I Hate 'Creative,' and You Should Too

"...soulless advertising that gets by on being visually interesting to the self-indulgent and baseless advertising created only for creative accolades and personal portfolios."

Creative: "Yet, what is art?"
Client: "We need to see ROI on this one."

Creative: (wonders how he/she can puff their ego with another "award winning" spot)
Client: (wonders why "award winning" spot didn't yield an increase in sales)

Client: "Yea, we really need to focus on the purpose of advertising...to sell!"
Creative: (gasps!) "But but, what is art???"

Ahhh...the pursuit of "what is art" against how it can inflate a creative's ego renders feelings of client nausia.

The focus of every "creastive" piece is simply to enter the conversation already taking place in the consumers mind. Engaging the consumer does not always require exotic methods.

I think creative gets a bad name because there is a disconnect between creative and increased sales. You can be creative and recognized by other creative types as Award winning but not connect with the consumer. You can be creative and dismissed by other "creative" groups but connect with the consumer.

Liberty Tax does a great job of connecting with the consumer with their dancing waving Lady Liberty Mascots. They get dismissed by many as being crass, overboard, etc. But the results speak for themselves.

Creative should be combined with attention, connection, engagement, RESULTS. We do not advertise to impress someones peers. We advertise to create a relationship with the client and generate sales. The sales generate profits which allow us to pay for more creative work.

Engage the customer by interacting with them the way they want. That is creative.

Scott
http://www.linkedin.com/in/scottlovingood
http://www.twitter.com/scottlovingood
http://www.askthewealthsquad.com/blog/

You're going too broad with hating "Creative." You just need to put an adjective in front of it. Is it smart creative? Stupid creative? Engaging creative? Unoriginal creative?

Saying you hate "creative" is like saying you hate an "idea." It all depends on whether it's a good one or not.

no, copyboy1. by doing that all you do is shift from calling it either "creative" (i.e. good) or "not creative" (i.e. bad), to calling it _________ (fill in the blank) creative. and then you have the exact same problem as when you were just calling it creative or not -- it's still completely open to interpretation. in other words, you completely misunderstood mr. denari's point.

he doesn't literally mean he hates creative. he very articulately explains how the word is being misappropriated. and that if we can stop using a word that has no clear meaning (it's vague by definition) for a set of instances that are more definable, we're going to be much better off defending the work we do. and that being "creative" thing will take care off itself.

I'm not sure how labeling something "smart creative" versus "unoriginal creative" leaves anything open for interpretation. That's exactly the point of adding an adjective - you clarify what you're talking about.

As Tom pointed out, clients now say "Do we really need to be so creative on this one?"

He's spot on by forcing the client to say "Do we really need to engage the consumer on this one?" But you could also force them to say "Do we really need to do smart creative on this one?"

They both sound just as ridiculous when you phrase them that way and there's no room for ambiguity.

I am so glad you said this. I have been thinking it for years. Simply said, good creative work is always strategic. The opposite of strategic is "untargeted"; the opposite of creative is "boring". Good for you. Paul S. Gumbinner, The Gumbinner Company, www.gumbinnercompany.com

Hate is such a strong word. But you make a good point: sometimes people focus on the wrong things. It's all about engaging the consumer.

Seth
http://www.twitter.com/rightminds

Without meaning to sound harsh, this post seems a bit whiny, and reflective of a growing agency trend where we blame the clients or the industry structure every time we don't get what we want.

Creative is creative, strategy is strategy and vegetables are vegetables. We all know what they are. Creative includes an overriding concept as well as the design and artistic execution. Strategy is the plan of action to get a campaign or message noticed by a desired audience. When developed in tandem and executed correctly, the potential results are greater.

The issue here isn't whether or not the word "creative" is being misconstrued or used to imply a lack of strategic sense. The problem is that agencies, anxious to have things our own way, try to force fit arguments and issues that simply don't work. We seem, on some levels, unwilling to adapt. If anybody is mangling terms, it's not clients, it's agencies. For example, in the Tom's post, he wrote:

>> ...instead of the client asking, "Do we really need to be so creative on this one?" he would be forced to say, "Do we really need to engage the consumer on this one?"

Agencies have never presented creative as a means to engagement - at least not in the sense that the term "engagement" is more often used in today's social media environment. Creative doesn't engage the same way that Twitter does. However, using social media to draw attention to campaign creative is a component of strategy.

Another example of our (agencies) unwillingness to adapt: our continued push for brand campaigns in a quick-results environment. The least year was bad for most everyone - the recession slashed budgets and many agencies starved. In an effort to generate income and secure retainer dollars, many pushed the importance of brand awareness (what some clients see as "creative" further defined as "long-term" or "having vague results"). When that didn't work, agencies moaned that they were being commoditized. What's missing here is the client POV - long term branding isn't what most marketing directors are being challenged with. Their CEOs and CFO's are saying "generate revenue this quater." They want to keep their jobs, so their interest is in capturing low-hanging fruit and generating a short-term ROI. Until the recession is really over and budgets get back to normal, every presentation is going to be met with the question "so what's the ROI?"

The problem with "creative" is that agencies want to push art and branding, and clients want results right now. An online display campaign generates low click thru levels (my blog on this: http://bit.ly/hYIm0), and we say "Who cares? You got great brand exposure!" as though long-term creative without short-term result is going to appease anybody right now.

Creative is fine, it's necessary, and everyone knows what it means. It's the agency attitude that needs to adjust.

Jay Miletsky
CEO, PFS Marketwyse

Author, "Perspectives on Marketing" and "Perspectives on Branding"

http://twitter.com/jaymiletsky

http://www.pfsmarketwyse.com

The problem here is that "creative" has been limited to a conversation only about the end product. Creative needs to be opened up to discussion about the process. Creative means many things; one of which is - to do something "different" which results in a novel approach or an original idea. Apply this to process and "creativity" begins to take on another life.

Rasul Sha'ir
www.twitter.com/cnvrgnc

I get the impression that a lot of commentors didn't read the article very closely.

Reading Jay Miletsky's reply was almost as good as the original article. I really liked the point that short term ROI is God and trumps any "creative" in today's economy. Thank you for the response Jay.

This creative issue seems to hit home with media owners as well.

Agencies are exactly what Jay said... unwilling or slow to adapt. (I would also like to add a bit childish as my own opinion) So media owners that want to be innovative and spur on the economic recovery have to put things on hold while agencies catch up to the rest of the world.

Being on the media side of the coin, I see so many new exciting ways to implement all kinds of technology and for the most part it is going to waste. Never to be used because the agencies refuse to educate themselves enough to make/be creative and make buys.

Now I don't want to seem harsh... the current economic climate does exaggerate the point, but the underlying issue is still there. Agencies should take a Six Sigma style look at their business and instead of fixing the symptoms... they need to find the source of the problem and fix that. (Be able to adapt and educate your staff more quickly)

-Jonathan Wilhelm

-PS

To tie my comment to the original article:

If agencies did this then they could "simply eliminated the word "creative" from our lexicon. If we did, the discussion would shift to a more productive discussion, focusing on engagement and effectiveness."

If Jay had not made them first, I would have made many of the same points. Thank you Jay. However, it is not enough to issue a broad policy statement on such matters. Back in 1996, COCO+CO. went so far as to prohibit employees from entering "creative" contests unless achievement of goals was measured.

The policy emerged when one graphic designer couldn't find a client partner's marketing plan, but had no problems locating the award criteria for a particular show. I found this to be a conflict of interest in violation of the company's "Resolution of Principles" and institued the policy which remains in force.

Tim Coco
President and chief executive officer
COCO+CO. www.cocoboston.com

I agree the word creative is used for many things now and in many contexts. Not only have I seen it used as a skill of being creative, but as job title on business cards, plus more.

Creative to me seems to be going the same way as 'quality'. Another word that is thrown about and no longer means anything to anyone, yet everyone talks about 'quality'.

Thanks for the quality and creative post :-)

I totally agree with Paul from NY. Good creative should always be strategic on some level. However, I'm sure all of us have fallen prey to the tyranny of client politics and time constraints sometimes resulting in the worst ideas getting airtime. So I understand the reality.

We should always strive to elevate our work to encompass both elements. If we don't compromise, then the client will value both.

Thanks for sparking the conversation!

I can definitely identify with this article. I used to work for an agency that only cared about awards, and consistently pitched work that was far off strategy. The strategic input from the client and internal strategic briefs were simply discarded, and the creative teams leveraged their clout to develop whatever ideas they chose, without regard to input from other teams.

From my side of the business (account), it frequently caused tension both internally and externally and I believe ultimately contributed to the agency's loss of a number of accounts, and consequently mass layoffs. Ironically this approach rarely actually led to award-winning work actually being produced. On a number of occasions, we went in and pitched multiple rounds of off-strategy creative work, were received very poorly by the client at several levels, and subsequently we were directed by the client exactly what to produce. The work naturally became on-strategy at that point, but lost all creativity.

It's our job as an agency to develop work which meets all of the criteria mentioned in the article - smart, disruptive, original, on-strategy, connects in a meaningful way with the consumer, etc. If these pieces can be married upfront, you can get a satisfied client who is less likely to take over the process and drive poor work into production.

Talking about hateful words, "direct" should be one of them. I mean, who in marketing thinks that advertising is looking a way to deliver the message in a way different than the shortest? We KNOW our limitations, we KNOW we have only 20 seconds to say something... is there ANY more straightforward than that? Oh, I hate "direct". And "creative" too. I still use to date with "strategic", but maybe we should see other people...