We’re all creative strategists now.

I recently attended the live recording of an On Strategy podcast episode. It was fascinating to see how Adland had (and hadn’t) moved on in the roughly 10 years I’ve been on the outside. In many ways the debates of my time are surprisingly still present: the definition of big cultural ideas, the need for virality, and arguments about relevance vs resonance all sounded very familiar. However, one thing truly stood out, marking a genuine evolution (although not for the better): Chris Beresford Hill highlighted how the space for big creative leaps has dramatically reduced since my days at Droga5. Clients today expect most of their brief to be clearly visible in the execution - even after it’s been through both strategy and creative. 

My younger BBH ghost turned in his grave. 

What is the role of creativity if we are simply executing on a client brief? And, by extension, what’s the role of an agency? 

In attempting to answer this, the conversation turned to the relationship between creatives and strategists. Stronger partnerships between these two functions are now more necessary than ever. This got me thinking about the role I’ve been playing unofficially for many years and why it might be time to formalize (admit) it for the sake of my clients. Since ‘leaving’ strategy I’ve been enabling strategists and creative agencies as well as the more creative brand marketers, but under the guise of insights and data. But I now realize I’ve been lying to myself. I never really left the creative profession. And I’ve never been in the insights business fully. Two things led me to this realization. 

The first is the feeling I get when I’m surrounded by insights professionals. Be it at a conference or presentations of any kind, I feel like the title role in the kids’ tale The Cow Who Clucked. The research and data profession clucks by getting things ‘right,’ conforming, validating, measuring, and scoping. Being ‘right’ is a high value for my data-collecting peers. And they thrive when things are ordered, predictable, and tidy. I’ve always felt a little fraudulent in these circles as I don’t care about data for its own sake, but rather about where it can take people and how it might reveal new things about the world. Even before AI demonstrated that it could single-handedly take care of this kind of data collection for free, I already knew that it wasn’t the kind I’m doing. Because I’m a cow. And we moo. We don’t just tolerate messiness, we seek it out along with contradictions and anomalies, because this is where new ideas come from. Our end goal is creativity and creativity feeds off chaos, conflict, and surprise, not tidiness.  

The second realization comes from studying creative organizations. For 25 years I've had the privilege of working with some of the most creative companies in the world, first as a strategist and then as an enabler of them. This has afforded me a perspective on what makes the creative ones more successful than the rest. I think I’ve boiled it down to three simple things:

1. They’re instinctive. My most creative partners have a glint in their eye. They don’t switch in and out of creativity depending on the task. They can’t switch it off, so ideas bubble over unannounced. We may all have these instincts, but true creatives just have great access to them. Society has done a stellar job of burying them under piles of ‘doing the right thing.’  The truly creative didn’t let that derail them and aren’t afraid of the unorthodox. So their instincts are as sharp as ever. 
2. They’re across the company. When I work with a truly creative company, it’s sometimes hard to spot who the official ‘creative’ is in the room. These companies have empowered everyone to see themselves as part of the creative process and therefore de facto creatives in their own right. When you remove that constraint, the organization pings into life. I viscerally feel it through the banter and sheer joy in their interactions. 
3. They start from the very beginning.  As they don’t switch it off, everything is fair game - from the business problem onwards. True creatives challenge every premise from the brief to the category codes.  Everything is in ‘play.’ And when you play with everything you’re training yourself and your peers to rotate, reflect, and collide every object or barrier that comes your way and you leave yourself open to genuinely new ideas. 

As enablers of creativity rather than a supplier of data (which, by the way, acts like quicksand for creatives), we have a new remit. We too must nurture instinct, empower everyone, and start challenging every norm. Here’s how we’ve applied these to our own business:

We coax instinct: Creativity cannot exist without instinct, and that requires certain conditions. A classic, left-brain, system 2 state may be necessary for some jobs, but it’s not conducive to creative thinking.  So we inject joy into the process. Not only is play essential to unlocking the holistic, messy human in fieldwork (where participants will unload far deeper truths), but the same playful principles stimulate a more intuitive, empathetic human on the analysis side of the equation. Too often we leave the joyful empath at home.  If you keep joy in the process through play, banter, and intrigue, it’s hard not to trigger greater creativity. Consider spinning ‘truth-seeking’ into ‘lie-hunting’ and see how much truth lands on your lap. 

We are all creatives: For years I’ve referred to the art of qual as being exactly that: an art or a creative process. At first, it felt like a guilty secret, but as we brought in new people from the realms of journalism, improvisational comedy, and storytelling, it has proven to be more true. Understanding humans is a truly creative process and we are all creatives. We began by changing titles. Creative ethnographers permitted people to officially enact creative duties. I’ve noticed this in agencies lately. ‘Creative Strategist’ has finally moved from an unofficial moniker to a job spec you increasingly see on LinkedIn. 

Creativity starts now: The sooner you make things odd-shaped, the sooner you can view everything with a new perspective. Right down to our own brief, we’re asking ourselves and our partners to capture the problem with poetry or metaphor, roleplay or weirdness. The more a concept has been rotated and distorted the surer the route to creativity. When you prompt a participant with an upside-down proposition, you trigger weird reactions. Those weird reactions are far truer than the expected ones. Make them dress up, wear a mask, role play, or lie and you reveal an altogether more interesting human. 

For years creativity has bounced between being a sacred, rare form of magic and a frivolous sideshow.  But creativity isn’t a garnish, a moment of light relief, or even a department. It is a must-have and the engine of business growth. When we partner with clients, we don’t just furnish them with consumer understanding, but we start the creative process with them. And the sooner we start thinking, imagining, and developing, the bigger and more powerful the ideas we can build together.