Marketing is combative. Competition is the reason we’re all here. To snatch market share, trample the competition and claim the W for our brands.
Brands cannot win by being passive or polite. And so their fuel, their creativity, must be equally competitive.
How can marketers and agencies harness the full force of the raw, red-blooded power of creativity for their brands?
By holding hands and getting comfortable with the truth about creativity.
Creativity isn’t mild-mannered. Its natural home isn’t boardrooms, Teams calls, charts or dusty old decks, sent via email for feedback by COB.
Creativity is a contact sport.
It’s clash of opinions. A collision of ideas. There should be raised pulses and the giddy, exciting, uncomfortable feeling that comes with taking risks and doing hard things.
But while friction and debate are an essential part of the process, creativity is most successful when powered by clients and agencies together. A team, flushed with effort and emotion, slogging it out together, all sprinting toward the same goal.
Let’s call it 'Contact Creativity'. A sport we play together. One that should get a little sweaty.
The ideal creative process involves real people, getting in a room together. Regularly, so an authentic, candid and effortless working rhythm develops.
It should be a group that’s passionately invested in solving a shared problem for their mutual benefit. Commercial impact, creative fame, entertainment, cultural traction – they all co-exist within that common goal. And in this raw, up-close-and-personal world of Contact Creativity, it’s okay to be real about that. A tired idea might tick off the metrics, but it will never truly change the conversation for a brand.
Contact Creativity is also about working quicker. Because what idea can truly be exciting after months or even years of meetings and dissection? Better to switch off the life support and move on to something bolder and truly alive. I’d rather work sweaty, to be more effective, more creative and to have more fun.
Contact Creativity doesn’t just show up as a hothouse or agile sprint methodology. It can infuse the whole shebang, from defining the job to be done and rooting out its strategic core right through to ideation.
I’ve heard this process called co-creation. But I think Contact Creativity is better, because that name allows the process to be what it should be. Getting together and calmly butting heads. By that I mean putting ideas out there, having them knocked down, being wrong, being right, being confused, being elated. And then, finally, finding clarity - client and agency together.
The stakes feel lower, yet the impact is much greater. Because it’s not a matter of the agency selling something to their client. Or the client tasking the agency with the campaign for Q1. Stakeholders don’t need to be managed, because everyone’s a stakeholder in the work. It’s like client and agency are fused into one multi-headed creativity-loving beast (which is an image I’ll definitely be trying out in Nano Banana once this article is written).
Contact Creativity may be more direct, but it also allows more permission to fail. With this way of working, it’s fine to share something that’s completely leftfield, possibly wrong or only 50% resolved. There are things you can say in a room where the vibe is collaboration that wouldn’t play so well on a slide in a deck. And it’s in those serendipitous moments that the real gold lies.
Marketing science gives us many helpful clues about to how to claim the W for brands. But I also think this discipline reveals much about our human desire to predict and corral what’s ultimately mercurial – creativity.
I love creativity for its messiness, its spontaneity and its infuriating unpredictability. The way to harness its power for brands is not to see it as something a creative agency sells to clients. But rather a way of being that client and agency share.
And if that sounds a little kumbaya in this optimised, AI-generated, AB-tested world of modern marketing, then know that it’s intentional.
Creativity may be a contact sport, but it’s one played by humans. And when people come together, working at pace, things do get sweaty. But show me any brand that’s romping home to glory. Behind it, there’ll always be a client and agency team working up a creative sweat together.
Hilary Badger is executive creative director at Leo Australia
