Are you a creative team?

In the advertising industry, the term “creative team” has a very specific meaning. It’s two people (now increasingly less often “two guys”, although for the bulk of our careers it mostly was), often a writer and art director, who come up with executional ideas.

In most agencies, they are not simply people who come up with executional ideas, they are in fact the only people who are allowed to come up with executional ideas. They have a monopoly on the process. Many Creative Directors, seeking to cultivate a modern and friendly persona, will say ‘hey, ideas can come from anywhere’, but they really don’t mean that. To test whether they do mean it, bring in your own Instagram posts or TV scripts to a meeting with them and see what happens. It’s as though the anaesthetist had made a sudden lunge for the scalpel and attempted to take your appendix out. Not a happy moment.

We all have our specialisms, of course, and if you haven’t put in Gladwell’s proverbial 10,000 hours with photographers and directors, you’re unlikely to be as good at it as those who have. 

But as our perspective on the advertising agency has shifted (we have set up our own business – have you heard?), it becomes ever clearer that creativity is not a job, it’s a discipline, and being creative is not a profession, it’s a trade. There are no rules and very few proven and established practices. It’s more like being a psychologist (which is mostly trial and error) than being a surgeon (which has very clear and proven procedures to keep us all safe).

Creative is something you do, not someone you are.

It would serve the advertising industry in particular and business in general to remember this and end the normative tyranny of the job title. Because if you’re in an organisation where someone has “creative” in their job title, then it rather suggests that because you don’t, then you’re not. 

Which is costly nonsense because it means that potential creativity is going to waste.

In setting up our new business, we quickly realised that we had become a creative team. Our job is to apply creative thinking to strategic problems. And we know we’re a creative team because we make one another’s ideas better. This happens through a process of constant low level bickering which might sound like bullying if we weren’t both doing it to one another and were not such firm and unbreakable friends. Our ideas become better because they’re constantly tested in this conversational combat, a process of ‘is that really good enough?’ that painfully pushes new things out into the world. That is by definition creative, and we’re doing it together in partnership, so we’re a creative team.

The team bit is important, to us at least. There are obviously loads of solitary creative people out there. They somehow manage to conjure new things in their own heads, all on their own. But it has always felt to us that they’re making life a lot harder for themselves (or perhaps just showing off). Creativity improves through constructive collisions, in our experience.

There are many teams that are not creative of course. Teams that work together to deliver a smooth process. Teams that don’t challenge each other too much, but instead seek harmony. Teamwork is a great thing, but unless it pushes to move beyond what has been done before, it’s not creative.

You are a creative team if you do this, not just if you have a certain job title, or happen to write posters and TV scripts all day.

You and your client can be a creative team.

You and your colleagues can be a creative team.

You and your mates can be a creative team.

Don’t get confused by your job title.

Go create.