Picture courtesy of striatic
By definition the job of any Creative Director involves creating stuff, and for all the recent hype around social media, the vast bulk of digital creative endeavour is still focused on spending money on buying media and then filling it up with something. So far, so traditional.
This approach is even more apparent within owned media. Free from many of the restrictions of the campaign, Creative Directors are able to unleash all the digital tools at their disposal, how else to explain the proliferation of over-wrought convoluted ‘microsites’ as the defining model of digital creativity today.
In principle we talk about how different digital is to traditional media, but in practice in most cases Creative Directors are simply adopting a fairly traditional broadcast approach, often repeating the same mistakes, convincing ourselves that this is what consumers respond to rather than tackling the much more complicated and challenging requirement of actually finding ways to deliver genuinely engaging communications.
How else to explain the paucity of great digital creative examples. Great work is just as rare within digital as it is in traditional, which is ironic considering the emphasis we put upon digital work being relevant, targeted and more meaningful to exactly those we wish to reach.
What the rise in importance of earned media has made apparent is that just creating more stuff is not the answer. What you don’t do is often as important if not more so than what you do in fact do. Clearly knowing when to shut up is a skill we could all do with a bit more of!
Thinking on how to work with earned media forces a reappraisal of the role of the Creative Director, no longer required or able to be in control of every message and aspect of every campaign
Joseph Jaffe in ‘Join The Conversation’ suggested that rather than fight against what appears to be a disenfranchisement of the role of the Creative Director, instead who is better placed to act as ‘curator’ of the idea as it transcends the constraints of bought and owned media.
In a recent post he tore into both digital and PR agencies as being unprepared and incapable of properly delivering great work in social media.
However, Creative Directors of all stripes with their experience in recognising great ideas, who better in a post-campaign world to recognise what's most interesting and most valuable. To know what to nurture, what to play down, what to tweak, what to move on. To know how best to keep the story going, to introduce new elements and ensure the ideas are picked up, passed on, take on a life of their own.
So if these are the skills that are going to be important from here on in, which type of Creative Director would you rather work with? A big-budget brand storyteller obsessed with control, or one more comfortable with the ebb and flow of the interactive world.
(A version of this post appears in my New Media Age column.)
