Clients Want To Pay for Interestingness, Not 'Creativity'



Creativity is what the ad industry feels it *puts into* its best work. Interestingness, on the other hand, is what viewers *get out* of it.

Clients don’t want to pay for what we feel we’ve put into it. They pay for impact.

Interestingness has a business logic behind it based on the ideas of Field, Wood, et al.; that is, generating continued mental processing, particularly among non-frequent purchasers, is what drives brand growth. Creativity can be tied to business effects, but it has to generate interest in order to have an effect. Interest is what is actually doing the work, so why don’t we focus on that?

Which is, in some ways, the point. It’s not that ‘interesting' and ‘creative’ define mutually exclusive categories of agencies, work or ways of working. It’s a matter of what goal you’re aiming for. When you aim for ‘creativity,’ you may produce a lot of stuff that’s new, beautiful, funny, different, heartwarming (i.e. what wins award shows) but doesn’t generate ongoing ’thinking about’ by consumers.

And from a practical ’So, what are we supposed to do?’ perspective, “Make it more interesting to the audience” makes sense. “Make it more creative to the audience” does not. I’m not sure what makes things ‘creative.’ More cowbell?

Whenever I hear ‘creative’ used as a synonym for 'good', I remember the pre-Internet meme about individual effort within a bureaucracy: 'It’s like pissing yourself in a dark suit. It gives you a warm feeling, but nobody else notices.’

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