"When we fist get an assignment," explains Eric Kallman, a young advertising writer, "we usually think of a lot of ideas very quickly. And they're usually not very good," he says with a laugh along with his creative partner and art director Craig Allen. "And then there comes a long period of time with a lot of silence and frustration...And if you do that for long enough, at some point, you finally say something that makes the other person laugh and the idea snowballs."
When Allen finally uttered the line "Hello ladies. Look at your man, not back at me, now back to your man..," the creative duo had a hunch it was the beginning of something big. The fleshed out television script they were working on eventually became known as The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, the highly awarded Old Spice television ad that went viral.
Kallman's description of the daily life inside capitalism's largest exporter of creativity: the advertising industry, captures a magical formula that the industry has held on to for decades. A visual thinker, the Art Director, pairs up with a wordsmith, the Copywriter, and together they combine their creative geniuses to come up with an amazingly creative and entertaining newspaper ad, or 30-second television spot, that sells their client's product to the masses.
The formula for this creative partnership was created by legendary adman, Bill Bernbach in the early 1960s when his agency's art directors and writers rocked the marketing world with the creation of the infamous Volkswagen Beetle ads. Revolutionary for their time, the ads used new design layouts and self-deprecating humor to sell the product. The ad campaign persuaded a generation of new drivers to buy the quirky little car, and, therefore, was honored as the best ad campaign from the 20th century by Advertising Age. As a result of the successful creative partnership that Bernbach pioneered, the creative industry has held on to this magical creative formula for nearly 50 years.
But mass communication has drastically changed in the past ten years. The print industry is being replaced with electronic formats, online viral videos now reach audiences equal to Super Bowl TV ads , and the brand design within a retail store can be more important to a company than a slogan. This watershed change in the communications industry has outdated the simple creative roles of the traditional model of art director and writer. The terms are just too simplified for the plethora of new ways to reach consumers, and many creative talents that are needed to take advantage of these platforms.
Some groups are challenging the traditional creative structure by taking advantage of the same technology that is forcing the system to change. Giant Hydra is a web-based application that takes the concept of crowdsoucing, and creates a more egalitarian model they call mass-collaboration. The app allows users to post a creative opportunity to a hand picked network of other creative professionals, pool their resources, and to help develop the idea. (watch the video here)
Victors & Spoils, the first crowd-sourcing creative agency in the world, is another company challenging the traditional creative model. In this agency's new structure, a core group of art directors, writers, planners and producers solve their clients marketing problems by asking a large pool of creatives to submit their ideas. Anyone in the world can sign up on the company's website and create a profile, indicating your expertise and experience, to become part of the creative crowd. The best idea, as chosen by V&S's core group, is then used and the person that submitted the idea is compensated
The area where Victors & Spoils and Giant Hydra's approach lacks is that both formats rely on users to create a reputation for themselves by specializing in only one area of creativity. This proliferation of talent many ignore a rising group of sought after eclectic creatives.
Freelance creative director and author Ernie Schenck describes the perfect new creative person as
someone who can move seamlessly between here and there, this side and that side, someone who can speak the language of concept story, but can also speak the language of digital technology.
In other words, he's looking for a creative Jack of all trades.
No one can predict what the best way to harvest the creative class's talents. But it is a safe guess that, there will always be a place in a capitalist society for specialized creative people, and eclectic do-it-yourselfers that aren't satisfied with the status-quo.
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