Creativity. The Value of the Painted Word.

“There is only one valuable thing in art: the thing you cannot explain.”

Georges Braque

There is a book that caused a lot of trouble around 1975. It is called The Painted Word. It was written by the famous writer Tom Wolfe. It is a critique of modern art and art critics specifically. He summed up what the book was saying about modern art this way.

“Without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting.”

His basic point was that, without words, whether they are an explanation or theory, modern paintings have very little meaning and cannot be enjoyed or understood. You cannot just look at the object itself. You have to understand the thinking behind it first. The value therefore came from the explanation rather than the painting itself. Modern art needs words. This irony obviously upset many in the art world calling Mr Wolfe a philistine and many other uncharitable names. People that were not in the art world thought he had a point.

I bring this up because I think this way of thinking will soon be very important in our business. Advertising’s latest buzz word is curation. To be fair, it comes around every couple of years but I feel this year it is having a stronger showing. What is curation? It is making a choice. It is selecting or choosing a piece of work out of many other pieces of work. Or, in our business picking a route, idea or campaign over another.

Now, in the good old days you might have a couple of directions, go to a few meetings and pick a direction and move forward. However, now, in our brave new world, the potential exists to create hundreds of variations and versions instantly. Thousand of options. So how do you decide? Some might say the modern way is to test and learn. Get a few versions, see how people respond and go from there. Perhaps. But even in this scenario choices will have to be made. There will still be opinions because human beings are involved.

I have always said it is easy to have a hundred ideas, but it is hard to care about one. Or, to put it another way, the more options you have the worse it could get.

When you have an infinite amount of stimuli and creativity it loses a lot of its value because it is not special or rare or interesting. It does not stand out. Therefore, for decisions and choices to be made, value will have to be put back into the equation. Anybody who works in the business knows that at least half the effort and time we all expend goes into getting decisions being made. I once had a two hour global meeting with a very senior client where I had to explain how a rabbit is capable of riding a bicycle. This stressed him out greatly. He thought it was unrealistic The fact the rabbit could talk and was wearing a waistcoat however was fine.

My point is making decisions in this business is a weird business. It is never a straight line. Often an idea happens because somebody had an unnatural amount of belief in it to get it across the line. An inconvenient, irrational truth. And, if we think having more choices and options will help that process, we might be incorrect. More options means more decisions. More decisions means more confusion. So, unless humans are completely removed from the process (which could happen) the issue of quantity not giving you quality will remain. After all, curation is just another word for taste. Another very valuable and underrated quality looking forward.

The truth is, as much as humans pretend to be logical we are not. We will always want an explanation or a story to make a decision. Tell me why. Make me care or feel. These things get you to clarity and give you confidence. And hey presto, curation. It is how you make a needle out of a haystack. Or, as an old client used to say if we started to waffle, cut the crap and tell me why I should do this.

In the future, how you make and explain a decision could become more valuable than the choice itself.

Or, the more ‘creative’ choices you have at your fingertips, the more painted words you will need.

Caveat emptor.

Creativity. Things we shouldn’t lose.

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing.”

George Bernard Shaw

Sorry it’s been a while. One thing I have learnt this year is that it is way harder and takes way longer to write a book than you think. But, we are almost done. My book based on ten years of Damonsbrain.com will come out later this year. Anyway, I digress.

While putting the book together I came across this brilliant clip from John Cleese on creativity. Please watch it. Specifically, he talks about what great creatives have that make them succeed. And the answer is not intelligence. It is being able to play.

It is actually vital to come up with new ideas. This might not sound revolutionary. But, in a world where increasingly, creativity is seen as an instant answer rather than a process it is worth thinking about. If you lose the time to play, is it even creativity or just a distant facsimile of it? It made me ask what other qualities or ingredients we should hold onto if we want creativity to have actual value as a game changer.

This is a photograph I took over 25 years ago in a town called Durban in South Africa. It is of a man standing in a doorway of a barber shop having a smoke. It was a fleeting, unexpected moment and I shot about 4 frames but only one shot worked. For me, it represents the two other qualities besides play we should hold onto to create new paths and things. Firstly, direct experience of the world and what is in it. A story, a conversation in an Uber or a glimpse of something out of the corner of your eye gives you a unique perspective. As a creative this is priceless. Often, it is not just what you say but how you say it. The postcard is never the place. Being different can be half the battle. That starts with not being fed answers but going out there and finding them. Your first hand experience will always the best way to do something great because you are the only person in the world who has it.

Lastly, the ability to see what you are not looking for. Or, to put it another way being open to randomness. Going forward, we will be able to create work very, very quickly. We will also spend a lot of time finding exactly what we are looking for. And we will have hundreds of options and lists of what we are looking for. There will be an accuracy and efficiency that will be deeply seductive. What that means is a lot of work will start to look the same. It will be correct but will it be interesting? How will we find what we are not looking for?

Playing is often about putting dumb shit together without any fear of looking stupid. It is how you get somewhere new. And to be clear, creativity’s real value is getting you somewhere new. Being open to randomness and humour is how you get there.

Play, direct experience and being open to randomness are all vital ingredients of the creative process. And of course the problem with these qualities is they need time. Something the world does not have. However, if these qualities are seen as unimportant, creativity just becomes a word that gets used a lot but loses its meaning.

We need to remember that creativity will always be the glitch not the matrix. That is its job. It should be daring. It should be irreverent. It should hate the phrase, that’s how things are done. It shouldn’t fit in. It should laugh at the wrong things. And the right things. And everything else.

We need to remember that creativity is an answer but you get to that answer by not looking for it. You get there by playing.

We also need to remember that creativity is not about finding answers that already exist. It is about finding answers that you didn’t even know could exist.

Finding those answers always begins with replacing fear with fun.

And fun is really something we should never lose.

Be a Geoff and try a little tenderness.

Got on a lucky one. Came in eighteen to one. I’ve got a feeling. This year’s for me and you.

Fairytale of New York

The Pogues

We are on the home stretch. Christmas approaches like a cheerful, glistening tsunami. At one of my old agencies, the creative department used to call it Black December. We were all tired and perhaps a little more cynical than usual after doing a Christmas campaign that had 6000 elements that may or may not have made any sense. Add to that, family commitments and everything else going on, and it can be as bleak as being the only person on the dance floor at your own New Years Eve party.

I mention this because I would like to do a little experiment that may get me thrown out of the secret creative cynical society. Which of course doesn’t exist. Or, does it?

Let me explain. A couple of weeks ago a creative called Geoff Fischer passed away. His passing was noted on Campaign Brief. I didn’t know him but I found myself reading the article and learning about all the cool and interesting things he did in his career. He sounded like a great person but it was all facts. I found myself wondering what he was like. Really like. You know, what was he like on a Tuesday morning in the creative department after learning the agency had lost a big pitch? Then I got to the comments section.

There was one comment that told me everything I needed to know.

“People had Geoff to tell them how great they are. Love and miss that man.”

I instantly knew Geoff. I had never met him, but I knew him. He was the person who picked up the other creatives on a bad Tuesday morning.

He was the person who gave confidence to other creatives. That is a skill that is enormously underestimated. It is one of the main secrets for creative success. Without confidence, it is very hard to put yourself out there. If you have ever had your work bombed and had to re-present the next day, you know what I am talking about.

If you are lucky, in your career, you will have a person like this. Somebody who will tell you that you are fantastic. They will tell you to keep trusting in what you are doing. Somebody who will pick you up and worry about how you are doing more than their own career. In short, they are a creative who cares about other creatives. I certainly have had people like that in my career. I had a director called Oscar – a piano-playing, chess-winning, all-round lovely human – tell me early in my career I could do great things. Nobody had ever said that to me. He has no idea the difference those words made to me. Until now, I guess. Merry Xmas, Oscar.

So, I guess Oscar was my Geoff. If we are lucky, we all know a Geoff. Be that creative. Those words can change a career and banish the doubts. And we all have doubts, right?

So, in honour of somebody I have never met and because it’s almost Christmas, here is my Christmas experiment. Tell somebody you work with that they are great. I know, I know. It goes against the creative code of cynicism. It is something that isn’t done in an agency. We create emotion but try not to show it. Do it. I don’t care how. Hide it in a story or a joke if that makes you feel better. But say it. Be like Geoff. Don’t think it. Say it.

You never know the difference your words could make.

Merry Xmas.

Creativity. Now and then can both be true.

“Fuck the past. This was the present.”

Margie Stiefvater

I was at SxSW in Sydney recently. I saw some great talks and learnt heaps. But, there was a re-occurring conversation. I cannot tell you how many times I ended up speaking about A.I. and what is going to happen. How will advertising change? Will I have a job? I am sure you have had those conversations.

So, since it is almost Xmas (Unfuckingbelievable) I thought I would attempt to offer a bit of hope. What I am about to say is pretty obvious. But it might help. Oh well, better out than in.

At the moment there is a narrative out there that technology will replace creativity. A lot of this is driven by the fear that technology will be used to replace a lot of jobs. This is a real and understandable fear.

However, what this narrative has also done is create this idea that technology and creativity are always seperate things. That technology will replace creativity. That these two things are in a battle.

There is another way to look at this. And I can’t really think of a better example than the new song from The Beatles called Now and Then. Sir Peter Jackson had created a technology during his brilliant Beatles documentary that let you seperate all the layers of a song using machine learning. Technology.

45 years ago, John Lennon had made a beautiful demo tape of a song. Creativity. However, the quality wasn’t great and his vocals were hard to hear. This tape sat in a bottom drawer and was never going to be used. And who doesn’t have a bottom drawer idea that couldn’t be done?

This new technology let the remaining Beatles finish the creativity of the song. Creativity and technology came together to create something neither could have done on its own.

The simple thought of technology and creativity being partners is everywhere. Musicians and sound engineers. A director and a director of photography. Special effects and live action. I could go on. What is strange is we like to put these disciplines into seperate boxes. Which of course is the opposite of what creatives should do. We should always stay open to new stuff. That is almost the first rule of being a creative. We should always be the first to put weird shit together. The truth is creativity and technology will give us a far bigger horizon than if you seperate them.

Just as an example, have a look at what my mate and great creative, Ant Keogh AKA Funkuncle is doing. Check out funkuncle_productions on Instagram. He is exploring what technology can do creatively. And, when you play, fear disappears and a whole new brilliant world of opportunity opens up.

Maybe that’s the word. Opportunity. Instead of threat. Yes, things are going to change. But that’s what creativity is all about right? The new. Nostalgia and creativity are not really great bedfellows. If you are creative you should love change. The truth is in this business we talk about disruption and being the crazy ones all the time. But, has advertising really changed in the last 50 years? And, do you weep for all the typesetters who lost their jobs when photoshop came out?

The opportunity to do more than you ever could shouldn’t be a threat. Taste, subtlety and restraint, context and human experience will still be required. And, I would guess way more than before. Because there is also a whole lot of mediocre shit that is about to be made. If there is one thing I know, it is that just because you have the tool it doesn’t mean you know how to use it. You need technology and creativity.

It is how we will make sense of now and then.

Creativity. All a Monet really needs is Taylor Swift.

“Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.”

Warren Buffet

Let’s do a little thought experiment.

I want you to imagine it’s somewhere around 1926. You are standing in Claude Monet’s studio in Giverny. It is a beautiful room. Full of colour and the sun. The old master will pass away that year. He gets his assistants to bring out a giant painting of water lilies he has painted. They float beautifully in the pond of his magnificent garden. He then gets the assistants to bring out the other 249 paintings he has painted of the same pond. He had painted this one little patch of water for 3 decades. Day and night. Summer and winter. Year after year. You are standing in front of his life’s work. I am sure it would be an experience beyond words. The last one sold in 2018 for almost 85 million dollars.

The interesting question is why? Why does something that has been painted 250 times have that much value? Compared to many other masterpieces it is not that rare. If I got one of his paintings and used A.I to create 250 options that you couldn’t tell from the originals, would you pay 85 million dollars for one? Now, I know you are going to say no. And neither would I. I am sure you would say because it’s not real. But, if we think about that answer for a second, it does bring up some interesting questions. In a brave new world, what is real? What will make something valuable?

If value is not only about rarity then, perhaps it is about something else. The experience you have? This becomes an important question. Because, when you can make 1 million Monet’s per day they are no longer valuable. They just become information again. There is no narrative, no context or any meaning. And there is no experience. A Monet and a business card become the same thing.

We have seen this for a while with music. In the past, the album was everything. In the beginning, you would wait in line with your community, devour the cliff notes and try to decode and obsess over the cover artwork. These were the lovely extra bits that didn’t let you just own a song, they ensured the song fucking belonged to you. This was how you experienced music. Then music went online and albums kind of fell by the wayside. You could now stream a billion songs to billions of people. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But, the specialness seemed to go backstage.Your song was on a list with other songs and bands that are sort of similar. You were part of a bigger package. The list had become more important than the song. The information had lost its specialness. I am sure there were many sweaty, unhappy band meetings about standing out. The simple solution was to do the one thing that cannot be replicated. Live performances. So, just to be clear, the bands that could, took what was becoming un-special information and turned it into an experience again. And hey presto, value appears.

Which brings me neatly to Taylor Swift. Now, there is a sentence I never thought I would write. Her latest tour has made a billion dollars. Each show brings in 13 million dollars. There are 131 shows. But the touring is not the secret. The secret is how she has brought the specialness back for her fans. And she has done it by going back to the beginning of music but with modern tools. She creates albums. Her fans truly belong to a community and have stories to tell. They get secret information and special access. These are all ingredients that have been around since The Beatles. But, Taylor Swift also has 273 million fans on Instagram that build this story with her. She understands that nothing is going to help you more than amplifying those ingredients to create a human experience. It would seem having a song or touring is just permission to play. These days you need to do a lot more.

Don’t just take my word for it. Have a read of this paragraph by Alex Suskind for Entertainment Weekly.

Over the past 13 years, Swift has perfected the pop culture feedback loop: She shares updates about her life and drops hints about new music, which fans then gobble up and re-promote with their own theories, which Swift then re-shares on her Tumblr or incorporates into future clues. It’s like a T-Swift-built Escher staircase of personal memories and moments that tease what’s next. “I’ve trained them to be that way,” she says of her fans’ astute detective work. Swift is a pop culture fanatic herself and has an innate understanding of the lengths her audience will go to be a part of the original creation. “I love that they like the cryptic hint-dropping. Because as long as they like it, I’ll keep doing it. It’s fun. It feels mischievous and playful.”Through this approach, Swift has designed the ultimate artistic scavenger hunt — and it’s easy to get swept up in its drama, even if you don’t listen to her music.

Warren Buffet’s quote will become even more important in the creative world over the next couple of years. Right now, we are so excited that we can generate lots of stuff, we might be forgetting something important. The human being who has to look at it. And human beings are driven by how things make them feel. As illogical as it may seem, meaning will always be why something is valuable. Because, that’s how a song or a painting belongs to you.

That is what creates a human experience. It feels unique. It feels like it can’t be replicated. It feels like it is yours alone. From a brilliant football match that could have gone either way to a perfect meal with friends at a restaurant that blew your mind, this is what makes life worth living. That’s what makes it special. And, in a world where we can make a lot of stuff very quickly, this feeling, will become increasingly valuable.

Otherwise, it is just information.

And you can get that pretty much anywhere these days.

Creativity. What will the wrong answers be worth tomorrow?

“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”

Sir Ken Robinson

Many years ago, BBH the great London agency had a black sheep as their logo. Their line was: when the world zigs, zag.

In short, how do you not be like everybody else. Creativity in advertising is all about being noticed. And a large part of that is not being like everybody else. One of my favourite quotes of all time comes from Picasso. Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.

Creativity should always be wary of consensus. Creativity should always be wary of best practice. Creativity should be wary of the phrase, that’s how things are done. None of those things really get you anywhere new. Let’s be clear, creativity is supposed to be the glitch not the matrix. The matrix is about what is. The glitch is how you go somewhere new.

So, to bolster my argument I thought I would give you two examples. One is about obsession and the other, humour. I think these qualities, which are really about discernment, will become very important in a world where the correct answer will be why many things look like other things.

It is very hard to light a film using candlelight. Actually, in the 70s it was almost impossible. But it was done in Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon. He realised that to make the film look like life in the 1750s there would have been no electric light. Only candles. So, that is madness right? It sounds like a bad idea with millions of dollars at stake. I am sure there were many who thought it wouldn’t work.

Well, Kubrick didn’t think so. He had a singular vision. He wasn’t looking for consensus or best practice. So, how did he do it? He obtained three super-fast lenses developed by Zeiss for use by NASA in the Apollo moon landings. With these lenses that were made for the moon and some other technical innovations he pulled it off. John Alcott the cinematographer would win an Oscar for his work. The obsession of Kubrick to do this created something new. What the 1750s actually looked like on film. Think how many period piece films had been shot before this. Nobody had asked the question. And nobody was obsessed enough to find an answer. An answer nobody was looking for.

Imagine, I pitch you an idea for a television show. The main person is a loser in almost every way. He is also unlikeable and continually stressed out. His wife thinks he is an idiot. The business he runs is terrible because he doesn’t know what he is doing. The staff he works with are incompetent and he treats them like shit. In each episode, something happens that is going to be a catastrophe. I would imagine many would not buy this show. There would be too many negatives. I would imagine there would be conversations about making the main character more likeable. By the way, the show is called Fawlty Towers.

This is why humour has always been important. It tells the truth to humans. A truth you see in yourself. Which is where humour comes from. And, it can look at the most mundane subjects and transform them into brilliance. To find truth and transformation in the same place is very rare. Humour doesn’t look for consensus or best practice. It looks for mistakes, flaws and what it means to be human. Our business moved away from humour for a long time. It needs to move back. It needs to zag.

The reality is, in the future, being the same as everybody else will be incredibly easy. And many will do it.

Which is why being different will become far more valuable.

And being different always begins with making the ‘wrong’ choices.

Thanks Sugar Man.

“Don’t sit and wait. Don’t sit and dream. Put on a smile. Go find a scene.”

Sixto Rodriguez

This is a small personal tribute to somebody who changed how I look at the world. I don’t understand how he did it. But that’s magic for you. I am just glad he did.

Durban is kind of like the third city in South Africa. I think every country has that city. Humid and happy. The small bands would play there. But, the big ones wouldn’t. The kind of city where you cannot be a celebrity and if you are an influencer you are definitely a micro influencer. Don’t get me wrong, it was a great place to grow up. But, boy, it felt a long way from anywhere. Actually, I wasn’t sure anywhere even existed. I loved the place but I had a feeling that it gave me small dreams. Dreams that didn’t get you beyond the end of your street. We used to ride our bikes on our street. We used to play cricket on our street. We used to do nothing on our street. The world ended at the end of our street.

Then one day the slightly older, definitely cooler neighbours were working on their car. A song started to play on their sound system. Decades later the moment is still perfectly clear in my mind. Sugar Man started to play. Instantly, I understood. There was a whole fucking world out there. And I would have to go and find it.

I asked the singers name. The neighbour in rugby shorts tells me the singers name is Rodriguez. His friend in rugby shorts tells me he is dead. He tells me Rodriguez had set himself on fire. They nod knowingly. So, I nod. But, I don’t know why I am nodding.

About 15 years later, I was in a small club called the Blues Room in Johannesburg. My girlfriend’s dad worked in the music industry. He told us to come down to watch an act. But, he didn’t tell us who it was. Now, everybody in South Africa really did think Rodriguez was dead. The other rumour was he had shot himself on stage. So, we are sitting there and this man walks on stage. Very unassuming. Very quiet. He starts singing. A few of us think, wow, what a great impersonator. But, it is not an impersonator. Slowly, it dawns on us. It’s really fucking him. It’s fucking him. It was like seeing Elvis a year after his death. It was insane. Maybe 60 of us watching in total disbelief. It would turn out that this was a warm up gig before the big one you see in the documentary ‘Searching For Sugar Man’. If you haven’t seen it, please watch it. It is a fantastic documentary and this blog will make a lot more sense.

In your life, there are a couple of moments that give you a magical, inspirational shit eating grin you can’t wipe off your face. That night was one of them. Art, and especially music, has the ability to make you feel everything is possible and you are in exactly the right place in the universe. That is about as good as it gets.

If I am honest, I am not sure why I have written this. Maybe, it’s just that I wanted to share something special. Maybe, everything doesn’t have to make sense. Or, I just am grateful that Rodriguez got me to realise the world didn’t end at the end of my street. I guess, I just wanted to say thanks Sugar Man. I don’t know what you did for me.

But, you did a lot.

Creativity. And now for something completely unexpected.

“We don’t see the things as they are, we see them as we are.”

Anais Nin

I hope this post makes you remember the first time you had an idea. Come on now, don’t roll your eyes yet.

Creatives are odd in quite a few ways. But, perhaps the strangest is how they search for new ways of doing things. This process is obviously scary and full of insecurity which is why we tend to be cynical bastards. But we are not really are we? I prefer to call it dark charisma anyway.

On top of all this, we are looking for a signal that our thinking will definitely work. It’s like looking for a map while on the journey. So, it is perhaps understandable we seek a little shelter or security from the insanity of this process. This alchemy has a name.

Inspiration.

It is a word that gets used way too much. It doesn’t happen very often. That’s why I am so fond of this quote by Chuck Close:

“Inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and get to work.”

But the truth is it does happen sometimes. So, what is it?

For me, inspiration is when you have absolute clarity about an idea and you know how to do it. Also, you completely know that it’s right. And, it happens instantly. It is also effortless. No work was required. And in hindsight it seemed obvious. I would guess, in a creatives career, it might happen a couple of times. You often hear musicians saying they wrote a big hit song in ten minutes. They say it was like it was already done and they just managed to hear it.

It is a very mysterious, mystical thing and I wish I understood how it happened. Unfortunately, I don’t. But I have found a clue.

Recently, I was in New York. We were walking about 20 000 sweltering steps a day. New York forces you to get out of your life. The denseness of every city block commands you to look and look again. It gives you new eyes. They see with innocence and clarity. You look at the world like a kid again. You see the possibility of everything.

This brings me to the photo above that I snapped with my iPhone. I was in Washington Park, in Greenwich, with my son Jake. The smell of weed filled the air. It was a beautiful warm evening. We noticed all these guys doing tricks and became fascinated with them. I lost an hour watching them. But, to all the New Yorkers, they were invisible. They walked straight past. In fact, a really great creative put this in on my FB page under the photo.

“It’s fun to see things that captivate you in NYC. When u live here u don’t even notice these things anymore.”

He is completely right. Inspiration doesn’t go anywhere. You just stop seeing it. You see the world as you are. The familiar becomes invisible. If you go to a house in Johannesburg, South Africa for the first time you will notice they all have electric fences. Thousands of them. But if you live there, they are normal. You don’t see them anymore.

It is such a rare and precious gift to see something for the first time. It reminded me that in a world where we want absolute certainty and things that are guaranteed to work, it is still the new, the surprising and the unexpected that push you towards the door of inspiration.

I guess, what I am saying is do yourself a favour.

Take a different way to work tomorrow.

Advertising. Everything is going to change. And it won’t.

“Driving the train doesn’t set its course. The real job is laying the track.”
Ed Catmull

In advertising, we love to write about where things are going and that shimmering, mystical place on the horizon. The future. Today, I am writing about something less glamorous. The process that goes with it and why it will always exist in advertising. That is unless humans are completely eradicated from the business. Which will have its own set of weird problems. But I digress.

Many of you will know the four P’s of marketing (I think there are 5 P’s or 7 P’s as well but I will go old school on this one). Today, I am going to introduce you to the lesser known three P’s of advertising.

Before I do, let me explain why with a little story.

When I just got started in this business I was working on one of my first real big jobs. The presentations and rounds of amends probably added up to about 6 months. There were late night global calls. Many, many suggestions all trying to be captured. Some made sense. Some didn’t. The pressure to get it right was enormous. A laundry list of considerations that changed each week. People losing perspective. All sorts of curveballs including the resignation of the person who had approved the job. In short, by the time we got to the finish line there was a sense of relief the process was over. Except it wasn’t.

We made the work. As you can imagine it wasn’t my finest hour. Nobody was happy and nobody touched the snacks in the edit suite. So, the process that we thought would ensure success was replaced by another one. Thirty rounds of un-fun edits. As I contemplated my future as a taxi driver (Uber wasn’t around yet) I painfully understood the 3 P’s of advertising. Pulling, pushing and people. The three ingredients of every job in advertising.

The reason this is important is because in our industry today there is a belief that in the future, ideas will be answers that get spat out instantly. And it is all done. The truth is, the more ideas there are, the more curation will be required. In fact, curation and prompts will become jobs all by themselves. It will be easy to have 100 ideas in the future but somebody will still need to believe in one of them. One of them will have to be backed. There is a process that goes with that. Either the pushing that happens before or the pulling that happens afterwards. Many think this will disappear but believe me, that will remain. For one simple reason. The third P. People.

Nick Law, the Creative Chairperson of Accenture Song, recently said mediocrity is now free. He is completely right. Because of technology, you can get to average work almost instantly. What that means is we will see a lot of the same type of work. We will be dealing with the problem of good enough. The question will be – if everybody has the same tools, what do you do then?

This is something I saw recently when I was judging. A lot of work using AI looked the same or had a very similar structure. The creatives had relied on AI without putting any of themselves into the work. I saw the same pattern of average you see whenever you are judging a large body of work. And then there were one or two pieces that didn’t look like anything else. You could see somebody pushed or pulled the work. You could see the brilliant idea had been protected and made better. You could see somebody cared.

Ideas are far more like babies than answers. They have to be protected and nurtured. Steve Jobs once said you can teach people anything except to care. So, as much as nobody is really sure what is about to happen, you can bet there will still be a lot of average ideas and a few really good ideas.

And you can bet there is one thing that will definitely not change.

Caring will still be under-valued and over-needed.

Creativity. The value of f#####g around.

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct.”

Carl Jung

Years ago, I worked with a creative who management didn’t like. They always thought he was playing around rather than working. He had a couple of side hustles. He always played pranks. He was never in his office. And he always seemed to be doing just about anything besides the job he was briefed to do. The thing was he always cracked the brief and he never missed a deadline. He had this way of distracting himself. He would talk to other creatives constantly about the job but not take it very seriously. It was like watching somebody fuse obsessiveness with ambivalence. He was playing but was also incredibly aware of the playing at the same time.

I thought of him when I stumbled on this clip. It is 5 years old now but I think is very relevant in today’s environment. John Mayer (apologies if you don’t like his music) shows us how to get somewhere new. He doesn’t know what he is doing. He just trusts the process. He calls it stupid-brave. You see it in creative departments when enough people are laughing and all building on an idea. No ego and in the moment. It’s like you are watching yourself very closely and totally not giving a fuck at the same time. The process is how Mr Mayer fuses these two opposite positions together to create something that wasn’t in the world seconds ago. The question is what is that power worth? It wasn’t there and now it is. Transformation. Alchemy. This is the real value of creativity.

So, why does that matter? These days there is an obsession with input and output. The world wants certainty and efficiency. Of course, it’s way cheaper and has less risk. What is the task? What is the answer? We like to talk about the beginning and end. Start and finish. But, we don’t really talk about the middle. It is messy, unpredictable and hard to pin down. I guess the question is do we need it?

What would happen if we got rid of the middle? What would happen if we made creativity more tidy? What would happen if creatives stopped playing? I am sure the world would carry on but I will take a guess what might happen. Firstly, I think a lot of inputs and outputs will start to be very similar. Not straight away, but eventually. Things will start to look and sound the same. There will be no glitches or edges. There will be nothing that is too much, a little weird or something that doesn’t make sense but sort of does. We will have a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. This blandness will create the problem of good enough.

This is where we look at creativity being correct and inoffensive rather than interesting and new.

By the way, this is not about technology or A.I. I think creatives will be just fine with all the new tools appearing almost daily. I think what is important though is creatives are allowed to play with these tools and keep things messy. Otherwise, you will start to swim in a sea of sameness. The problem of good enough. I am sure some of you have already seen a little of this happening on Midjourney where you start to see the same illustration style appear over and over. This is what consensus does. But you need playfulness, stupidity and obsessiveness to get somewhere new.

The truth is, playing around is a vital ingredient of creativity. In a sense, it almost is creativity. Without it you create a process that starts to always come to the same conclusion. Take it away and you lose the value and power of creativity. That is to create something out of nothing. And at it’s very best something completely original.

The problem is it is hard to value in terms of money.

But then again, some things are way more valuable than money.