Is creativity killing us?

The most pressing issue facing advertising today is the collapse our industry’s economics. The plain fact is we are paid less and less for the value we create. There are many cunning ideas for how we solve this but I’m not sure we have adequately understood the problem. A problem that has its genesis in the day we decided creativity was no longer a product but our industry’s entire identity.

The great advertising schism of the early 1990s, which began when Saatchi & Saatchi created Zenith Media, fractured what was once a holistic industry. On the media side this division has brought real value to both media operations and clients. However, it was a disaster for the other bit of the partnership, not because of the split itself but because of what happened next. 

As media agencies built out their territory with measurable metrics, performance promises, and ever larger buying points, the other half of the divide made a fateful decision: to define ourselves as ‘creative agencies’. This decision seemed innocuous at the time, perhaps even inspiring. But we in doing so we painted ourselves into a corner from which we’ve struggled to escape.

By adopting ‘creative’ as our defining characteristic rather than one of many valuable services we provide, agencies unwittingly positioned ourselves as purveyors of a commodity product. We set creativity up as the only metric we wanted to be judged by and walked away from the many ways that agencies had traditionally added value. Worse than that, ‘creative’ ceased being a standard for us all to strive towards and became the collective name for any agency that didn’t buy media – a disastrous reframing that has steadily eroded our perceived value.

This semantic shift made it remarkably easy for clients to chip away at agency compensation. After all, creativity is widely perceived as abundant and accessible – something that can be sourced cheaply from freelancers, in-house teams, production companies, or influencers. The professional and strategic application of creativity to solve business problems became lost in translation.

As a result, we’ve watched our industry’s value proposition steadily dilute. Client organisations, never trained to evaluate the commercial impact of creative thinking, find it simpler to compare creative services on a cost basis alone. How can you quantify the difference between one creative idea and another on a spreadsheet? You can’t – and therein lies our industry’s self-made trap.

The irony is painful. By proudly claiming the creative mantle, agencies unwittingly devalued the very thing we sought to elevate. And while we embraced the ‘creative industries’ label with enthusiasm, aligning ourselves with film, music, and design I’m not sure they regarded us in the same light. There wasn’t a single advertising agency present at the Creative Industries Growth Summit held in Gateshead this January by the Culture Secretary, Lisa Nandy.

This isn’t to suggest creativity is not valuable – quite the contrary. Genuinely innovative thinking and expression applied to business challenges creates enormous value, we know that. The problem is definitional – creative should be an adjective and not a noun.

We must reclaim creativity as a standard of excellence and not the name for an entire sector and do this as a prelude to reframing the conversation around the true value we provide – applying commercial imagination to business challenges. Commercial imagination encapsulates what the best agencies have always delivered – the ability to create new possibilities for brands, to see pathways to growth others cannot, and to transform business fortunes through imaginative and commercially grounded thinking. It acknowledges the potency of creativity while anchoring it firmly to business outcomes.

If we have any chance of prospering the first step must be to we must abandon the ‘creative agency’ label that has served so badly. Our industry doesn’t exist to produce creativity for its own sake – we exist to imagine and implement commercial transformation for the brands we serve. Only by reclaiming this broader purpose can we rebuilt respect and recognition for the value our industry creates.