What Separates Top Creatives

Creativity doesn’t come from people whose minds are a file cabinet with everything neatly tucked away and accounted for. It comes from minds more like a cluttered room with clothes on the floor and piles of odds and ends waiting to be stored.

Creativity is not a nice, linear process where “A” leads to “B” leads to “C.” It’s more like walking through a maze with lots of dead-ends where just when you think you’re getting somewhere the lights go out.

Creativity is messy, a journey of chaos and frustration…and eventually…discovery, inspiration and exhilaration…as you finally reach your destination.

How could it be otherwise? By definition every creative project is doing something that has never been done before. And doing that in this mercantile world—not to mention make a living doing it—requires more than talent and training.

Just what is it that separates the highly successful and creative of us from everyone else? Well, in our opinion:

They give the idea fairy a chance to come.

They don’t fall in love with the first thing they do or think of (or maybe even the 24th). But they also don’t evaluate, pick apart and discard as they go along. No need to torture yourself. You don’t get somewhere original without first getting the dumb, silly, contrived and expected out of the way--giving your subconscious a chance to help work it all out.

They love what they do. No matter what.

Doing what you love is one thing. Doing what you love for money is quite another. It’s deadlines. All-nighters. Clients who hire you and then tell you how to do it. Co-workers who don’t have a clue what you do (You get paid for this?). Yet, these creatives will tell you they wouldn’t be happy doing anything else. In fact, one of them once remarked it’s the most fun you can have with your clothes on. Go figure.

They can think outside the boundaries. Not just the box.

Any creative assignment comes with potential limits to creativity: Strategies. Focus groups. Budgets. Preconceived opinions. Hallway research. Finding a way to do something original that survives all that is a remarkable accomplishment. It requires being as good at selling and shepherding the work as at conceiving it. So that everyone concerned understands and appreciates what makes the idea so irreplaceable.

They’re incredibly motivated.

They’re determined to do great work. To get somewhere. To be recognized for their talent and achievements. They couldn’t take themselves and the work they do more seriously.

They know the value and fragility of a great idea—whether for an ad, a package design, a web site, an app. And they will do everything in their power to keep it alive, or at least on life support. But should they fail, setbacks just make them try all the harder.

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Hype. Hypocrisy. Crassness. For them, there’s too much of that to go around. And while what they do may not be an art form, they believe to their bones in doing it artfully. There’s an integrity to what they do. And their work, their clients and they themselves are all the better for it. Nothing says marketing and communications can’t be interesting, intriguing, uplifting, involving, entertaining…and make the world a little better place.

ADDY “Harlem Shake” 2013

Powerhouse Insourcing

What does a corporate Art/Marketing Department have in common with an IT Department, besides some of the company’s least understood employees? They’re not always seen as a core activity in a company. Or as a main area of expertise.

As critical as IT can be to a company, over the years this has led to a lot of big organizations outsourcing their IT functions to an external provider. The idea being to cut costs and focus on those core activities. The things that made money.

Unfortunately for a lot of those firms, having their IT farmed-out and managed beyond arms-length produced the opposite of what was intended. Cost over-runs. Critical delays. Security concerns.

So today, IT is coming or has come back in-house. Being insourced.

Insourcing is when a company ceases to contract a business function and begins to perform it internally. Or decides to develop a project or manage a function they might otherwise outsource.

But insourcing requires retraining existing staff. Or hiring new staff. Bringing in specialists for temporary needs. It raises a lot of issues regarding recruiting, software licenses that might be needed, physical work space and of course the costs of salaries, taxes and employee benefits. But insourcing also has real advantages, among which the most important is improved bidirectional communication, both with everyone working on a project or the final consumer.

So what does all this have to do with your Art/Marketing Department? After all, if you have one, you don’t need to insource. And, unless the company’s less than happy with its performance, we’ve already decided outsourcing isn’t the be all end all.

Actually we’re talking about a place in between the two. Something we’ve named IHOS. Or In-House-Out-Sourcing.

IHOS combines the best of both worlds—the flexibility of outsourcing with the improved bidirectional communication of on-site talent, which is especially important for subjective brand and marketing materials.

Essentially the IHOS vendor manages the department, and is responsible for the payroll, the training and hiring of specialized talent. The IHOS concept is a win-win. The company gets access to the great creative talent and expertise they depend on. If the work slows, the IHOS vendor can temporarily move that talent from one company to another. If the workload picks up…same thing.

We learned a few things from this last recession. No one likes to be put in the position of letting people go when the economy contracts.

"When the 'Great Recession' hit, we were contacted by one of the world’s largest employers to manage their Marketing Department. We retained some of their existing staff, and meticulously hired the rest of the department. As a staffing company, we’ve done this before. We have staffed entire departments from the ground up. Except this time, everyone we brought on was our employee, not our customer’s. And we manage the payroll, vacation schedules and day to day business like we were part of the company.

This has been so rewarding both to me as a recruiter and to our customer in the level of talent,” says Raquel Rodriguez, VP of Sales and Partner icreatives.com.