Sometimes, our job is to get out of the way.

I dunno if every kid did this, but when I was in primary school it was a common ‘parenting exercise’ to give a group of kids an egg to ‘keep alive’ for a period of time. Funnily enough, looking back, I probably see less parallels now as a father raising two kids than I do as a Creative Director looking after ideas.

Babies, despite essentially being potatoes with arms and legs, are pretty resilient and malleable. But ideas, ideas are incredibly fragile. The longer they have to travel, the more hands they pass through, the more fingers that poke at them, the more bumps in the road they weather, the more likely they are to break. And as much as ‘ideas can come from anywhere’ is a modern catch cry of the marketing business, only creatives really know what’s required to keep an idea alive.

Sometimes a client might ‘send through an idea of their own’. Sometimes a strategist might ‘throw a few thought starters in the brief’. Sometimes an accounts person might come up with a ‘suit idea’ in the brainstorm. But after that, they walk out of the room. And even if one of these ideas end up sticking - only one person gets left holding the egg. The creatives.

Now I’m not being disparaging here, it absolutely takes a village to keep an idea alive, but what I am saying is that creatives are the ones who have to carry the egg throughout the entire process. From concepting, to stress testing, to executing, to presenting, to presenting up the line, to presenting up the line again, to presenting to global/hold co, to research, to media, to production, to post and so on and so on and so on. No one else is there from incubating to hatching. (I’m really stuck with this bloody egg metaphor now, aren’t I?)

Whenever a really good idea makes it through one of the early stages, say the initial presentation, some of the people on the periphery of ‘ideas’ begin to celebrate. But a seasoned creative always has the same feeling. ‘God, somehow we have to keep this thing alive now.’

And that’s because until we see the damn thing on a TV screen or a billboard or a phone - we know it’s on death’s door. Every day from this point forth, our life will be spent protecting and defending this idea from being poked, prodded, kicked and ending up visibly damaged or extinguished entirely. (Sometimes, I don’t know what’s worse, tbh.)

And, over the years, especially as a Creative Director, I’ve come to realise that sometimes the best thing you can do - is get out of the way.

In many cases, it’s what everyone needs to do. We all get in the way sometimes. Agencies can get in the way of their own work. Production companies and directors can get in the way of their own work. Media and research agencies can get in the way of their own work. And, yes, marketers, you too can get in the way of your own work. Often, it’s with the purest and most positive intentions - but we’re all guilty of it.

Rather than leave their fingerprints on everything at every opportunity, the best operators I’ve seen in this business in any aforementioned touchpoint are ‘path clearers’. They look ahead, far down the road, for anything and everything that might get in the way of the idea and begin moving shit out of the way. Stakeholders. Media plans. Research. CEOs. Budget constraints. They strap themselves to the front of the idea, teeth bared, knuckles white, prepared to bulldoze through any obstacles that might get in the way.

My greatest learning in regards to this came from an absolutely bizarre brief. We had a client called YourBreast. A breast augmentation clinic. One day, out of the blue, we got an absolutely panic stricken phone call. All of their advertising was digital. And specifically, Meta/Facebook. Overnight, a sudden algorithm change had swept through Facebook that included a significantly draconian nudity filter. It didn’t just block ‘nudity’ on Facebook (something that makes obvious sense), it blocked anything with six degrees of separation from nudity. So, even if you ran an ad with no nudity, but it linked to a website that was in any way connected to having a bit of skin on it - the ads would not run. And given YourBreast’s website was full of boobs, their entire advertising suite had gotten them effectively banned from advertising. Even totally clean ads. If it linked to their booby-filled website - banned.

Total disaster would be too mild a phrase.

While the tech heads searched for answers (and if you’ve ever had any issues with Meta, you know how much help they are in these situations…) an emergency brief was sent into creative - which was basically ‘what the hell do we do?’

No one wanted to touch it. I mean, it was an impossible brief. All of the content was women in bras and bikinis showing off the product (boobs). And even if it wasn’t an influencer on the beach, and it was a recovering cancer survivor regaining their confidence, it was still boobs. Everything we tried to plug into Facebook got banned.

And here’s the point where I learnt why it’s important to get out of the way. (And why diversity in creative departments is even more important.) I still remember the moment. Isabel Evans and Ana Pareja Calvo, a gun creative team at the agency, came over with an entirely different response to everyone else in the building. They suddenly didn’t see any of this as a problem. They made the point that, as women, we don’t need boobs in our face. I mean, we’re pretty familiar with them. We have them. And if we’re considering getting breast surgery, we don’t want boobs all over our laptops and our phones when we’re trying to research it anyway. This is a good thing. What if we completely rebuilt the brand with fun illustrations of booby characters and just got rid of all the the other stuff. What if we just circumvent the nudity filter by making a bunch of funny watercolour boobs. This isn’t a problem, it’s an opportunity.

I’m not sure I’ve ever sat up faster in my life when being presented something. It was fucking brilliant. And I knew from that moment onwards, my job was to protect this idea with my life and, importantly, get the hell out of the way so Izzy and Ana could bring it to life in its truest form - because they’d just proven they knew better than anyone else involved.

Here’s the case study, if you’re interested.

Ideas are precious, fragile things.

But sometimes, despite feeling counterintuitive, the biggest job all of us might have to play in keeping a piece of work alive isn’t to put our hands all over it.

It’s to clear the path ahead, and sometimes - that might mean getting out of the way ourselves.