Last week, I wrote a piece for Harvard Business Review entitled, The Dinosaurs of Cannes. In it, I said:
We’re one of the very few creative industries that codifies who gets to be creative by putting “creative” in their title. Other types of creative companies, like IDEO, expect everyone to be creative. We need to let go of this arrogance and allow creativity to come from everyone and everywhere.
As you can imagine, the piece sparked a lot of grief from the industry’s roving anonymous commenters. A lot of tension seems to arise around the premise of who gets to be called a “creative.” While you would think this tension comes from “creatives” themselves, I find that it goes much deeper than that. The traditional agency model has been built on a foundation of scarcity of talent for decades. This scarcity drives bizarre behavior. First, it drives agencies to collect people, especially “creatives,” and parade them around as if they’re the latest catch that will suddenly transform a shop into something new, shiny and more modern. You can see it in all of the blogs and journals of the industry. It’s not just creatives but creative technologists, Director of Possibilities and other agency titles of the month. There are as many funky, over-complicated, too-creative-for-their-own-good titles as there are agencies.
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