Skip to main content

Creative person or creative professional?

A great article by Kiran Khalap,co founder of chlorophyll (agency, not pigment).

Its really worth reading.

Creative person or creative professional?
Which one are you?
Stupid question?
Give me 4 min 33 seconds at two words/second to clarify.
The shortest (three words), simplest and deepest definition of creativity was provided by Teilhard de Chardin, the paleontologist philosopher whose work has influenced almost all the 20th century thinkers on human evolution.
“Creer c’est unir”
“To create is to unite.”
Outside Andheri railway station in Mumbai, a vendor shouts, “Laal baraf khaao.”  (“Enjoy red ice.”)
He unites the coldness of ice with the redness of the watermelon to create an irresistible consumer proposition.
On TV, Rajanikant’s heroics unite with the speed of 3G to create the unforgettable ZooZoo Superman.
Advertising employs creativity for ‘problem solution’: it must deliver commercial results to clients by solving the problem of influencing their customers.
But creativity has not one but three roles: ‘problem-solution’; ‘self-expression’ and ‘evolution’.
My super-talented advertising friend Rajeev Raja expresses himself through his silver flute.
My brand planner colleague Vidya Damani unites her love of human beings and her desire to understand karma to create a community of seekers: evolution at a spiritual level.
While creativity is about uniting, management operates by dividing.
Management has to invent enemies where none exist.
Copywriter versus art director: till the early 60s, timid Indian copywriters slipped their gingerly typed copy sheets under the doors of the mighty art directors; then saw the final ad in the newspapers.
Creative team vs suits.
“You bloody MBAs…your idea of excellence is excel sheets.”
Agency vs client.
“The bloody marketing manager won’t recognize a good idea if it was shoved up his…nostrils or any other orifice.”
Client and agency vs competitors.
“Look at that advertising they produce…recycling ours without shame”
Pause. Step off the merry-go-round.
What if the creative professionals said to themselves, “I have this gift of finding solutions to the client’s communication problems…why don’t I solve the problems of the advertising industry itself?”
Here are some problems defined by the agencies themselves…they have been the same for decades;-)
Problem: finding the right talent for the advertising industry (refer to all the interviews of Creative Directors in Campaign)
Problem: clients don’t respect advertising agencies and therefore pay them like vendors of plastic spoons and therefore agencies are low paymasters and therefore can’t retain talent (refer to all the speeches by the Hall of Fame Award winners)
Problem: problem-solution is mistaken for self-expression (“What? You want me to work on an agarbatti account?”)
Problem: brands command either loyalty or a premium, so why don’t ad agency brands? (refer again to all the speeches by the Hall of Fame Award winners)
If you were a creative person rather than a creative professional, wouldn’t you love to prove yourself by pitting your problem-solving genius against such seemingly intractable problems…rather than against the creation of just one more TVC?
Are there creative people who are not in advertising and who already do this?
Of course!
Check out the creative people who work on the web.
Most allow others to finish their problems.
Most invite customers to solve problems.
Most important, they don’t mistake the commercial intent of their endeavour for self-expression.
Ok, my 4.33 are over.
Over to you.
-- Kiran Khalap, co-founder, chlorophyll brand & communications consultancy

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wanted: Bravery Awards for Marketing

--By Prem Kamath, executive vice president and general manager, Channel [V] I have always found it curious that advertising and marketing seem to operate at opposite ends of the spectrum as far as numerical rigor tends to go. While developing an advertising idea, the emphasis is always on the softer side of consumer behaviour: insights, aspirations, fears, need-states, beliefs, values. But a marketing plan has little patience for these. The currency on this side of the fence is often more quantitative: reach, impressions, frequency, recall, cut- through, impact. And in this duality often lie the origins of the oldest of all client-agency conflicts: Clients finding agencies frivolous and superficial and Agencies finding clients just downright anal.While much has been said and written about the state of advertising today and the reasons for its decline (if this is true at all), this piece focuses on the other end of the stick – why advertisers could do with being a bit more advent...
Post a Comment
Read more

Association: How vital is it?

“Wow, Tide ki safedi!!! Anything special in office?”                My friend asked me while I was leaving for office today wearing my new plain while shirt. Something struck me, how easily he associated with Tide brand even when other brands are too promoting it with same “whitening power” positioning. May be, because; “Tide” did a good job of associating themselves with “whites” only.                 The Association is been basic funda in the human behavior. We tend to associate and co-relate the different ideas/things/events with each other. Actually how we correlate these together only decides how we will behave with it.                  For example, let’s consider the addiction to Smoking , some people can easily loose the addiction while some try hard but still fail to do so. We blame this on th...
2 comments
Read more

Great People Are Overrated

-- by William C. Taylor is co-founder of Fast Company magazine Last month, in an article in the New York Times on the ever-escalating "war for talent" in Silicon Valley , Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a passing comment that has become the entrepreneurial equivalent of a verbal tick — something that's said all the time, almost without thinking. "Someone who is exceptional in their role is not just a little better than someone who is pretty good," he argued when asked why he was willing to pay $47 million to acquire FriendFeed, a price that translated to about $4 million per employee. "They are 100 times better." Zuckerberg's casual calculation reminded me of a conversation with Marc Andreessen, the legendary cofounder of Netscape, and now one of Silicon Valley's most high-profile venture capitalists. "The gap between what a highly productive person can do and what an average person can do is getting bigger and bigger,"...
Post a Comment
Read more