What are you saving creativity for?
A friend of mine tagged me in a comment he left on a LinkedIn post from a big-deal media consultant who was pontificating that because of the pandemic crisis “ideas were in high demand”. As if ideas at any other time were not needed. Ideas are always in demand — for Pete’s sake, what would you be holding back and saving creativity for?
Whenever I see that media guy post I was to add a sharp retort, but it’s wasted.
He doesn’t get it.
For the last 15 years he’s been charging his industry an outrageous amount of money to release the exact same findings in an “annual” survey, and every year his big reveal is that THIS is the year traditional media will really buckle down and focus on digital marketing. And every single year, banner CPM rates drop, a thousand other companies make more off of podcasting than television or radio stations do, and bloggers make more bank as newspaper continue to fold (see what I did there… folding a newspaper??)
When I worked in media the only time they wanted to hear about creative ideas was after something blew up in their face…
- A gigantic revenue drop from advertisers?
We need ideas on how to get them back! - Google is taking all the digital advertising dollars?
We need an idea on how to get those dollars back! - CraigsList gives Classified ads away for free when we always charged for them?
We need ideas on how to save Classifieds! - Auto Dealers and Real Estate companies don’t need to advertise as much as they used to?
We need need ideas on how to build a time machine to travel to the past and relive our glory days once more!
The time for creative, outrageous, reality-shifting, and paradigm destroying ideas is BEFORE you need them.
You don’t save-up your creativity for a rainy day.
Start testing the waters with new ideas while things are still going well in your industry. If you don’t start investigating new concepts early on, how will you get any good at them?
- How will you be able to work out the kinks of new technology?
- How will you know which team members will excel in this new space?
- How will you get clients engaged in something new if you wait until it’s so old their kids are already experts at the “new idea” you’re trying to pitch them on?
Start working on an idea that could put your own industry out of business tomorrow, because if you wait until that concept is introduced to the market by an outside entity you will likely be out of business tomorrow.
