“Creativity is the Answer”
It has been quite a while since the football World Cup took place last year in Russia. France won the world cup and Germany lost very early. That is about what I kept in mind from an athletic point of view. However, there was something else I encountered that fascinated me and I never lost sight of it although a lot of time passed: Adidas’ strange advertisement campaign “Creativity is the answer”. The campaign’s name derives from its main, perhaps only and really often repeated message: “Creativity is the answer”. All images produced and also the TV-spots are brimful with the affirmative sentence about the fuzzy concept that is formulated as being in relation to a previously asked question. The first design I came across looked like this:
Apparently, the advertisement was published before the big debate about political integration of migrants and Mesut Özil’s love for his countries came up. This image was part of a series of images blended together to form a kind of an implemented short clip in Germany in an infinite loop. After looking at the statement for a couple of minutes I was really short from believing it: could creativity really be THE answer? Of course, the ad’s emphasis is on CREATIVITY instead:
So, that was my initial encounter with the ad, and it kept me thinking a bit. I guess because of our project Organized Creativity where we always question creativity on different levels and with different dimensions. However, I never really thought about creativity as being the answer. And in general scientists are not only and maybe not even mainly interested in the answer, but at least similarly interested in the underlying question. Considering the ad, it is not easy to determine what question creativity might be the answer to. To find questions to the answer, I tried gathering more information about the ad itself. Fortunately, they produced a TV spot, I took a look at. The add mashes-up football stars of the present and past like Özil, Pogba, Messi, David Beckham or Zinedin Zidane with the rapper A$AP Ferg, the songwriter and singer Pharrell Williams and the model Karlie Kloss. Overall some commentators counted 56 stars appearing in the 90 seconds advertisement.
The ad starts behind the scenes of an event. Everyone is in a hurry, football players rehearse tricks, the camera follows rushing people, at a corner Jose Mourinho says: “Showtime, come on!”. We are in the middle of something, and suddenly we enter a big crowd waiting. An MC (A$AP Ferg) shouts into the mic: “Creatives. The world needs an answer!” Another MC aligns shouting “Give us the answer!” A moment time stands still, then we hear emphatically: “Creativity is the answer!”, followed by football stars doing tricks and playing football in different styles and surroundings. Additional voice overs tell us: “Never play on repeat.”, “Put your spin on things.”, and “Let a new way begin.” We further hear: “Tear down those walls.”, “Flip the script.” and lastly: “You write the rules.” During the last two shouts Lionel Messi throws away a “Script” a stage worker handed over to him. After a final “Creativity is the answer!”, Pharrell Williams offers the mic to the viewer: “Now over to you.”
So, there is no clear question to the answer, but maybe a few tacit ones. Obviously, the advertisement for sport products relates sport stars with stars from creative industries. While creative industry’s actors are usually evaluated in relation to (fuzzy) creativity, one could say that sportsmen and -women are rather evaluated in terms of (calculable) performance. The ad might suggest that this relationship is changing, with also sportsmen building on creativity as their key capacity. Going a bit further a question could be: Why are Özil, Messi, Pogba successful football player? Some would say: performance is the answer! Connecting performance to speed, strength or endurance. However, this ad answers differently: creativity is the answer. Instead of speed, strength or endurance creativity is about being novel (Never play on repeat), individual/original (Put your spin on things), and influential (Let a new way begin). The ad gives also one, but only one answer how to accomplish this: act subversively (Tear down the wall / Flip the script / You write the rules). This sounds a bit like an early psychological “guide to creativity for managers”. Yet, in a meritocracy still based on rather predictable performance and the idea of rational actors this could prove an interesting outlook for what is expected from a society’s individuals in the future: fuzzy expectations of creativity, one could say.
Building on this, we can interpret how the ad mingles a crowd of anonymous people with quite a bunch of famous individuals. The MC — Master of Ceremony — shouts to the masses, underlining the apparent spiritual aura the ad is trenched in. The masses wait for the answer like in the church in earlier days for the good news. Almighty creativity, one could say, opaque like good itself and surely at least as important, the spot engages the viewers with creativity believers and their spiritual leaders. There is no real question to be asked, everyone already knows the answer to all questions possible — like in a good, old community of faith.
The ad thereby has an important link to a lot of general creativity research: why creativity is that central is rarely addressed, and even less critically scrutinized. Creativity itself (whatever it is) or being creative (whatever that means) has a deeply positive ring to it that seems to be always on the bright side. Not only based on this ad, this is rather shortsighted, in my opinion. Luckily, there are people interested also in dark sides of creativity and what comes alongside this so much appraised value in itself “creativity” (for instance a group of researchers from our research group Organized Creativity, discussing this topic at EGOS this year).
To sum up, at least after the world cup and with the knowledge of Germany not making the cut in the preliminary round one really justified question for our famous answer would be: How could Germany have made the cut? — Creativity is the Answer.
