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Advertising is not a creative utopia
Creative imagination is possibly what first separated Homo sapiens from his knuckle-dragging ancestors. From the time the first troglodyte smudged a muddy handprint on a cave wall, tilted his furrowed brow sideways and said "Urgk?", creativity has flourished like a barren desert floor after the first summer rains.
How do we physically express the kaleidoscope of emotions, thoughts and ideas whirling around our crania? Art, music, literature, drama, and dance have appeased our innate hunger for creative expression. This creative expression allows us to pluck that amorphous spark of brilliance from the ether of our musings, and turn it into something tangible and beautiful.
This wonderful gift of evolution has blessed many since that first epiphany, and left us with a bountiful heritage of artistic beauty. However, our current commercial environment has few vocations dedicated to the creative mind. Unless, by some fluke of fate, your art, music, literature, drama, or dance, surges through the clutter and becomes the 'next big thing', the artistic profession shows little in the form of pecuniary or emotional reward. Now advertising and marketing are recognised as creative pursuits and they are also very lucrative industries, but what is the true creativity quotient within these professions? Are we creativity whores, regurgitating our artistic reflections to the highest bidders? Lorded over by slavering bean counters and self-proclaimed marketing 'gurus', intent on squishing the very last drop of creativity out of our passionately conceived ideas… and then revising, reworking, obliterating, editing and mangling those ideas into weak shells of the original concept. "It just didn't fit in with our perception of the targeted, HNC (Hip 'N Cool) market, and doesn't align with our globally realigned and streamlined, general and strategic marketing plan," they explain once you have slaved for 3 days, both day and night, to give them exactly what was briefed.
Don't be misled. Advertising and marketing is not the creative bastion it is made out to be. "If you go high enough, you will always reach one man," (Mel Gibson in Payback) - the one who makes the final decision. This is the abridged creativity hierarchy:
Now on the bottom rung of the creative ladder, we have possibly the largest pool of artistic talent, slowly tapering off as you go up the chain. At the top of the chain, we have the guy who has the final say - Le Grande Fromage. Based on experience, this guy is not bursting at the seams with treacle-like creative juices. His idea of creativity is his 4-year-old's finger painting stuck on his fridge. Creatives have to struggle with this ironic and evil twist of fate everyday, having their creative jewels bashed, squashed and bastardised by deluded Dali's, wannabe Lascaris's, and closet copywriters. The creative value chain is upended. We need to turn the creative process on its head. First the guy with the Mont Blanc pen can scribble his crappy doodles on a post-it, from whence it descends down the chain, eventually landing with the creative team, who can mould it with creative impunity. The final product is now 'patented', meaning that no alteration can be more than say 5 percent of the original. This piece of creative genius can now go to market, to achieve fantastic results for the client, earn awards and be held up as an icon of advertising.
Or maybe I am just seething on my arrogant creative pedestal? Maybe we don't know anything about the business' strategic, global marketing bollocks. I argue that we know our business and advertising sells product. Simple as that. If you want to sell, you advertise, and if you want to advertise successfully, you should employ the experts and let them get on with it. Would you tell a dentist that you thought the cavity was in another tooth?
Post-rant, my advice is this – if you want to get into the creative field, get yourself a Mont Blanc pen and start counting beans, because that's the only way you will be able to have total creative freedom.
