Where Do We Go From Here?
According to the New Testament Apocrypha, as Peter was escaping persecution from the Roman authorities he looked up to see Christ coming along the road the other way. He asked his master, "Quo vadis," meaning, "Where are you going?" Christ replied, "Romam vado iterum crucifigi.” Of course he said it in Aramaic but meaning was the same: "I am going to Rome to be crucified again."
When asked where the creative business is headed, some might feel a second crucifixion is preferable to what's coming.
Can we agree that we live in a post-advertising era? Cynics among the chronologically-impaired might call it an apocalypse. Certainly, it seems clear that we walk among a new generation of brand-savvy consumers. Media divergence now bombards us with more sensory information than a palsied ECT technician. Artificial intelligence has learned how to synthesize the entire Internet. (Yet somehow, it still doesn't have the IQ required to bring me breakfast in bed.)
All of this has come together to change the communications landscape—and, with it, what it means to be a creative.
Long before the era of mass marketing, Marshall McLuhan, philosopher, media theorist and sporter of a rather dashing Errol Flynn mustache, wrote: "The medium is the message." The advertising business, which flourished in the second part of the twentieth century, was built on blurring the line between media and message.
Advertising was constructed around units of media. Creativity had its place, of course. Advertising careers, and the egos that went with them manipulated emotion in carefully scripted 30-second chunks of time. An entire industry's creative process was codified around specific media — TV, print and outdoor.
Today, McLuhan's premise continues to hold true. The difference is that now we can skip ads, stream our content, and dip in and out as we please. So seamless is the media-cum-message that my toaster tries to sell me on a lifestyle of crispy mornings and golden-brown optimism.
“The medium is the message.” -- Marshall McLuhan
We've arrived at a cultural and creative shift where technology is expanding and now informs the creative process. In large part, this is because technology has been democratized. Anyone with an iPhone is a filmmaker, a photographer, or at least a master of selfies. Spielberg's latest blockbuster has to contend with your aunt's cat videos on YouTube. Picasso's blue period is lost among your neighbour's Instagram brunch pics.
In this fractured media landscape, messages flit past like digital fireflies, their glow barely registering before they fade into the abyss. Tweets and TikToks compete for our attention like street performers vying to captivate us. We scroll through endlessly, hoping to distract ourselves from the horrors of our own existential emptiness.
There are two fundamental but opposing axioms at work in the creative process: convergent and divergent thinking. Both are necessary to generate useful creative ideas.
Divergent thinking is chaotic, open and unstructured. We toss out ideas like confetti at a funeral—no concern for appropriateness. Divergent thinking requires reckless abandon that makes HR departments break out in hives. Editing is banned as one dreams up wild, unfettered ideas, or at least one that makes you shoot coffee through your nose.
Convergent thinking is narrow, focused, and structured. It requires persistence and calm, focused judgement. One takes the many hot-headed divergent ideas and converges them into final options.
Inside the creative mind, these opposing axioms duel, like a fencing match between Salvador Dalí and Sherlock Holmes. One is a wild artist gleefully throwing paint at cards pinned to a bulletin board, hoping for a masterpiece. The other is a meticulous detective carefully organizing the same splotched cards into something meaningful. It's akin to juggling flaming swords and water balloons; you must simultaneously be sharp and whimsical.
Amid the growing diversity of media platforms and the death of specificity that goes with it, creative skills and disciplines converge. Okay, it's more a head-on collision than a convergence.
AI adds to the inertia. Sometimes it feels as if we're trying to build a sandcastle in a hurricane while Siri critiques our architectural skills. This enhanced-by-the-machines creativity is all fun and games until Alexa suggests a more 'user-friendly' moat.
ChatGPT and other generative AI platforms like Midjourney or Craiyon are meant to assist us. They're so advanced now that they allow users to create ideas from almost any textual input. And these ideas are often not at all bad. A few years ago, a bot even wrote a Cannes-award-winning script. Wait until the machines negotiate higher salaries, leaving directors wondering if they should've stuck with humans who don't demand constant software updates.
Should we worry that this brave new world of creative convergence has turned everyone into a Jill of all trades, master of none, where your neighbour's expertise in knitting is matched only by their sudden prowess in neurosurgery gained through YouTube tutorials?
I don't think so.
In the collision of skills in the new world, the creative's role is to know how people engage with new platforms and different forms of entertainment and media. Creatives who understand culture and how technology influences cultural behaviour will always be employable. We can all start mastering the latest TikTok dance trends and deciphering the algorithms of Instagram's ever-changing feed.
But today's creatives need to go further than admiring the latest shiny, new platform. We need to understand the whole picture, how each piece connects to the other. We need to think more about systems design, like the conductor of a bustling subway system during rush hour. Every train, platform announcement, and delayed connection is a piece of the puzzle that determines whether commuters arrive at their destination with their sanity intact or in dire need of a therapy dog.
Long before copywriters and art directors, graphic designers and developers specialized in their niche advertising roles in the second half of the twentieth century, agencies were staffed with generalists. And long before advertising's first generalists, artists drew on general skills to innovate.
Paul Gauguin was a stockbroker forced to find a new career path after the market crashed in 1882. Vincent van Gogh failed as an art dealer before he painted some of art history's best-loved canvases. Jean-Michel Basquiat never formally learned to draw, but became one of the United States' most famous—and expensive—artists. Jeff Koons famously worked in finance before becoming today's most prominent living American artist.
With the rise of mass production came specialization. And in advertising, specialists wrote copy, art directed layouts, shot films, directed actors, edited scripts, colour corrected packs and set type. Many of those specialties slowly died out, starting with typesetters and photographers. Now, even art directors and copywriters are evolving to widen their skill sets.
One thing that separates the great innovators from everyone else is that they know a lot about various topics. Openness to Experience is a personality characteristic identified by psychologists. Openness to Experience is the degree to which a person is willing to consider new ideas and opportunities. Some people enjoy thinking about new things. Other people prefer to stick with familiar ideas and activities.
As you might expect, high levels of Openness to Experience play a part in creativity. After all, being creative requires doing something that has not been done before. If you are unwilling to do something new, it's hard to be creative.
“If you’re not willing to try something new,
it’s hard to be creative.”
Surgeons and airline crews benefit from repetitive practice. The smoothest operations and flights are the result of specialized expertise and training. Screenwriters, authors, and artists, however, must draw on a range of material to create innovative new work.
Opportunities unveil themselves when you can venture across boundaries, combine ingredients, and match patterns across completely different realms and experiences. Unifying ideas connect these puzzle pieces waiting to fit into the grand mosaic of innovation. Just as long as we don’t lose any in the couch cushions.
But there's a further level yet. You must be able to communicate the value of your expert generalism. When you can articulate your value succinctly and memorably, then you can make a lucrative career out of it. The future is bright for the patient generalist, assuming the generalist can clearly communicate the value of their recipe. Because in today's job market, 'master of none' sounds less appealing than 'proficient dabbler with a winning success record.'