10 Truths
1. Creativity is inherently progressive.
The impulse of creativity has always been about making progress;
towards more connected, more humane, and more pleasing world.
Culture takes the blunt facts of life,
and applies our vision, sensitivity, IDEAS, and skills to improve it
always pushing forward with our latest tools in hand.
Language itself, storytelling, music, print, TV, TikTok…
Nothing about this moment is any different.
2. Creativity is not under siege.
There’s nothing to defend, no lost golden age to return to.
Creativity is endless, unstoppable, and intrinsic to being human.
The tools we use to express it have always been changing
since we first drew on a cave wall with a hunk of charcoal.
No advance in technology is to be feared or dismissed because
every medium will eventually be humanized.
We must simply apply ourselves to it.
3. Collaboration of diverse minds must be the starting point.
The historic blip of mass media marketing
created a momentary separation of “idea people” and “technical people”
and the Internet brought an end to that era.
Today we need the tinkerers, the coders, the architects of experience
the ones who understand how to shape the medium itself
and the writers and designers and idea-havers from all backgrounds
colliding, connecting, and synthesizing their various perspectives
to forge something truly new.
And we have to do that every day.
4. “Big Idea” thinking is a nostalgic genre.
The opposite of Progressive Creativity is nostalgia.
Idealizing an old way of doing things, and insisting on
continuing the tradition within the confines of defined genre.
There’s nothing wrong with genres though—
some of the best musicians in the world play The Blues.
5. Nothing is dead, stop it.
Books survive. Vinyl survives.
People still ride horses sometimes.
:30 ads still have their role.
The only thing the Internet really killed is digital agencies.
The center of gravity shifts or gets harder to find,
but all our approaches have their place and moment and use.
6. Media agnostic ideas are a myth.
There is no such thing in heaven or earth as an idea
that is not expressed through a medium.
There’s no way around the fact
that your manifesto is a script.
Each medium has its own
language, culture, feedback loop, and expectations
that shape what will work and what won’t,
and that therefore shape the ideas themselves.
7. Insist on ethics.
Don’t wait for the people at the top to do the right thing.
Our industry will produce ethical, thoughtful, sensitive work
only if the people demand it from our leaders.
without constant pressure from the bottom up,
do you think they will make the right decisions?
8. Operations is Destiny.
Being “an idea person” isn’t enough.
If our companies and teams are organized to mine nostalgic genres,
we’ll continue to work inside those boxes forever.
Companies produce the work they are designed to produce.
Change has to be structural in order to be real.
If we leave it the people who think primarily about money
to design our companies, nothing will ever change.
9. Interactive storytelling is the next great blank page.
If there’s one area that’s ripe for Progressive Creativity,
it is creating stories that change according to
data, rules, and interactions
where every permutation is as emotional as the next
and as wonderful as the best stories ever told.
10. Forward!
There’s a whole new world to create—
New forms to invent, new languages to speak.
Whole master approaches that we haven’t even considered.
We’ve got all the creativity we need.
Nothing is holding us back that we can’t correct.
One of us could have the idea that defines the coming decades
in the next five seconds.
When you come up with it, let me know.