Creativity as a competitive sport.

After watching the new brand campaigns from Anthropic and OpenAI, I bashed up a quick post on my phone that caught fire very quickly. (It’s funny how it’s always the innocuous on-the-fly stuff that takes off.)

There’s layers to it which I’ll leave you to ponder, but something that I often can’t stop my brain from doing is pulling things apart and searching for the why behind it. The ‘what makes it tick’. Like a subconscious raccoon rifling through the trash in my head. And something that I still think is oft overlooked in our world is the fact that we’re in the business of creativity as a competitive sport.

I wont labour the point too much in this post, as I covered it in a previous post titled ‘Find a way to poke your own bear’. If you haven’t read it, maybe jump in for context, and then come back.

The fact of the matter is that this is not a ‘normal job’. We don’t have a set list of widgets to make, spreadsheets to fill out, boxes to tick, and then we clock off for the day. Much like a professional athlete (I imagine, anyway), it’s all consuming. We work on our craft, we watch our opponents, we keep an eye on the ‘transfer market’ for movement of talent, eye the switching of sponsors, we work hard, we win, we lose, we celebrate, we cry, we quickly move on to the next fight. It’s why consultancies buying agencies has (not always, but mostly) been a failure. Why CX, PR, Digital agencies attempting to go ‘full service’ has mostly been a failure. Why external businesses merging agencies together to ‘bring in creative’ has mostly been a failure. Because they don’t get it. They don’t get what motivates us. (They have their own motivations, but they are not the same.)

Capitalism, for all its benefits and faults, is built on competition. Eat or get eaten. And over time what’s become clear is that there are two ways to get bigger and stronger and more competitive. Cut or create. This is a blunt way to put it, but generally speaking - suits cut, creatives create. In some instances, both are required, so this isn’t a black and white ‘good or bad’ analogy. Balance is necessary. But as our industry has become increasingly run by suits instead of creatives, I think we can all agree there’s mostly been a lot of cutting. I mean, look at the holdcos. Acquire, merge, cut, repeat. (And how’s that been going?)

Creatives aren’t driven by cutting. We’re driven by making, building, creating. That’s our competitive sphere. Making 2% more quarterly profit by switching our photocopy paper provider or making a bunch of people redundant does not energise us. We want to come up with the best idea. We want to beat the other teams in our agency. We want to beat the other agencies. We want our brands to beat the other brands. We want to get headlines. We want to win awards. We want to make shit famous. We want to win the game by making the best thing. You can ridicule it all you want, and there’s certainly validity in the nonsense around awards and PR in this business, there’s toxicity in the water, but at the end of the day - it still drives the competitive nature of commercial creativity and, ultimately, drives people to make better work and build better brands. (Moving forward, the best suits and clients will be the ones who find a way to tap into this inherent competitive nature, something I covered in this post about motivating creatives.)

AI is a strange beast in that it arguably does both, it cuts and creates. In a way, it doesn’t really matter. What does are the human motivations behind it. Suits are using AI to cut. They’re firing staff and replacing them with AI with, so far, terrible results. Creatives are trying to find ways to make things faster, bigger, better. The intention is different, and that intention is very, very important.

The fact that the best ‘AI-related’ or ‘AI-adjacent’ work that has ever been made was by human creatives, human directors, human production teams, human… well, everything, is very, very fucking important. Because the reason it’s better than a seven-fingered Santa driving a Coca-Cola truck from hell is the intention behind it and the competitive nature of the people involved. The ‘want’ or the ‘drive’ behind the work wasn’t a race to the bottom, but to the top.

Anthropic and OpenAI, very cleverly, went after independent agencies, with more creative leadership and control, who are increasingly driven by making better work rather than purely sending profits up to the mothership, to generate value for their brand by creating - not cutting. (Even though, arguably, their entire business model is built on cutting… but that’s another conversation). This move was not by chance, it was very intentional and business leaders should pay attention.

The elastic band of hyper-capitalism has been pulled to its limits and has felt close to snapping for some time now. Because there’s only so much we can cut until there’s nothing left. Eventually, we have to start creating again. And to create new things, new ideas, new value - you need creative people who are driven to be competitively better than their peers. You need creative people who are driven by building things up, not smashing them down. And to achieve that, you need creative people with the taste and talent to do so and to put resources and support behind them in the competitive arena.

And, ironically, dare I even say it, embarrassingly, the two biggest AI companies just showed our industry how to do it.

What a time to be alive, indeed.