Learning Objectives Chapter 10

Learning Objectives – Chapter 10

1 Describe the core characteristics of great creative minds.

A look at the shared sensibilities of great creative minds provides a constructive starting point for assessing the role of creativity in the production of great advertising. What Picasso had in common with Gandhi, Freud, Eliot, Stravinsky, Graham, and Einstein—including a strikingly exuberant self-confidence, (childlike) alertness, unconventionality, and an obsessive commitment to the work—both charms and alarms us. Self-confidence, at some point, becomes crass self-promotion; an unconstrained childlike ability to see the world as forever new devolves, somewhere along the line, into childish self-indulgence. Without creativity, there can be no advertising. How we recognize and define creativity in advertising rests on our understanding of the achievements of acknowledged creative geniuses from the worlds of art, literature, music, science, and politics.

2 Contrast the role of an advertising agency's creative department with that of its business managers/account executives and explain the tensions between them.

What it takes to get the right idea (a lot of hard work), and the ease with which a client or agency manager may dismiss that idea, underlies the contentiousness between an agency's creative staff and its managers and clients—between the poets and the killers. Creatives provoke. Managers control. Ads that win awards for creative excellence don't necessarily fulfill a client's business imperatives. All organizations deal with the competing agendas of one department versus another, but in advertising agencies, this competition plays out at an amplified level. The difficulty of assessing the effectiveness of an advertisement only adds to the antagonism between departments. Advertising researchers are put in the unenviable position of judging the creatives, pitting "science" against art. None of these tensions change the fact that creativity is essential to the vitality of brands. Creativity makes a brand, and it is creativity that reinvents established brands in new and desired ways.