobody-but-yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn't a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time - and whenever we do it, we're not poets."
Every senior ad agency business leader will experience a spike of familiar dread on reading cummings' fighting talk.
Ideas like 'fighting' and
'battling' and 'hard work' will spark the muscle memory, past confrontations
with dedicated creatives refusing to compromise their work and suggesting instead that account handlers work to honor their clients and make them understand how much worse and less effective
the work will be if the clients' whims are unquestioningly acted upon.
Creatives who have made
extraordinary leaps from brief to idea believe that their account handler
colleagues should make similarly extraordinary leaps in 'selling' the work to
clients.
Thank goodness, thinks the modern account handler, that the world has moved beyond this exhausting 'traditional' dynamic. Thank goodness we're in
charge. Goodbye the old 'creative bottleneck', hello frictionless
digital.
No surprise then that the
majority of advertising entails little/nothing more than getting the marketing
strategy on film: it's the logical conclusion to the "everybody's
creative" philosophy.
Obviously this necessitates
Mad Ave fees getting slashed: if "everybody's creative" then why pay
a premium to an ad agency?
Which is just one tiny,
frictionless step from doing away with ad agencies altogether.
