Death to sh*t ads: Creativity as a competitive sport
A blog by Jess Wheeler, Creative Director, SICKDOGWOLFMAN
After watching the new brand campaigns from Anthropic and OpenAI, I bashed up a quick post on my phone that caught fire very quickly. (It’s funny how it’s always the innocuous on-the-fly stuff that takes off.)
There’s layers to it which I’ll leave you to ponder, but something that I often can’t stop my brain from doing is pulling things apart and searching for the why behind it. The ‘what makes it tick’. Like a subconscious raccoon rifling through the trash in my head. And something that I still think is oft overlooked in our world is the fact that we’re in the business of creativity as a competitive sport.
I wont labour the point too much in this post, as I covered it in a previous post titled ‘Find a way to poke your own bear’. If you haven’t read it, maybe jump in for context, and then come back.
The fact of the matter is that this is not a ‘normal job’. We don’t have a set list of widgets to make, spreadsheets to fill out, boxes to tick, and then we clock off for the day. Much like a professional athlete (I imagine, anyway), it’s all consuming. We work on our craft, we watch our opponents, we keep an eye on the ‘transfer market’ for movement of talent, eye the switching of sponsors, we work hard, we win, we lose, we celebrate, we cry, we quickly move on to the next fight. It’s why consultancies buying agencies has (not always, but mostly) been a failure. Why CX, PR, Digital agencies attempting to go ‘full service’ has mostly been a failure. Why external businesses merging agencies together to ‘bring in creative’ has mostly been a failure. Because they don’t get it. They don’t get what motivates us. (They have their own motivations, but they are not the same.)
Capitalism, for all its benefits and faults, is built on competition. Eat or get eaten. And over time what’s become clear is that there are two ways to get bigger and stronger and more competitive. Cut or create. This is a blunt way to put it, but generally speaking – suits cut, creatives create. In some instances, both are required, so this isn’t a black and white ‘good or bad’ analogy. Balance is necessary. But as our industry has become increasingly run by suits instead of creatives, I think we can all agree there’s mostly been a lot of cutting. I mean, look at the holdcos. Acquire, merge, cut, repeat. (And how’s that been going?)
Creatives aren’t driven by cutting. We’re driven by making, building, creating. That’s our competitive sphere. Making 2% more quarterly profit by switching our photocopy paper provider or making a bunch of people redundant does not energise us. We want to come up with the best idea. We want to beat the other teams in our agency. We want to beat the other agencies. We want our brands to beat the other brands. We want to get headlines. We want to win awards. We want to make shit famous. We want to win the game by making the best thing. You can ridicule it all you want, and there’s certainly validity in the nonsense around awards and PR in this business, there’s toxicity in the water, but at the end of the day – it still drives the competitive nature of commercial creativity and, ultimately, drives people to make better work and build better brands. (Moving forward, the best suits and clients will be the ones who find a way to tap into this inherent competitive nature, something I covered in this post about motivating creatives.)