Phil Lynagh is managing partner of LightBlue
One of the most annoying sound bites I constantly hear these days goes like this: “You know, Phil, everyone at our company is creative.” Nice idea, but what an absolute load of tosh. If I hear this once more, I swear I’ll pull my own teeth out with pliers, or with some other tool – in a creative way, of course.
We all definitely assess what being creative actually should mean and represent within our space. Anyone with a true commercial creative mind knows it’s extremely hard to come up with ideas that stir the soul, that can actually be produced on budget and can actually sell stuff. However, if you believe the turgid tosh that we see everyday is the creative benchmark, then it’s very easy to see where the perception ‘anyone can do it’ comes from.
To all agencies out there, how many of your creative team are professionally qualified? How many studied their art before joining the workforce? The answer to creating a solid core of emerging creative talent probably lies within those statistics. True, there are examples of creatives that have got to the top through trial and error, loosely translated as experience, but what worries me is the collateral damage inflicted while this ‘experience’ was being earned.
Everybody within our industry needs to understand creativity better, its value commercially and more importantly its impact; this will ensure that we never obstruct real creative talent by surrounding them with the mediocre. We may be extremely proud that one of our suits represented his country at knitting and one of the PR girls got a B in her GCSE art exam, but this does not give them creative sway in the workspace and we should not encourage such reinvention. The lines need to be drawn, it’s for the best.
Generating jaw-dropping commercial ideas will always be the job of the few from which the many benefit. The more we promote this truth, the faster we raise the entry standard and the better our creative teams will become.
