Advertising Age published a lengthy and meandering report on the angst experienced by creatives in Adland, many of whom apparently feel disrespected and devalued in White advertising agencies. The sources of unhappiness include group brainstorms, the rise of media, the obsession with data, and the threats posed by AI.
Seems like a lot of whining rooted in recognizing how creative roles have devolved over time—as billable hours trump big ideas, CFOs outrank CCOs, and the lines have blurred between below-the-line disciplines and traditional advertising.
If any creative person is suddenly feeling disrespected and devalued, well, they just haven’t been paying attention to the happenings of the past 30 years at least.
Also, the disrespect and devaluation felt by White people in Adland isn’t nearly as bad as the discriminatory bullshit directed at people of color—who are undervalued, underpaid, and underrepresented due to underhanded scheming.
Creatives Feel Undervalued—Ad World Debates Who Should Be Involved In Generating Campaign Ideas
People are increasingly questioning the ‘group brainstorm’ move to get ideas from across an entire agency—and AI
By Lindsay Rittenhouse
Freelance creative director Julian Rad recently tweeted that “one of the most passive/aggressive insults ever hurled at a creative is calling for a brainstorm: Let’s bring the whole team together and get into it / no bad ideas / a great idea can come from anyone because everyone is creative / this is how we harness our collective power.”
The tweet, racking up more than 400 likes, sparked a debate over who exactly should be involved in generating campaign ideas and seemed to have struck a chord with creatives who expressed feeling like their work is being devalued.
One of the most passive/aggressive insults ever hurled at a creative is calling for a brainstorm: Let’s bring the whole team together and get into it / no bad ideas / a great idea can come from anyone because everyone is creative / this is how we harness our collective power.
— Julian Rad (@julianrad) May 22, 2023
Rad went on to question why other departments such as media or legal are not subject to the all-agency brainstorms that are organized to fuel creative ideas.
Media: Let’s do a collective brainstorm on our media mix. We’re all consumers of advertising, we all have a pretty good idea of how this works and I’m sure that some great new ideas for how we structure the messaging architecture that maybe you would never think of can bubble up.
— Julian Rad (@julianrad) May 22, 2023
The agency brainstorm, essentially an all-hands-on-deck situation to gather everyone in the agency to answer a client’s creative brief, is not necessarily new.
But the notion that “a creative idea can come from anywhere” is something that agencies are increasingly leaning into as they hire more employees in other areas that are high in client demand including performance marketing and data. This comes as artificial intelligence threatens creative jobs, leaving professionals such as copywriters, creative directors and art directors feeling increasingly uneasy and undervalued.
The argument over how the industry values creativity came to a head during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity last week; a recurring topic of conversation about AI and data overtook creative celebration during the ad festival.
TBWA\Worldwide President-CEO Troy Ruhanen addressed some of the industry’s creative problems in an interview with Ad Age in Cannes.
“Creativity is probably not in its boldest place right now. And it’s been three years and we’re out of COVID so at what point are we really going to acknowledge that?” Ruhanen had said, adding that AI overshadowed creativity at Cannes.
The irony is that in a festival designed to celebrate creativity, most of the heat—apart from on the awards stage—was around media, tech, data, measurement and retail networks. Even purpose marketing, a huge focus in the festival’s past, is giving way to a more performance-oriented point of view as brands go back to selling basics.
“The way we look at it is that we need to convey performance or benefits,” Procter & Gamble Co. Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard said in an interview with Ad Age when asked to weigh in on recent backlash lodged against individual marketers and their ads. “And if you do that, and do it in a way that is inclusive and also sustainable, if we stay in that territory we’ll be fine. That just reinforces again getting back to the fundamentals. I think in today’s world, moving into areas of advocacy that are outside of your brand’s wheelhouse, that’s where things can get undone.”
Some might say that agencies made their own beds by putting forward integrated “holding company” solutions that push higher-margin businesses such as media and data, with creative agencies bringing up the rear. Proponents of this argument point to mergers of legacy agencies, such as VMLY&R and Wunderman Thompson, and creative agencies being acquired, such as Droga5 being swallowed by consulting giant Accenture, as evidence that creative shops don’t hold the sway they once did.
“The race is heating up to diversify services beyond traditional creative,” Greg Paull, principal, and co-founder of R3, said in a recent report. “The biggest moves in 2022 have all been focused on the ability to serve the convergence of media, commerce, entertainment, and shopping.”
The result is a devaluation of creativity, even at the event meant to honor it.
“In the end … it’s the work of great creatives (and strategists and producers and directors) that make Cannes possible,” said Dotun Bello, senior copywriter at Anomaly. He also questioned why so much of the coverage he saw was focused on the business leaders and celebrities outside the ad industry who showed up to the festival, instead of on the people who actually made the award-winning campaigns.
Too many cooks in the kitchen
Rad said decentralizing creative across an entire agency is becoming more normalized and is one of the main reasons why creative work has been so lackluster recently, which prompted him to send his tweet. For example, he said he recently freelanced with an agency that had “creative” before every title at the shop including “creative account director” and “creative production coordinator.”
“At first I was like, ‘Oh how cute,’” Rad said. “But they actually took that very much to heart; that a great idea can come from anywhere. So I literally couldn’t do anything without first bringing the group together, getting consensus, having them brainstorm through everything. They would just dump their ideas on me and expect me to do the creative work of bringing them to life whether they were good or not.”
Rad said the work suffered because there were about 15 people tossing around creative ideas who all needed to come to agreement on the final product. He said the ideal creative team involves three to four people: a few people from the creative suite and maybe one or two strategists.
Rad added that group brainstorms are not all bad; they can be beneficial if the creative team wants to gut check an idea with a larger audience.
He said the agency usually calls group brainstorms when it’s just won a piece of new business, to rally people up with a team-building exercise, or when managers feel like the creative team isn’t delivering the right idea or at the right pace—which is what he has a problem with.
“It’s an expression of managerial anxiety where they don’t really understand the creative process,” Rad said. “It’s not going fast enough, it’s not going well enough.”
Keith Cartwright, founder and chief creative officer of WPP-backed Cartwright, said while he believes an idea can be sparked by anyone at the agency, some shops do devalue the creative work by forcing too many brainstorms.
“When you start to devalue [creative], which is our product,” Cartwright said, “clients pay less, they give it less respect, timelines shrink, production budgets shrink, because they don’t see the inherent value of it anymore and they’re finding other ways to get their message out.”
Cartwright said even if an idea comes from someone in another department of an agency, it does not mean that person knows how to bring the idea to life and deliver it through a successful campaign to clients like a creative director would. That’s where creatives bring value and that’s the work that should be ultimately left to them, he said.
“As an industry, we have to be very careful in saying that ideas can come from anywhere,” Cartwright said. “There’s collaboration, which is important, but there’s collaboration run amok. Collaboration run amok is everyone raises their hand and everyone gets an opinion and you have to take everyone’s opinion into consideration. And then you have to put their opinions into the final say. If you look at it as a team—if I’m the quarterback, I’m not trying to also be the defensive lineman and the running back. That’s how we win.”
The creative process isn’t always siloed within the creative department anymore as agencies invest more in hiring in other disciplines including strategy, data and performance marketing—areas in high demand from clients. And shops want their people to be able to work across multiple disciplines.
“The platforms to create work are no longer siloed to a specific area,” Sasha Martens, president of industry recruiting firm Sasha the Mensch, said. “Ideas need to come from all different directions, and as a result, people can navigate so many different verticals. As a percentage of hiring/staff, creative departments are smaller, as companies have put their focus on performance marketing, data and PR.”
Martens said this approach clearly isn’t always the best one for an agency. “In some organizations, there is a desire to minimize creativity if possible because it is intangible, but [that] can damage their agency brand over the long term; your agency will lose its meaning and then its value,” Martens said.
The global chief creative officer role has already been in decline for years, and some questioned what this all means for the future of creative leaders in the industry. The chief creative officer role will likely not completely go away but as other disciplines such as data and strategy rise in importance, so do the leaders of those disciplines.
A holding company agency executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press, said over the last 15 years creative leaders who once were the sole dominant voice in an agency are losing their grip to executives in other disciplines. The executive said people from various disciplines have had more of a voice in coming up with ideas for campaigns, which can be a positive.
“There’s less ego in the room; it’s good,” this person said. “But that comes with everyone tossing ideas out. There’s no hierarchy. Not to say the creative gets the final say by any means, but there needs to be a sense of order.”
Some are fighting against that hierarchical structure, seeing it as a deterrent to good work.
Independent Portland, Maine-based agency Via installed a new internal process for reviewing creative ideas last year in an effort to create a more democratic model that encourages campaign ideas from more than just one person, Via CEO Leeann Leahy said. As such, after Via Chief Creative Officer Bobby Hershfield departed, he was replaced by a creative council made up of four executive creative directors and a head of innovation and technology that oversees all of the agency’s work.
“We decided that a CCO alone was not going to help us to get true diversity of thought,” Leahy said. “No matter who that person was, their lived experience and style would dominate, because the system beneath them is historically hierarchical and ultimately everyone is trying to anticipate what will please that one person at the top. So we changed it up.”
Increasing anxiety from AI
AI hasn’t helped matters.
Group brainstorms may have been a solution to igniting a creative idea, but now chatbots, including ChatGPT, can do that.
Creatives are on edge due to the rise in companies using this technology to make content, as well as moves such as WPP’s new partnership with Nvidia to create a generative AI “content engine” that will produce large volumes of ad content.
“Seems like creatives on the executional side of the business are rightfully more fearful of where their jobs are going,” the holding company agency executive said. “Creatives are becoming more protective.”
Speaking on WPP’s Nvidia deal, the executive said, “I do find that recent announcement a little uneasy. In terms of using AI, you have to use it to your advantage. It can guide and spark new thinking. That’s useful.”
When it’s used as a “crutch” is when AI becomes detrimental, this person said.
“You could dovetail this into ChatGPT,” Rad said, which in his opinion will only lead to more homogeneous, mediocre work if relied on too much.
Rad said AI chatbots can be good for curing writer’s block because it gets something on the page and can spark an idea that a creative can then build on.
Arguing in favor of group brainstorms
Group brainstorms have been commonplace inside most agencies, but they are becoming more frequent as shops increasingly try to garner ideas from everyone across the company.
Leyla Touma Dailey, president and chief creative officer of ad agency Doe-Anderson, said the rise in AI is actually why she advocates for group brainstorms—people can spark an idea just like a chatbot can, so why not leave it up to the humans?
“Creativity [is] the most magical product that human beings produce, and it ultimately has to come from humans,” Touma Dailey said. “AI definitely has a place in and around creativity, but the fun and joy and meandering that leads to creative brilliance requires a kind of sorcery that simply can’t be machine-generated. I absolutely believe ideas can come from anywhere, but the real magic happens when someone sees the potential, plucks out the tiny nugget of possibility, nurtures it, waters it and pushes it to grow into something exceptional.”
The holding company agency executive said the most success comes from group brainstorms used to spark an idea, and then the idea goes to a group of three or four people including art, copy, creative and strategy who craft the final creative product.
Grey Global CEO Laura Maness said the WPP agency promotes group brainstorms and the notion that a creative idea can come from anywhere, while being mindful of the important role creatives play in crafting campaigns.
“There’s a celebrated entrepreneurial spirit that runs through Grey and has since our inception; we believe famously effective ideas can absolutely come from anyone, regardless of experience level or expertise,” Maness said. “That said, the role our creatives play in bringing ideas to life (even when embracing and leveraging AI tools along the way) requires an intentionality, craft and specialism that’s irreplaceable.”
And that sentiment is echoed by Grey’s creative department.
Grey Global Chief Creative Officer Gabriel Schmitt said just as the agency challenges people in other disciplines to come up with creative ideas, he too challenges creative people to think with a business mindset. “I like the idea that we are all here to make famously effective ideas. We encourage and empower our teams to flex their secondary muscles, so to speak. This makes for a much more vibrant company,” he said.
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