Want to do better work, manage and cultivate these 6 Creative Resources.
Break out of the content mediocrity grind with intentional managment of Time, Money, Vision, Talent, Intelligence and Experience.
Abstract
When we look at big brands like Nike, Apple, Amazon, Disney etc., producing conceptually beautiful, meaningful and entertaining content, we fail to acknowledge the big budgets that let them buy the creativity behind those big ideas. It’s easy to get discouraged with the content grind when we have to fight for time and money to make the content, designs and advertising we know will make a difference. It’s even more discouraging when we see the lion’s share of the budget necessarily allocated to a mandated quantity of content, for the sake of the algorithm, rather than an aspirational quality meant to stand out from the clutter.
Time, Money, Vision, Talent, Experience and Intelligence are always in demand. How they get allocated often determines the difference between branded value and branded interruptions. As the proliferation of mediocrity expands exponentially thanks to content generators, the need for conceptually resonant and well crafted content will become even more important. Those of us responsible for developing this content with diminished resources must find ways to spin straw into gold.
How do we get the results that creative contrast provides? I’m optimistically proposing that it comes down to how we manage these 6 creative resources.
Key insights from this article.
- The six key creative resources are Time, Money, Vision, Experience, Intelligence and Talent.
- Time, Money and Vision are external resources provided by stakeholders.
- Experience, Intelligence and Talent are internal resources provided by the creative team.
- Money buys Experience, Intelligence and Talent when time is short.
- Time provides low quantities of Experience, Intelligence and Talent the room to explore and incrementally transcend the necessary, comfortable and shippable mediocrity it takes to meet content calendar deadlines.
- This Time to experiment and push past current levels, leads to increased levels of Experience, Intelligence and Talent.
- Cultivating Stakeholder Vision teaches stakeholders to value creativity and creative contrast and allocate resources to procure it.
- Experience, Intelligence and Talent can be cultivated in any team with good managment and self-investment from the team.
- Build a team that is cultivating their own quantities of Experience, Intelligence and Talent and you will eventually have a powerful team that can make the most of any deficiency in Time and Money.
Frustration
As a creative director, I dream of making powerful, story-driven, inspiring content that captures the customer’s imagination, helps them see a better life on the other side of the product and inspires the purchase with a healthy dose of brand loyalty. But that isn’t what the day to day really looks like for most companies.
Instead, it is the content grind, producing quanitity over quality, and hoping for something resonant to be produced amongst a sea of mediocrity that increases exponentially with each passing day. Social media has democratized advertising, letting smaller companies attempt to compete for visibility in the spaces, but in doing so, it has also created the mediocre content clutter problem, where fresh content serves the algorithms and the platforms while being largely invisible to the users.
To this end, most brands are steadily contributing to the heap. We see creative industry professionals complain about the abundance of mediocrity, but there isn’t much we can do about it. With the emergence of content generators known as Ai, craftsmanship is no longer a barrier to content generation. We’re already seeing an exponential proliferation of easy to ignore content hit the platforms and pile up. Platform users are evolving toward content blindness as attention spans shrink even more.
We’ve built a world where hundreds of hours of generated content piles up like heaps of trash in landfills. For brands struggling to keep up, this heap represents a gigantic misallocation of creative resources. Let’s talk about those.
6 Crucial Creative Resources
To do creative work, (Design, Content, Advertising etc.) well, I’ve identified 6 crucial creative resources . An abundance of any one of them can be helpful, but my experience is that there is rarely an abundance. This is not because companies don’t have budgets for creative work, but because they routinely misallocate them towards quantity over quality. These resources include Money, Time and Stakeholder Vision (External Resources provided by clients,) and Talent, Intelligence and Experience (internal resources provided by the creatives behind the work.
External Creative Resources
External creative resources are those allocated by the stakeholder for the project. These typically include time and/or money. Both are allocated in lower amounts when the stakeholder doesn’t value insight-driven, result oriented and differentiated work, an indication of a deficit in Stakeholder Vision.
Money
You can do a lot with an abundance of money. Unfortunately, it is the resource that is most trackable and the one stakeholders seem to be most protective of. You can spend money to get more visibility for mediocre work, but that doesn’t mean it will convert. Mediocrity with a big budget behind it just means more people have the opportunity to ignore it.
Mediocrity with a big budget behind it just means more people have the opportunity to ignore it.
Instead, money is most valuable for the procurement of the three internal resources of talent, intelligence and experience. Money let’s the company engage the concentrated repositories of creative excellence we call Agencies. These agencies are magnets for the best talent, intelligence and experience. Within these agencies, iron sharpens iron, retaining the best of the best and weeding out the mediocre. Creatives in these meccas have access to senior creatives who have an abundance of experience, intelligence and talent, sharpened by repetition and exposure to a variety of problems, processes and solutions, housed in environments that foster the renewing and expansion of internal creative resources.
It costs money to get access to these creative resources, and when tapped, they deliver best by helping the client find their way to the most surprising, appropriate and elegant solutions available. In doing this, they create the necessary insight-driven contrast necessary to be seen among the clutter, and more importantly, resonate.
Time
Is there ever enough time? Not if you lack deep wells of the internal resources of intelligence, experience and talent. Teams with shallow reservoirs of these three resources will often be forced to ship the comfortable mediocrity that they know they can sell to the stakeholder. They simply don’t have the time to experiment, and “spin” on problems before jumping into the fabrication of a solution. By “spin” I mean giving their brains time to work through the sub-conscious processes that yield insight and creative outcomes. Instead, they must move quickly to keep their heads above the constantly rising tide of content demand.
In my experience, these solutions typically manifest as well-crafted but ultimately ineffective arrangements of brand elements, and first draft derivative copy that fails to elevate to a cohesive purpose driven solution, system or better yet, an experience.
The stakeholder takes an artifact with a shiny new paint-job to the customer, that still has the same old hamster wheel engine hidden inside. They get lack-luster results and come back with the assumption that it was the aesthetics that failed, and then waste more resources on the fast turnaround of a new “paint-job.” Too much of this, and the grumblings about an ineffective brand identity begin to emerge. The cycle never ends and the time to explore and draw real insight is never available because the production cycle is self-perpetuating.
Stakeholder Vision
This leads us to what I believe is the least pursued, but in my experience, most valuable creative resource, Stakeholder Vision. This resource boils down to an externally fostered appreciation for creative work as a differentiator for results. It is difficult to foster, and requires continued investment in the stakeholder and even self-investment of time and possibly money into the work when the allocated resources are exhausted. Experienced creatives know that good work is usually unexpected, creating surprise, contrast and memorability, when it is also appropriate and elegant. Getting to those results, may not be possible if we only make ourselves available to the work in the conventional working hours. Small amounts of self-investment may be necessary to get the artifact to a higher state of itself, where it can perform better and raise the stakeholder’s standards for what is good work. Do this enough and you raise your percieved value to the stakeholder where in you begin to have some leverage to bargain for more external resources.
We shouldn’t take for granted that stakeholders see our effort or value the extra investment. They value results and until the work achieves those, the content grind will perpetuate a “good enough” approach where the measure of quality is often an “is it on brand” check, rather than an insight driven emotional resonance between the customer and the artifact. If a typical content calendar is 90–150 pieces of content per month, most of which is conceived in a single 3–5 hour period, the outcome can really only be mediocrity in mass. If this is the tried and true approach to building brand awareness and understanding in your market, don’t be surprised if nobody loves your brand.
Getting allocations of Time and Money from stakeholders begins with investment into them. Creatives must build up the stakeholder’s ability to value and pursue better results through creativity. Creative leaders of the company must advocate, explain and demonstrate the value of good, creative, insight driven work in the hope of procurring higher quantities of time and money. It is also imperative that the creative leader foster intrinsically motivated self-development in the creative teams so that they are increasing the internal creative resources they bring to each project that yield consistently higher outputs of result garnering work.
Internal Creative Resources
Internal creative resources are those resources that the creative brings to the project. These include talent, intelligence and experience. An abundance of these can expand a small budget or short timeframe, as the talented, intelligent and experienced creative can find ways to innovate with limited time and monetary resources faster. This means they can get to better results with the same resources than those generated by less experienced, intelligent and talented resources. The ultimate outcome of a well-managed creative career is that the creative arrives at the leadership phase with an abundance of all three internal resources, which increase their influence and value to the organization through their ability to scale out to team members who’ve had less time to foster these resources.
Talent
I think talent is probably the most misunderstood of these three resources. What is talent? I think people apply the talent lable to excellent demonstrations of skill, but fail to fully appreciate the practice that it took to develop the skill. So let’s look at the semantics.
Google defines talent as:
Talent: natural aptitude or skill.
Aptitude: a natural ability to do something.
I think there is a distinction here to be made between talent and skill.
Talent = Aptitude x Passion.
Passion is an intense desire or enthusiasm for something.
To have a passion for a particular aptitude will lead to higher amounts of personal investment in practice.
Practice: perform (an activity) or exercise repeatedly or regularly in order to improve or maintain one’s skill.
Skill should be the outcome of efficient and repetitive practice as:
Skill = Aptitude x Practice
Skill is the ability to do something on a continuum of bad to good. The higher the skill level, the closer to good you can consistently land.
Through this lens, talent becomes a resource to be cultivated by the creative and the creative leader. I believe this cultivation starts with identifying areas where the creative has an abundance of passion, that align with needed skill-sets in the organization. Creatives in jobs that are out of alignment with their natural interests and passions will invest less, and their growth will be stunted. The motivation to develop skill will have to be extrinsic, usually involving a carrot or a stick, and it will always yield a lower return on investment.
Creatives in jobs that are out of alignment with their natural interests and passions will invest less, and their growth will be stunted.
This view has implications for the hiring and design of creative teams. Organizations must curate teams with appropriate skill-sets that can facilitate the maintenance and expression of their brands identities. These identities are combinations of visual and verbal choices, selected and organized into a system of patterns of behavior that help the brand build meaning in the market. Organizations must hire based on the needs of the visual and verbal identity they want to have, or foster development of the necessary skill-sets that can yield the appropriate artifacts. The other alternative is to engage contractors which takes us back to the allocation of money for the project.
Intelligence
Intelligence is a multifaceted cognitive ability encompassing reasoning, problem-solving, memory, and learning. High intelligence is typically associated with an aptitude for grasping complex concepts quickly, seeing insights where others don’t, identifying gaps in knowledge and seeking out appropriate augmentation to existing knowledge when necessary. It is not simply about being capable of holding theory or fact in long-term memory though. Intelligence influences other things like empathy and curiosity that facilitate creativity. Creativity is a type of intelligence encompassing the capacity to generate novel and valuable ideas or solutions. It involves thinking beyond conventional boundaries, connecting seemingly unrelated concepts, and embracing ambiguity. Creative individuals often display a willingness to take risks and explore uncharted territories, pushing the limits of traditional thought.
While intelligence and creativity can operate independently, they frequently intersect and complement one another in the realm of creative work. Intelligence provides the foundation for understanding complex problems and efficiently acquiring domain-specific knowledge. Creative thinking, however, requires a certain degree of divergent thinking — breaking away from established patterns — which can sometimes challenge highly intelligent individuals who tend to stick to established norms. This is likely where so much tension between creatives and stakeholders begins to manifest, which takes us back to building up Stakeholder Vision.
Building the creative resource of intelligence means focusing on a systematic journey from semantics through understanding, application, analysis, judgment and ultimately synthesis of new knowledge into existing knowledge in a way that makes it meaningful and beneficial to future practice. These six phases are illustrated well in Bloom’s Taxonomy of higher order thinking skills.
Experience
Experience serves as the foundation upon which creativity builds. Every person’s unique life journey contributes to a wealth of experiences, perspectives, and knowledge that can be drawn upon for creative inspiration. These experiences provide the raw material from which creativity can emerge. It’s not just the positive and successful experiences that matter; failures, setbacks, and challenges also play a crucial role in shaping one’s creative mindset.
Experience is also closely tied to learning. As individuals engage in different activities and situations, they learn and adapt. This adaptability is crucial for creativity. The ability to see connections between seemingly unrelated concepts and the capacity to adapt familiar solutions to novel challenges often arise from the lessons learned through experience. A person who has faced and overcome various obstacles is better equipped to tackle new, unfamiliar problems creatively.
Experience also relates to practice and passion as outlined above under talent. Higher levels of passion will initiate practice. It is in the practice that we acquire experience by discovering the nuance of theory and application. Bill Gardner, creator of Logo Lounge helped me understand this. The best logo designers work at a level of microscopic craftsmanship where the degree of change is often measured in hundredths of a point. Through repeated focus and practice across a variety of problems, they develop a sensitivity and judgment that sets their work apart. It is in this deep sensitivity, developed through practice that the appearance of excellence and professionalism is created.
It is in practice that we acquire experience by discovering the nuance of theory and application.
While experiences provide the building blocks, the role of reflection should not be underestimated. Taking time to reflect on past experiences, successes, failures, and the lessons learned allows for a deeper understanding of one’s personal growth and thought processes. Reflection can lead to insights and a more profound appreciation of the interplay between different experiences, ultimately fueling creative thinking. It is here, in the reflection, analysis and judgement of application that synthesis is facilitated, allowing the creative to add new meaningful and useful wisdom to their creative arsenal.
It is imperative that the creative and the creative leader provide opportunities for new experiences within the workflow. As Marty Neumier says in MetaSkills, 15 years of doing the same work over and over does not lead to 15 years of experience, but one year of experience 15 times. This means building the scaffolds necessary to give young creatives a chance to experiment, apply new theory to their work and fail, in service to gaining experience.
15 years of doing the same work over and over does not lead to 15 years of experience, but one year of experience 15 times. — Marty Neumier
To do this, we must articulate what a minimally viable delivery of the creative product looks like, and achieve it as quickly as possible so that extra resources can be allocated toward the exploration necessary to break free from the conventional solution.
The Resource Management Mandate
More mediocrity is not the answer. Content generation engines like ChatGPT and Midjourney have made it possible to exponentially increase the amount of content a team can generate. This is not necessarily a good thing as it will exponentially increase the clutter, shrinking the human attention span even more and making excellent content that much more valuable.
Teams with cumbersome content calendar mandates should leverage these tools to meet the demand to feed algorithms, admonishing creatives to learn to wield these new tools and shape their outcomes through the lens of talent, intelligence and experience.
Simultaneously, creative leaders should effort toward building in stakeholders, the appreciation and discernment for good creative work. This should lead to better management of external creative resources toward the development of the internal.
