Is There A Creativity Crisis?

Marketers Are Creative?

There’s this idea that advertising used to full of misfits & weirdoes. The creative director of an agency would be some sort of auteur who might wear a mix of punk & 60’s mod style to the boardroom…and wow everyone with an ad campaign that lived on the border between ad and art.

Today, it is likely that the creative director knows at much about Google Sheets as they do contact sheets. While it always has been a business first, marketing and advertising is where a little magic can float as an equal amongst P&Ls & OKRs.

The Internet Was Bad for “Creative” & AI is Perhaps Bad for Creativity

Back in the dot com days, I worked with this tremendously talented designer - Jennifer - she was sort of effortlessly arty. She adorned her car (a Honda Insight IIRC) with hand-painted flowers, wore chunky jewelry that only the very cool could even dare, and she colored her white Converse Chuck Taylor’s in dark & dramatic psychedelic designs.

Every afternoon, I would hear her swearing because the low resolution needed for 1999 online banners would “ruin another fucking gradient!” or “I can’t make it not look like shit at under 50kb…” She was a designer who wanted to make beautiful things, but the constraints of the medium made her compromise in ways that hurt her artist’s soul.

As high speed internet became more accessible and computers more powerful, the internet turned into an amazing canvas of creativity. But on the commercial end of the internet, we became obsessed with performance and optimization, so we stopped trying to make something high impact, but rather started iterating on the ideas of others that worked. That gave rise to the sellers of templates and swipe files and on and on and on, so every ad, every website, every SaaS interface started to look the same. AI has made it even more desperate because AI is a really good mimic…so it can model anything you tell it to and stick in details appropriate to your purpose. But it’s still a model.

Barry Hott, a marketer that has managed a bazillion dollars in ad spend for marketers that you know, said in Motion’s 2025 Creative Trend’s Report, “Go watch what your audience is watching and make shit that looks like that. That’s it. Game over.” Barry knows a metric fuck-ton about advertising, and he knows what works…maybe we will call this approach pragmatic creativity?

Regarding AI, Rory Sutherland, the Vice Chair of Ogilvy & Mather UK said on the Future Commerce podcast, “There's a danger that what [AI is] doing is enshrining groupthink. It's taking groupthink and effectively engraving it.”

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Marketing Is a Business, Of Course…

But our obsession with optimization crushes creativity. “Creative” now means something closer to “I found something that worked and tweaked it with our logo” and less “I spent hours understanding a problem or concern and it influenced everything in my output because that is where my understanding & empathy delivered me.”

Sutherland, again, (by the way, I love this guy - read Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense - it is a CLASSIC) coined the phrase “marketing technoplasmosis” which is the phenomena where marketers and creative adapt the way they think and act to serve the tech platforms they operate within… He says in Future Commerce, “Now, we have a world in marketing where every time you do something that fails, it's chalked up against you as a cost. However, when you do something that succeeds, at the most, you can lay credit to its effects over a three-month period…” So the marketer, the creative, the brand all adopt this kind of measurement mindset which means that they will make changes to campaigns that have immediate impact…because building value over time and making a transformative breakthrough isn’t rewarded or even recognized.

So, yes, the creativity of marketers is enormous and it is being harnessed for the benefit of our clients and employers, but the narrow definition of successes and failure as defined by a 13 week result set means that big swings no longer exist.

What Does This Mean To You?

I tell me clients all the time to NOT BE FUCKING BORING. We live in a time of fractured attention and cultural preferences that ricochet endlessly. For the most part, our work in visual, copy & tech happens inside of a window that has an interface to show you dozens of other tabbed boxes full of someone else’s pragmatic creativity, or it is shown on a device that dings and vibrates and whooshes at you incessantly from your pocket.

The world is noisier. The world is more distracted. The world has confused clever and wondrous. Our horizons are closer & the landscapes are flattened with the pleas for attention from every pixel, every window, and every notification so nothing stands out.

Why AI Isn’t Replacing Affiliate Marketing After All

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I Hate That I Wrote “Pragmatic Creativity”

It offends me. It offends my entrepreneurial instincts. It offends my ADHD. It offends my concept of being human.

Most of you reading this are entrepreneurs of some measure or another. That requires some degree of insanity or delusion. I once explained that “An entrepreneur is someone who is too dumb to know when to give up.” That is still the best definition…entrepreneurship is an exercise in passion. It is, in some ways, a truly human thing. Entrepreneurship isn’t a safe path, by any means. It’s reckless.

That sense of being driven, passionate & reckless reminds me of Kerouac & Cassidy’s exploits in On The Road. It may not make sense to anyone else, but a sense of otherness, adventure and amphetamines created a magical experience. It isn’t quite the same - but building your business is an adventure.

Being a marketer is an adventure too. It isn’t just clickthroughs and conversions - it’s understanding and connection and empathy. It is having the judgement to understand the difference between musical and cacophonous. It is having the accumulated learning and lore of a culture to stand on and extend.

Is it art? No.
Is it pragmatic? Also no.
Is it a little dangerous? Ya.
Is it a modestly romantic? Ya.

Don’t Reject Creative For Conversion

Let your agency be a little dangerous.

Let your agency be weird.

Let your agency be stubborn & opinionated.

Let your agency say “Fuck off” or “I love you.” (Maybe better, “Fuck off. I love you.”)

Don’t let your cold outreach sound like a mashup of trite conveniences.

Don’t let your sales process not have a story.

Don’t let your discovery calls pass without an actual discovery.

Don’t forget to tell your clients what they mean to you.

Don’t forget to let your team know that you think that are the fucking best.

Don’t let yourself forget that creativity & passion are why you do this…

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