The creativity crisis

“Lucky Strike. It’s Toasted” marks Don Draper to a group of clueless Lucky Strike chiefs in the hit show Mad Men. “We have six identical companies making six identical products. We can say anything we want. Everybody else’s tobacco is poisonous, Lucky Strike is toasted.”

They say the best strategy is one that is simple to explain but difficult to come up with. You could say the same about creativity, the best ideas are the simplest ones once you hear them, but they are the hardest to create. And marketers are becoming worse at it.
 
From 1996-2008 creatively awarded marketing campaigns were around 12 times as efficient as non-awarded ones. Since then, this has fallen alarmingly.

 
Why is marketing (and society) experiencing a creativity crisis?

Peter Field, the above graph’s author, argues that the main culprit of the decline has been marketers’ obsession with return on investment (ROI).

And I cannot blame marketers for that too much, finding and demonstrating the return from your advertising campaigns is an extremely attractive prospect for several logical reasons:

• It lets you compare your campaigns on a single metric
• It gives you a chance to present this number to prove marketing’s worth
• It allows you to optimise your campaign through testing

On the contrary, it also makes you focus on the short term results. As most marketers do not measure their campaigns beyond 6 months, it creates an unintended consequence of favouring those campaigns that perform over the short term.
 
These short term campaigns also tend to be of a certain type more often than not – highly targeted, aimed to pick the low hanging fruit and primarily digital campaigns. 
 
The shift towards these short term campaigns naturally comes at the expense of long term ones that tend to be more emotion-focused and demand marketers to employ creativity in a far greater fashion than the short term digital counterparts.
 
These insights were confirmed by the findings of Media in Focus: Marketing Effectiveness in the Digital Era, which analysed 500 ‘digital era’ case studies of marketing campaigns in recent years, including 120 cases from 2014 to 2016.
 
If long term campaigns are on the decline and these long term campaigns are more likely to demand creativity out of marketers, it is of little surprise that there has been a dip in overall creativity.
 
In many markets, most of this ‘long term’ money is being diverted into search and social media channels. Marketing investment in these digital channels has never stopped growing throughout the last decade, whereas marketing budgets have been way more conservative in their growth.
 
In 2020, online ads were projected to account for more than half of the $660bn forecast to be spent globally on ads this year for the first time. The traditional media was expected to record a growth of 1.5% year to year, its first growth since 2011, but growth on internet advertising was projected to be at 13.2%. 
 
These projections were made before half of the world’s countries went into some sort of lockdown which led masses of advertisers to switch even more of their budgets towards digital. It would not surprise me to see online advertising overtake traditional media by a significant amount in 2020.
 
“It’s a huge mistake,” Peter Field says. “We’re not anti-search. Paid search has been one of the founding stones to improvements to efficiency, but we’ve just gone too far, we’ve put too much money into it.
 
“With the money to fund 25% year-on-year growth in it, that money has got to come from somewhere, it’s not coming from Father Christmas, it comes from brand-building budgets.”
 
And it is not just small advertisers that fall into this trap, who may have fewer resources to track their results.
 
Last year Adidas admitted that it has been over-focusing on ROI and digital metrics and have now started a journey to introduce more brand-building campaigns (long term, emotion led).
 
Five years ago the sports brand didn’t have any econometrics, its attribution modelling was based on last-click and there was no brand tracking. It also focused on efficiency over effectiveness. All of that led Adidas to look at short-term KPIs and how to optimise ROI (i.e. reduce the costs) rather than what was in the best interests of its brands – long term growth.
 
“The reason for that is short-termism because we are trying to grow sales very quickly,” said Simon Peel, global brand director at Adidas to Marketing Week. “We had a problem that we were focusing on the wrong metrics, the short-term, because we have fiduciary responsibility to shareholders.”
 
It is not just Adidas, Gap has initiated a shift back to brand building after admitting it had made the mistake of advertising its discounts rather than its brand on Old Navy and was now seeing the negative effects.
 
Booking Holdings and TripAdvisor have also said they are moving their spend back to brand marketing after realising they were investing too much on performance marketing.
 
All this shows how over-focus on ROI and short term metrics has led brands to shift budgets to digital and marketing overly specialised in optimisation rather than creativity. What makes matters worse is that is only part of the problem – creativity, in general, has fallen out of fashion in marketing and organisational environments. 
 
Creativity used to be the oxygen of marketing. David Ogilvy, Bill Bernbach, Leo Burnett and many great advertising minds of the 20th century defined not only the advertising world during that time, but entire societies that we witness in today’s world (through consumerism).
 
Their ideas about consumers, brands, copywriting, imagery are prevalent until today. Whole hordes of copywriters sought Bernbach’s approval on their work. And arguably it wasn’t just creativity that made these advertising gurus different, but it certainly helped. 
 
Today’s advertising, on the other hand, has evolved to this:

Creativity gurus disappeared from today’s office because it is a lot harder to put the effects of creativity on a spreadsheet. You can measure if your PPC ad leads the prospect to sign up for your newsletter, but you cannot measure that easily if your imagery within the newsletter pop-up leads to that conversion (unless you did significant A/B testing).

And it is not just the brands and the agencies that are to blame. The emergence of digital advertising bullies Google, Facebook and Amazon in the ad space has accelerated the problem.

The advertising supply giants have given the tools for marketers to reach highly targeted audiences with small budgets, which has inadvertently created a pool of marketing talent that is focused on optimising these channels. They know how to optimise their PPC ads that deliver more views, more clicks, more conversions but lack the grounding in how to make the ads elicit an emotion.

Today’s office has also become incredibly rationalised. One of my favourite marketers of the current era, Rory Sutherland, wrote a book on this called ‘Alchemy’ and I would strongly encourage everyone to go and read it.

If something cannot be easily rationalised by the stakeholders it is unlikely to be approved. John M Keynes said worldly wisdom teaches that it is often better for the reputation of oneself to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally. One could argue that creative ideas do not always follow the conventional path.

Also, marketers have become too obsessed with media strategy at the expense of creative strategy. Most conferences and marketing sites have been flooded with digital vs traditional, extreme targeting vs mass reach, PPC versus paid social etc. Marketers have forgotten that creative execution is much more important than media selection. And that creative strategy should come before any media is even discussed.

Digital marketing experts estimate that the average American is exposed to around 4,000 to 10,000 advertisements every day. It doesn’t matter if the ads are seen before a Youtube video, in front of a TV set or in your bed while scrolling through your phone – if the advertisement does not catch the attention of the user, everything else doesn’t even matter.

However, marketers these days tend to start their meetings with what channel they might use rather than what content they will put on those channels. This is deeply flawed as plenty of research pieces have shown that the actual creative is more important than the channel.

The creativity crisis is not solely resting in the business landscape though. I would argue that our society has created an environment that is hindering our ability to be creative.

If you think about your most creative thoughts, when do they appear? For me it is most likely on a walk through Hyde Park, on a bus ride aimlessly staring through the window or while waiting in line at the grocery store. None of them occurs while being in the office. None of them occurs while staring into a phone’s screen as well.

They say Ogilvy did not write a single ad in the office. I would also bet he would not write any while scrolling through the phone during these times.

But in today’s society, our minds have become engulfed in multitasking and switching between tasks the same as a supercharged puppy that cannot decide if he wants to chew your shoe or chase the birds or catch his tail.

Our minds are constantly switched on. From our phones to our laptops to our tablets, from one task to a different one, there is no ‘white space’ for the brain to produce any unplanned thoughts. This white space is necessary for us to let it wander aimlessly and in turn train our brain to think outside the usual scope.

And if we are not training our mind to produce these thoughts, it is of little surprise that when we do want to be creative, we are useless at it.

One of the main myths that people have around creativity is that they have to be inherently born with some sort of creative spirit to have it (I used to think so as well). In reality, all of us are creative to a different degree and we portray that in our relationships, our work, our cooking and our hobbies. Likewise, we can train our mind to be more creative just like we can train it to meditate or to play sudoku.

Here are a couple of tips that I will be implementing:

• Create opportunities for ‘white space’. When we are not working on a specific task, the Default Mode Network activates within the brain (sometimes called the Imagination Network). By letting our mind wander aimlessly, we are giving the chance for the default mode network to do its magic. Find moments to give our brain some ‘white space’, whether it is during a walk or our commute, avoid the temptation to pick up the phone and fill the brain into actively thinking of something.
• Adopt ideas from other areas. Neil Gaiman, arguably one of the most creative writers of our time, says that much of his creative inspiration has come from outside the world of writing. He credits musicians Lou Reed and David Bowie as two of the biggest influences upon his work, and he says that anything can be used as inspiration for writing. Don’t limit yourself to only the influences in your area of work. Drink from a wide-brimmed glass of creative inspiration.
• And finally – practice. Rex Jung, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico who studies aptitude, intelligence and creativity said “the more raw material you have, the more time you devote to developing a skill set, the easier it is to improvise. It takes expertise to have enough material to draw on to be creative. So find an area that interests you, develop an expertise in that area, and then start creating and develop something extraordinary.”