NOT EVERYBODY IS CREATIVE.
One of most annoying sound bites I constantly hear these days goes like this, “You know Phil everyone at our company is creative.” Nice idea but what an absolute load of tosh.
If I hear this once more I swear I’ll pull my own teeth out with pliers, or with some other tool and in a creative way of course. We all definitely need to take a step back and assess what being creative actually should mean and represent within our space. Anyone with a true commercial creative mind knows it’s extremely hard to come up with ideas that stir the soul, that can actually be produced on budget and can actually sell stuff. However if you believe the turgid crap that we see every day is the creative benchmark, then it’s easy to see where the perception ‘anyone can do it’ comes from.
“It’s extremely hard to come up with ideas that stir the soul, that can actually be produced on budget and can actually sell stuff.”
To all agencies out there, how many of your creative team are professionally qualified? How many studied their art before joining the workforce? The answer to creating a solid core of emerging creative talent probably lies within those statistics. True, there are examples of creatives that have got to the top through trial and error, loosely translated as experience, but what worries me is the collateral damage inflicted while this ‘experience’ was being earned.
“Ensure that we never obstruct real creative talent by surrounding them with the mediocre.”
Everybody within our industry needs to understand creativity better, its value commercially and more importantly its impact; this will ensure that we never obstruct real creative talent by surrounding them with the mediocre. We may be extremely proud that one of our suits represented his country at knitting and one of the girls in PR got a B in her GCSE Art, but this does not give them creative sway in the workspace and we should not encourage such munchausen-esque reinvention within the ranks. The lines need to be drawn, it’s for the best. Generating jaw-dropping ideas that sell is and always will be the job of the few from which the many benefit.
The more we promote this truth, the faster we raise the entry standard and the better our creative teams will become.
Phil Lynagh
Director SHA.
“The opinions in this article are that of the author alone and in no way, reflect the opinions or viewpoint of the agency. Unless of course we happen to agree with those opinions completely, in which case they might, but otherwise they don’t”
