The Next Hiring War Will Be Fought Over Creatives

In the world of software it’s not at all uncommon to hear talks about the 10x engineer. Those individuals whose great performance meaningfully drives start-up success.

In Hollywood, the creative individual is lionized. The director is seen as a key element of any successful film, and ever since HBO invented the mythical figure of David Chase, even TV shows anchor around their writer.

Yet in the New Media video publishing world, we almost never talk about our creators. How many of Vice’s creators can you name?

It’s about to tear the industry apart.

Approaching Peak Social Video

For years, it’s been fine to merely produce content. Fill feeds with video in your chosen vertical and you’re gold. The main problem video publishers had to solve was just how to get in front of the right audience.

But we are moving into the competitive era. Consumers’ watchtime isn’t increasing, but more and more content is being thrown at them every day. There’s going to be a shake-up, and — as has happened in every other media business — the highest quality content will win.

Content isn’t created in a vacuum. Data can help (we rely on it heavily) but content is made by human hands. CCO is the new CTO — being a publisher without a great creative is like being a tech company without a great technologist.

And scarcity is inevitable.

Publishers will be made and broken by their ability to recruit and retain creatives.

“Traditional” experience has proven time and time again to be nearly worthless to New Media publishers. Ditto for agencies. How many companies even existed 5 years ago that could really be considered “relevant experience” to a publisher today?

There simply are not enough great people to go around.

So if you are a publisher, now is the time to start creating the right culture. A culture that rewards creativity, values originality, and allows freedom. That excites great people to come work for you, and to stay there for years.

Who is going to be the Google of creativity?

The reality is that big teams cannot be filled out entirely by experienced hires. Training and investing in new talent will be key. Learning how to find young creators with original voices and the raw talent that your team can bring out.

Your investors may not understand yet why it’s important to pay these people so much*. Why you need to invest so heavily in culture. But after the correlation between great creatives and great companies becomes apparent (with a few acquihires along the way) — they’ll start to notice.

Until then — fight for it.

If you are one of these creators, take pride in the work you do.

Don’t do shit work for shit pay. Sometimes do great work for shit pay (but not too often). Great work gets noticed. Soon you’ll be doing great work for great pay.

The success we’ve had at Donut Media I attribute to our great creators. But we’ve had it easy. We watched our favorite car videos and hired the people that made them.

Now no one else can do that.

And neither can we.

So if you’re into cars — contact us.

*This whole post was inspired by a (admittedly not-very-funny) joke that has been making the rounds in the new media circles: “Ask a VC how to build a great technology company, they’ll say to hire great technologists. Ask them how to build a great creative company, they’ll say to hire great technologists to tell your creatives what to do.”