Who Are You Creating For?
Yourself or an audience?
I recently created a video for a client who owns a Spa. I had fun with the process and created my own personal vision of what a Spa promo should look like.
When I showed it to the client, she didn’t like it. Together, we embarked on a long, painful revision process.
Imagine you make a painting in art class. You show it to the teacher, who says, “It’s good, but I don’t like this part over here. Staple a real flower on there so it looks more realistic. Also, the colors over here are too bright. Shade over the whole thing with this gray crayon. And while you’re at it, cut off the sides so the painting is square.”
Hours later, what was once an honest, manifested piece of pure imagination, is now a piece of paper with a bunch of stuff on it. But the teacher is happy and you get an A!
This hyperbole captures one of the core frustrations creators experience when doing paid work for clients. At the end of the day, when someone pays you to create something for them, you are creating it for them — not for yourself. The client’s vision takes precedent over yours, while your tools and knowledge are used to translate that vision into reality.
I could have saved myself from the painful revision process by helping the client articulate her vision from the start. But then I would have missed the opportunity selfishly create my own vision into a video I was genuinely proud of, even though it was mangled and replaced with something else in the end.
She paid for the video she wanted with PayPal. I paid for the video I wanted with a painful revision process.
Passion Work
As a working creative professional, there is usually a distinct separation between client work and passion work. One of them pays your bills and the other one lights your soul on fire.
Most of the time they are mutually exclusive. What lights your soul on fire doesn’t pay your bills, and what pays your bills doesn’t light your soul on fire.
Many creatives I know do paid projects solely to buy themselves time to create something meaningful the next month.
Why do creative work if it doesn’t light your soul on fire? If the goal of being a creator is to express your own thoughts, ideas, and view of the world in your own style, then a worthy aim might be to get to the point where clients pay you to create passion work. If nobody is paying you to create what you want, then you creations need to be more valuable.
How do you measure the value of a creation?
By the subjective opinion of the financier?
This seems to be the measuring stick of the Spa project. The video I valued never stood a chance against the one the client (who paid for it) valued. That particular video was exchanged for money which is a solid indicator of value. That video also earned a spot in front of an audience where people paid attention to it, which is another indicator of value.
Nike once paid Casey Neistat $100,000 to travel the world with his friend and make a Casey-style vlog about it. The campaign was called “Make it Count.” At the time of writing this, the video has over 27.5 million views.
The money is secondary here. They wouldn’t have paid him that much if he didn’t have the audience he has. Over 9 million people subscribe to his content on YouTube, and that amount of attention was worth it for Nike.
Is the value of a creation, then, measured by the size of the audience? Nike spent (at least) $100,000 on the basis of this belief.
If this is the case, should you reverse-engineer what you think people want to see and create that? Is that how Casey built his audience?
I can’t speak for him, but I’d argue that he built his audience by selfishly creating whatever he wanted to create. He did it very consistently, very well, and his style struck a cord with a particular audience. He captured their attention by being himself. I think people value content that is true to the creator more than content that is molded to fit what someone thinks they want to see. Our gut tells us when someone is being authentic or not, and guts are hard to fool.
Casey valued his own videos enough to keep making them even when he had no audience, and his style hasn’t changed much since then.
Is the value of a creation, then, measured by subjective opinion of the creator?
There’s something truly beautiful about selfish creativity. It’s value can be measured by the satisfaction the creator feels during and after the process. It brings the focus to his own honest opinion of how well he expressed what he wanted to express. The creator is the only one who can evaluate its worth. No budget, audience, or client’s opinion can touch it, although it may attract all of these if done well.
Then again, the subjective opinion of the creator didn’t matter in the Spa video situation.
So, how do you measure the value of a creation?
This question, like all worthwhile questions, does not have one True answer. Perhaps there is an underlying principle here.
Maybe value of every creation is completely subjective, and the aim is to make things that are valuable according to their specific goal. Sometimes that means creating something totally personal that lights your soul on fire and honestly reveals the world as you see it. Sometimes that means sacrificing your precious vision to create what a client or an audience wants to see. Sometimes that means working with a client to co-create a compelling vision. Sometimes that means creating something that will reach as many people as possible and attract the highest budget possible.
A mentor once told me:
“Treat every project like it’s the last project you’ll ever do.”
If you’re not at a point where people pay you to create what you want, keep creating. Create for yourself when your heart calls for it. Create for an audience when the project calls for it. If you do both with purpose and with your best effort, you and your will benefit every time. You will evolve.
