Let’s renew creativity

You know how they say everyone can be creative?

They’re lying. Yes, everyone can write, everyone can paint a picture, everyone can take a photo. But having a skill or pressing a button doesn’t mean you’re creative. More often than not it means your replicative. You’re just replicating someone else’s creativity.

And that dickweed executive who says creativity is simply connecting two previously unconnected things is a simple-minded idiot. By that measure, banging your head against a brick wall is creative.

Such diminution of creativity undervalues its power. It reduces creatives to interchangeable widgets. Even worse it leads to the wrong people making creative decisions.

When the wrong people are making creative decisions, the wrong creative gets made. As is evident by the sad state of creativity in advertising these days. Is it just me or have you noticed how ads have become insufferable in recent years?

As a former creative director, all I see is one brief after another masquerading as an ad. No creativity, no charm, no wit. No reason to pay attention. Just one boring headline or stream of numbers after another. A waste of time and space. (Speaking of numbers, did you know you’re now more likely to die in a shark attack than click a banner ad?)

Whatever happened to creativity in advertising? All those mergers over the years have resulted in a handful of advertising conglomerates that make more money selling media than selling creativity. They’ve become incentivized to produce less effective advertising that requires a client to commit to a bigger media buy because that’s where they make the money. Always follow the money.)

This explains why advertising is in a death spiral. The fact it shot itself in the foot and the head at the same time is kind of funny. Connecting two previously unconnected things together, eh.

We need to renew creativity now more than ever. We need new ideas and new ways of living to move us out of the age of plagues to a new age of wonder.

If you look closer at the word ‘create’ you’ll discover it’s from Latin creare.

Which means to bring into being, to bring forth, to grow.

Let’s grow like never before.