Creative Responsibility Beats Creative Freedom
A few years ago, I had a bit of an epiphany. It might be obvious to you, but, for me, at the time, it was pretty profound.
NO ONE WANTS AN INTERMEDIATE CONSULTING SERVICE.
There’s an infinite number of ways to restate this principle but here’s three:
Nobody wants a shovel, they want a hole.
Nobody wants a strategic plan, they want an outcome.
Nobody wants a script, they want a finished movie or video.
The last one is obviously most important for me. I’m a good writer, but I discovered just being responsible for delivering an idea/script is not only bad for business, it is bad for the soul.
A long time ago, I wrote a very simple and very useful spot for a very, very large client. It was a spin on a testing video that helps them sell a great deal of a technical product. It was not terribly creative, but it had personality and it deserved to be done well.
The client said they had their own in-house production people. I said, “Great. I don’t care who shoots it. Let’s sit down with them, have a pre-production meeting and get it done.”
I asked what I thought were all the right questions, “Do you guys have lights? What are you going to do for sound?” They made all the right noises. We scouted the location, the technical division built the apparatus we needed, and we set a day for the shoot.
On the day, the in-house guys show up and the don’t have any equipment to speak of. Certainly not enough to light the rather large apparatus we were shooting. So, about an 45 minutes in I turned to my client and said, “This isn’t going to work.”
That should have been that. But I couldn’t let it go.
Any production company I knew was going to throw umpteen people and craft services at it. Which would send the budget through the roof and put it out of proportion with the value that the finished video would have provided.
So I said, screw it. I’ll do it.
I hired a camera guy and a grip and off to the races we went. The video turned out to be very good. Not creatively glorious, but very useful and in terms of sales tactics, very smart.
And with that I crossed my own Rubicon.
Don’t forget the flip side of Freedom
There are those that think the creative process is about freedom. I find that they aren’t very successful or effective creatives. Because it turns out the creative process is not about freedom. It is about responsibility.
Even if you were handed a blank check to make a movie with no other strings attached, you would still have the responsibility to tell a story. In essence, not to waste your audiences time and attention. If you faithfully uphold that responsibility, hopefully you get rewarded. (The market can be a fickle place) But if you shirk that responsibility FOR SURE bad things will happen.
When I create marketing content it’s not just a chance for me to play with someone else’s money. It is my responsibility to use all my skill and acumen to make a thing that will work. AND it’s my responsibility to do this in a way that rewards the audience for engaging with it. It’s my responsibility to honor budgets and timelines. That is how I define my responsibility to do good work.
“But…” I hear some of starting to protest. There is no but. I might not have the power to influence everything involved, but I still have the responsibility for the outcome. Does that suck? YES. But that’s the deal.
Difficult clients? Doesn’t matter. I certainly get to choose whether of not I work with them again, but in the thick of it, it’s STILL my responsibility. If I’m a pro, I shouldn’t even get mad about it. It’s the field on which the game is played. Sometimes we have race in the rain.
Outlast the Idiots
A famous copywriter named Luke Sullivan had a rather mean-spirited dictum about coming up with ideas: “Outlast the idiots.” You come up with a great idea and they kill it. So you come up with an even better idea after that. And a better one after THAT. Because that’s the job. That’s the responsibility you’ve assumed.
Of course, not every project turns out great. But the responsibility is to make sure it’s not for any reason you can control. Make sure they knock you out cold. Don’t throw in the towel.
With this pugilistic analogy, I don’t mean to suggest that this work should be a fight between creatives and clients. What I found is that most clients are great. And the times that they have seemed to be difficult, it was because they had greater difficulties on their end.
But refusing to give up — refusing to be beaten by circumstance or convention — is the only thing that leads to great work. And it’s a skill that can be practiced.
Everything is has a tendency to become average. It’s the omnipresent suck; more powerful than gravity. This means that the struggle is always and everywhere against mediocrity. And if work that is dull and soulless doesn’t make you want to fight, well sir (or madam as the case may be) you’ve clearly wandered into the wrong post.
Keeping it a Little Weird as a Strategy
It used to be that just having a video for something was a competitive advantage. But there is a wave of terrible, AI generated content headed right for us. This content will kind of work, like direct mail kind of works. But just like cheap direct mail, everyone will hate it. And cheap videos will blend in with all the other crappy AI content. Be it videos, blog posts, emails, text messages — whatever it is, the bad version of it is about to get a lot cheaper and show up in our inboxes a whole lot more.
But there’s an upside. If you can do something that’s even a little bit thoughtful and unexpected — if you can make a human connection with the person on the other side of the screen — then you will enjoy remarkable results.
In the AI age, we crave the unexpected weirdness of humanity more than ever. Thankfully this plays into my strengths. On the surface, I have two competitive advantages.
1. I can make powerful messages that fit into a short amount of attention.
2. I’m skillful enough to make things effective while preserving a spark of the unexpected weirdness of humanity. I can make sure it has soul.
But underneath both of those things, I am able to do good work because I choose to take responsibility for everything that happens in the process.
It’s not for everyone, but it’s the only way I’ve found that works for me.