On Creativity-online.com, Joyce King Thomas, Chief Creative Officer of the ad agency, McCann Erickson, New York, said some interesting things about being creative in the ad agency world. It struck me that you could say almost exactly the same thing about books, screenplays, and other writing projects these days:
“To be a great creative person today, you have to be open to anything. You have to come to every project with zero preconceptions of how you're going to solve the problem. Advertising is in total, absolute flux right now. The mediums we use, the way we make money, the way agencies are organized. Nothing is stet.
What we do today is some kind of hybrid of advertising, communication, ideation and conversation creation. Ultimately, it has the same goal of persuading consumers to behave differently. I'm not about the past. Advertising, or whatever you call what we do today, is way more interesting now. What has always been most interesting to me about this business is that, at its core, it's about changing someone's mind. The biggest challenge agencies have today is juggling the need to be financially prudent and the imperative to move forward.”
The only difference is that as writers our goal is to get the readers/viewers to FEEL something, rather than to change their behaviour (although with self-help or political or ecology books we may be doing that as well). And, as is true of ad people, we ignore at our peril the changes in the business and marketing aspects of what we do.
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