When did marketing stop trusting creativity?
A personal investigation into advertising, technology marketing and the questions that seemingly won’t go away.
The creative courtroom
Throughout thirty years of being paid to have ideas, I have noticed a subtle, continual shift. Today it feels as though we spend 10% of our time thinking of the right idea, then the remaining 90% building the rigorous and defensible case, or deck inevitably, for why this particular idea or approach could deliver the desired outcome.
It’s like being a lawyer for the defence in a courtroom drama. You must play devil’s advocate and interrogate your own ideas thoroughly first, before facing the inevitable prosecution counsel in the numerous stakeholder creative presentations. Anticipate the areas of resistance. Identify areas of compromise and equally areas that are non-negotiable. Build the logical case to protect as much of the magic as possible. Try and employ as much objective evidence as possible, because the subjective is, well, just that. It has made me question, when did creativity become something that had to prove itself before it was allowed to exist? Is it a recent phenomenon? Or one that’s always existed that I’ve simply chosen to forget?
The biggest change in my advertising career happened in the early 2000s with mass adoption of the internet, digital advertising, then social media and all the promise that this new land brought with it. So, it’s tempting to blame the digital revolution and all that it claimed to deliver for the demise of trust in creativity. You don’t need expensive creativity, because we’ll put the right message in front at the right person at the right time – was certainly a seductive promise. Except that’s too easy. Marketing was trying to reduce the uncertainty of creativity long before Google Analytics existed.
Thirty years ago, towards the end of the halcyon period in advertising, we didn’t have decks. Instead of PowerPoint we relied on a respected point of view. Creative concepts, craft and confidence. The confidence to present an idea stripped back to a rough black and white marker visual. I should also declare that most creatives in the agencies I worked in weren’t allowed to go to client meetings. That was the domain of the strategists and the account management team, who went well-briefed with one job – sell the work. The client perception back then was that the account teams were likely to be more objective than the creatives.
At that moment in time the creatives – copywriters, art directors and designers weren’t employed because we possessed some mystical gift unavailable to ordinary humans. We were employed because we’d supposedly developed judgement about things that were inherently difficult to know in advance. Will people notice this ad? Will they understand it? Will they find it funny? Have they seen something like this before? Will they watch it? Might they remember it? Strategy defined the business problem. Creativity was trusted to make the leap.
Now this isn’t a trip down memory lane through rose-tinted glasses. I remember that the roses came with thorns back then too. Clients challenged work. Planners challenged work. Creative Directors assassinated ideas. Plenty of very average advertising escaped anyway. But there was an implicit acceptance that creative judgement was itself a form of expertise. And that judgement wasn’t evidence-free, because research was already everywhere, but it fell into two camps, Qual and Quant.
Can you put a number on an idea?
Qualitative research, usually experienced through a two-way mirror, was genuinely fascinating when the group dynamics were moderated skilfully. Groups of customers discussing their lives, loves, habits, brands and rituals. People said unexpected things. You could learn about their lives, behaviours, language, prejudices, desires and contradictions. Truth was almost always stranger than fiction. Qual could provide the raw material for a creative leap, especially when done early in the process to refine and interrogate the brief rather than simply judge the creative execution.
Quantitative research, dominated by companies such as Millward Brown with their Link testing, was the second approach. It felt different. Primarily because it attempted to attribute numerical values to potential advertising qualities and performance. This felt more troubling. Not necessarily because the numbers were wrong. But because measuring enjoyment, involvement and branding seems inherently subjective. Could a creative idea really be reduced to a series of scores? Perhaps it could. More importantly, it was, and clients trusted numbers because they appear objective.
Before spending large sums producing a television advert, you made what was known as an animatic. Crude drawings, animated with approximate movement. Temporary voices. Placeholder music. Audiences in the Link test then judged something whose eventual effect might depend upon casting, acting, direction, timing, music, cinematography and editing. Paradoxically brands were trying to reduce the financial risk of making something that didn’t exist, by asking people to judge an inferior version of it before it existed. All because creativity can be hard to trust. Or maybe because people like insurance policies.
Lowe Lintas (formerly Lowe Howard Spink), where I worked from 1999-2005, was regarded as one of the best creative agencies at the time with a double Cannes Grand Prix for print and film in consecutive years for Stella Artois and The Independent Newspaper. Clients consequently trusted our creative judgement a little more, but never totally. Lowe embraced research, but with an anecdotal get-out clause that I will come onto. The creative’s fear was always that research could be unreliable in outcome and could kill or diminish an idea before it got into the public domain.
This fear was articulated most clearly by another agency founder David Ogilvy, who declared, “The trouble with market research is that people don’t think what they feel, they don’t say what they think and they don’t do what they say.” Yet people were trusted more than creativity. Ogilvy also offered the counterbalance that, “Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.”
It sometimes felt as though clients had come to trust the researchers more than their creative agencies. In the post-testing reports, there were inevitable recommendations from the research company to improve the adverts. These usually targeted the more unusual elements in an idea, with suggestions to normalise it or close the comprehension circle further, so the messaging was more immediate. Make it all a little more literal. Interesting, because we were always taught never to patronise the public. I guess it’s a balance.
I mentioned that Lowe had a potential get-out card to play against research findings, and it relates directly to trust in creativity. Sometimes research results don’t predict the future outcome correctly. This story long pre-dates my time in advertising but relates to the famous “Heineken refreshes the parts other beers cannot reach” campaign. This campaign was created at legendary agency CDP in 1973 by Terry Lovelock and Vernon Howe. Frank Lowe was the managing director, and the account followed him when he founded his own agency.
Anecdotally the first three Heineken films didn’t test well in qualitative research. One of the main conclusions was that they were “unlikely to promote awareness of Heineken and interest in drinking it.” Frank Lowe and Heineken client Anthony Simmonds-Gooding ignored the findings, and the Heineken campaign went on to run for decades, becoming one of the most memorable, famous and best-loved campaigns in UK advertising history. So, what happens when research and experienced creative judgement disagree? Which do you trust? The instinct or the numbers? What if both are fallible?
Never laugh at a gorilla
By 2006 I had left Lowe, lured across to Publicis to be joint Creative Director on the British Army account. Publicis also held the Cadbury confectionery account, but it wasn’t something I had worked on until the account was put up for pitch. Then everyone in the creative department was drafted in to try and help retain the business.
The day-to-day Cadbury client was apparently creatively cautious, and the agency, under her direction, had been producing commercials that were real-world social scenes, where the different Cadbury products were being eaten. Then something charming/amusing was said or happened. Not cause-and-effect like the Heineken campaign, just observed social situations. I can’t remember any of the executions twenty years later, but the gist of it was there was a formula or construct that we had to write to. It had been decided that the agency should retain this real-world approach for the pitch, just get fresh creative teams, new to the Cadbury account to have a go.
Our sister agency Fallon were pitching against us. They were riding high on the success of the Sony “Balls” commercial (a genuinely memorable technology commercial), created by their Argentinian talisman, Juan Cabral. A far cry from the kind of output Cadbury were buying from Publicis. Being a sister agency, we managed to get wind of some of their creative ideas ahead of the pitch. Nothing underhand, just pub-talk.
One of the ideas was apparently ‘a gorilla playing the drums – it’s a ninety-second script too.’ How we laughed. No way in a million years the ‘thirty-second-social-situations’ Cadbury client would buy that. Curious to know more, I questioned whether it was a cause-and-effect idea – was the gorilla eating the chocolate the catalyst for it to play the drums? Apparently not. (Even the imaginative creative wants to close the circle sometimes.) More importantly, what was the strategy? Nobody knew.
The rest of course is history, and I’m happy to have been a spectator on the wrong side of history regarding one of the UK’s most famous commercials. Inevitably there were lingering questions. Why were Publicis held to a real-world creative construct? What was the strategy – the logic underpinning the magic? How did Cadbury trust Fallon’s creative judgement? Was creative research involved? Years later, answers emerged.
Firstly, you can’t make great creative work without a client who appreciates how creativity and storytelling work. Enter Phil Rumbol. In 2006, he had joined the Cadbury marketing team. Phil was our senior Stella Artois client at Lowe. Someone with a track record of making famous advertising. Films that changed the course of brands. With my focus entirely on the Army account, I hadn’t put two and two together. I can imagine the existing Publicis work simply didn’t match the ambition of someone used to making Cannes-winning Stella Artois films.
Secondly, and more importantly, the strategy was top-drawer. ‘A glass and a half of joy’ turned the distinctive Cadbury recipe promise into an invitation to make communications that mirrored the joy Cadbury chocolate gave people. I talked previously about strategies that open up creative playing fields for decades. This is one of those ideas. Although further creative instalments in the campaign struggled to emerge from Gorilla’s shadow.
But let’s not assume that Cadbury’s ‘Gorilla’ sauntered into the world with universal recognition of the creative landmark it was about to become. Far from it. Accounts subsequently confirm that there was resistance internally at Cadbury from senior management to Gorilla. Phil Rumbol and his marketing team immediately felt the idea delivered the emotional brief, while senior colleagues questioned an unusually long ad with no chocolate and essentially no conventional product message. Rumbol commissioned it anyway. Perhaps professional experience gives people different tolerances for creative uncertainty. Rumbol backed himself and trusted Fallon’s creative instincts.
The completed film was then put through three quantitative pre-testing methodologies to try and build trust internally. Different methodologies apparently produced different readings. D&AD’s case study says the pre-testing showed that although the film didn’t make much conventional sense, it strongly generated the intended feeling. Rumbol reported that Millward Brown’s Link test had deemed Gorilla a poor ad on measures including branding and persuasion, while other methodologies used alongside it were more accurate in predicting success. Before you can measure whether creativity works, you have to decide what you believe creativity is supposed to do.
Either way, Gorilla made it to air, with the campaign subsequently generating impressive commercial results. But the bit that interests me most isn’t whether the research was right or wrong. It’s what happened when the research couldn’t provide a definitive answer.
Somebody still had to decide. Phil Rumbol backed his judgement. Or Fallon’s. Probably both. He had enough experience of imaginative advertising with Stella Artois to accept that an unfamiliar idea came with uncertainty. He didn’t know Gorilla would work. Nobody did. He was prepared to find out. Confidence isn’t certainty.
The Insurance Policy
Around the same time, one of my own creative ideas had arrived at almost the same research junction. The decision to air went the other way. The brand was Ballantine’s whisky. Whisky advertising at the time tended, unsurprisingly, to spend a lot of time looking backwards. Stories of heritage, provenance, craft and history. All perfectly legitimate things for a whisky to talk about. But hard to stand out from the crowd, so we decided to look forwards.The existing global Ballantine’s brand idea was Leave an Impression. The audience was younger and more creatively ambitious, so rather than celebrate people who had already left their impression on the world, we created the people who might do it next – Tomorrow’s Heroes. We imagined future editorials and films featuring those whose creativity and achievements would capture the imagination of the younger generation, photographing and filming these fictional people and presenting their accomplishments as if they’d already happened. ‘Stan Banille. Designed the Space Hotel, 2028’ and ‘Bill Tenanse. Invented the Video Dream Recorder, 2021’ were the first two in the series. These scripts were to air in 2007. The dates we chose were close enough to feel emotionally within reach, but still futuristic. (Here we are in 2026 and neither has been achieved yet.)
Ballantine’s, for their part, appeared to be sponsoring the activity and asking the question: “How will you leave an impression?” Raising a glass to the people who might create tomorrow. Subtle dates within the copy and opening titles revealed the advertising conceit – that it was all set in the future.
Like the whisky, there was another subtle blended layer too. The names of our fictional heroes were all anagrams of Ballantine’s. We never explained it. You didn't need to spot it for the advertising to work. But if you did, there was a small reward waiting for you. We'd been taught not to complete the circle for people. Leave something for the audience to do. Perhaps that's another form of trust. Trust that people don't need everything explained to them.
The marketing team loved the campaign. It was the first time that global markets had agreed on a unifying idea, but it was Pernod Ricard company policy to research all new campaigns. The results came in the form of a series of traffic lights – green, amber, red. Go, proceed with caution, or stop. Prior to research we had warned that this campaign turned whisky conventions on their heads.
Sure enough, Tomorrow’s Heroes came back with amber traffic lights. Engaging, but the product link wasn’t clear. Amber lights were good enough to give the client the option to run the campaign. But it wasn't unequivocal enough to give him what I now think many clients were really buying from research. An insurance policy. If the scores are excellent and the campaign subsequently fails, you can point to the research.
After much discussion, our client decided not to run Tomorrow's Heroes. Despite having invested in the production of two films. The doubts that surfaced in research lay at the cornerstone of the campaign idea – Ballantine’s right to talk about the future. Strangely this concern had not come up when the concept itself had been through qualitative testing, pre-production. But this was a different audience sample, different opinions, watching finished films.
Admittedly the films had no Ballantine’s whisky in them until the end shot, so no drinking scenes, and certainly no cause-and-effect. But the actors and scenarios were all human and relatable. Not a gorilla in sight. Research didn't kill Tomorrow's Heroes. It simply failed to remove enough uncertainty for the client to feel comfortable launching what could have become a long-running campaign.
I wonder if Phil Rumbol would have launched Tomorrow’s Heroes without a research-backed insurance policy? Who knows. What I do know is that the problem with an insurance policy is that eventually you may stop doing anything the insurer won't cover.
There's another reason Tomorrow's Heroes has stayed with me. It was an idea solely based in What if?. We were imagining and inventing a future. Space hotels, video dream recorders – technologies that didn't exist – attached to people who hadn't invented them yet.
Years later, I found myself working almost exclusively with the industry actually building that future. Cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity. Technologies that would have sounded like science fiction when we made those Ballantine's ads. Which brings me back to the question I started with. Why does an industry whose products so often begin with “What if?” produce so much marketing that begins with “How?”
Perhaps the technology industry doesn't have an imagination problem at all. Perhaps it has a problem carrying the imagination that creates its products through into the way it communicates them. And that takes me to a coding course I was sent on about twenty years ago.
A room full of people trained to make leaps
When the digital tsunami hit advertising’s shores, an unwritten proclamation was made that creators of the future would have to be able to code. Not wanting to miss out on the next big thing, I found myself at Decoded’s coding school course along with the rest of the art directors and copywriters. Coding was the only way to stay relevant we were told, with the promise that by the end of the day we would individually have coded a website with a certain amount of functionality.
The first exercise of the day will stay with me forever. It was a simple task, involving pen, paper, and no coding. Familiar tools, all looking good so far. The task was to write down the command sequence that your brain navigates to pick up a cup of tea, guide it towards your mouth, take a sip, and place it down again without any spillage. Write down each individual step, taking into account the distances, direction, weight, and temperature. We had forty minutes.
Now, I love a cup of tea, but this was mind-numbing, to break down what felt like a simple task into almost a hundred commands. If this was the future of creativity, I was despairing. Reductive, system-based and completely literal. If imagination was the ‘What if?’ then coding seemed to be the ‘How?’ A room full of people trained to make leaps were being taught to make tiny steps. We'd spent our careers being rewarded for making connections nobody else had made. Now we were being taught that the future depended on leaving no necessary connection unmade. At the time coding felt like the opposite of the creativity I knew and loved, even if the websites we built that day felt functionally rewarding. In hindsight this was simply my introduction to a different type of creativity. What I was wrestling with was the notion that code engineering asks: What needs to be here for this to work? It was impressed upon us at Decoded that skilled coders worked in a reductive way to minimise lines of code, removing the superfluous to optimise efficiency. Less is more. Which is interesting because advertising often creates value by adding something that, functionally, doesn't need to be there. Cadbury’s drumming gorilla. Compare the Market’s meerkat. Guinness’s white stallions in a surfer’s wave. Stella Artois’s fictional version of France. Ballantine's anagrammed heroes. Remove those superfluous things and the literal proposition can still survive. In some cases, the communication becomes more efficient. But the memorability disappears. Because often we remember what shouldn’t be there, rather than what should. The anomaly that’s unexpected. Functionally unnecessary doesn’t necessarily mean competitively unnecessary, when you’re competing to be remembered. Efficiency asks what we can remove. Creativity sometimes asks what we’re missing. It’s important to state though that random weirdness isn’t creativity. A hummingbird in a Fintech ad isn't automatically imaginative. The apparently unnecessary element still has to contribute meaning, feeling, memory, humour or distinctiveness, and ideally be tied back to the brand in an obvious way that helps tell its story. Regression to the mean
Graphic design is visual engineering. Grids, lines, systems, weights, hierarchies, and spatial relationships. My bachelor’s degree was in Visual Communication, with the major in graphic design. Advertising came later. When I was at college, graphic design was by and large a broad church, and still predominantly paper-based. Flamboyancy and personality were encouraged. As was modernism and the ability to reduce something visually to its essence.In the early 1990s paper did not have the same parameters as pixels. Bitmap didn’t seem like it would be a big thing creatively.
But as the world went digital, and eventually mobile, the parameters of pixels came into play. Design had to be optimised for digital. And by optimised I mean reduced. Logos became cleaner. Sans-serif elbowed its serifed counterpart out of the way. Design became flatter and scalable, driven by a need to work at 16 pixels. Equally digital interfaces needed consistency, scalability and accessibility. Increasingly, anything apparently unnecessary was engineered out. But what if some of the apparently superfluous things we're removing are doing competitive work?
A serif, odd letterform, flourish, peculiar colour combination or strange character might be unnecessary for function while being extremely useful for recognition. Perfectly optimised design can solve every problem except the problem of looking like everyone else. Following the same reductive approach, ten brands can each make perfectly rational decisions and collectively arrive at the same party, in very similar clothes. Uncompetitive conformity. But maybe this is bigger than advertising.
Design conformity can often be the result of reaching an optimal performance state. With the mass adoption of wind tunnels and similar modelling software, car design has become increasingly homogenous. As a child I could spot a car model based on silhouette. Today I have to look at the badge and that’s not a result of my diminishing eyesight.
Back in 2023, Alex Murrell, Strategy Director at Epoch – a global brand agency wrote an article entitled ‘The Age of Average.’ He observed that we were living in a sea of sameness. From buildings to interiors to cars to the way we look and dress. To movies, books and video games. To brands, their adverts, identities and taglines. He reasoned that maybe when times are turbulent people seek the safety of the familiar. He also suggested that our obsession with quantification and optimisation could be a factor, or the globalisation of inspiration. Either way we are living through a mass cultural regression to the mean.
Apparently, I wasn’t imagining it
Four years before Murrell gave this phenomenon a name, I'd encountered another explanation for what might be happening. Back in 2019 when we were planning LogicLogicMagic®, I was reading a lot of books on advertising and marketing theory, trying to upweight the logic part of our proposition. Creativity in advertising was in crisis and yet I was planning on co-founding an agency in one of the superficially least creative sectors. One particular book stood out a mile – Lemon, by Orlando Wood. His follow-up book Look Out is just as thought-provoking. If I could only own two marketing texts, they would be these two.
Lemon contained a hugely reassuring body of work, because Orlando had gathered evidence around something I'd felt happening throughout my twenty-year career to that point: “A narrowing of focus, resulting in work that is flat, abstract, dislocated and devitalised.” A feeling, however uncomfortable, is never as persuasive as thoughts underpinned by considerable research. Orlando’s investigation went deeper than observation to explain how actions driven by the two different sides of the brain accounted for this ‘souring of the advertising brain’ away from creative effectiveness.
It's an oversimplification, but the two brain hemispheres attend to the world differently. The left hemisphere tends towards the narrow, abstract, explicit and goal-orientated; the right towards the broad, contextual, human and implicit. Wood's analysis found that advertising displaying more left-brain characteristics had become increasingly dominant since the mid-2000s. According to Orlando, we're living through increasingly left-brained times. Not just in marketing but culturally – The Age of Average, as Alex Murrell called it.
After reading the explanations of how the two brain hemispheres attend to the world differently in Lemon, that coding course came back to me. What I had experienced as two different kinds of creativity: What if? and How? wasn't the same thing Orlando was describing, but there was an intriguing overlap.
What if? looks outwards. It imagines possibilities, makes unexpected connections and asks what could exist that doesn't already. How? focuses inwards on the problem at hand. It breaks things down, creates order, removes ambiguity and works out how to make something function. Technology needs both.
Every extraordinary piece of technology starts with some version of What if? and only exists because somebody then answers How? What if computers could talk to each other? How? What if computing power didn't have to live on your desk? How? What if a machine could understand natural language? How?
Technology is therefore one of the worst places to go looking for an absence of imagination. Its products are evidence of the opposite. Which brings me back to my earlier suspicion. Maybe the imagination isn't missing. Maybe something simply happens to it on the journey from product to promotion.
What if? meets How?
I looked back on everything I encountered when I joined a B2B technology marketing agency: Demand Generation, customer journeys, content architecture, emails, landing pages, personalisation, automation, design systems, targeting, and optimisation. There was creativity everywhere. Systems solving difficult problems. Turning complexity into clarity and creating repeatability. Communications that were scalable, designed to reduce friction. Moving people efficiently from one stage to another. It was just not the kind of creativity I initially recognised. It was the creativity of How? not What if?
The wrong currency
I used to describe starting in B2B technology as arriving in a foreign country carrying the wrong currency, because that’s how it felt. I have money. I just can’t spend it here, unless I can find someone who understands its value. The problem wasn’t the creativity of How? It was the job we were asking it to do. When you’re competing with complexity, remove friction. When you’re competing with indifference, create traction. The person scrolling past your post doesn't necessarily have friction. They have indifference. The person walking past your stand doesn't have a comprehension problem yet. They have an attention problem. The buyer who has never heard of you doesn't need the purchasing journey optimised. They need a reason to begin the journey. This is where Orlando's follow-up book Look Out became even more interesting to me. Wood distinguishes between broad-beam attention, associated with brand building, and narrow-beam attention, associated with targeted activation. Different kinds of attention, he argues, require different creative characteristics. What if? creates possibilities. How? makes possibilities work. Technology needs both. Imagination to conceive something that doesn't exist. Engineering to make it exist. Yet somewhere between the creation of the product and the communication of it, the balance seems to change. Perhaps B2B technology has become exceptionally sophisticated at reducing friction because so much marketing has focused on the relatively small proportion of buyers who happen to be in-market. The quest for leads creating super-efficient fruit pickers, who in turn forgot how to water the orchard. Perhaps we’ve been applying the creativity of conversion to the problem of attention. Digital didn’t kill creativity. It gave marketers astonishing capabilities: targeting, personalisation, measurement, testing, automation, optimisation and attribution. All genuine advances. But those capabilities perhaps carried an implied promise – you don't need to be interesting if you can be relevant. Targeting determines who gets the opportunity to see you. But creativity influences what happens when they do. I wonder if digital optimised our ability to reach people faster than our ability to make people welcome being reached? Efficiency again marauding as effectiveness.
What if Marketing is the unnecessary bit? Sometimes answers lie in the absurd. So let’s take this idea of removing the apparently unnecessary to the extreme. What if Marketing itself can look unnecessary? Particularly inside a technology organisation. Engineering builds something. Product decides what it does. Sales sells it. Finance counts the money. Customer Success keeps the customer. So, in a technology organisation where Marketing often only influences one of the four Ps – and the weakest lever too – Promotion, how can it appear like a necessary investment rather than an unnecessary cost? Marketing's effects can be less immediately visible: familiarity, memory, preference, fame, distinctiveness, and future demand. They're often cumulative, probabilistic and difficult to attach neatly to a single action. So, Marketing has understandably tried to make itself legible to an organisation that values things that can be numerically defined: clicks, downloads, leads, MQLs, pipeline and attribution. Activity in the pursuit of evidence. In an environment where trust is in short supply, you look to try and making the rigorous and defensible case. We’re back in the courtroom looking for that insurance policy. The problem is that measurement doesn’t merely measure marketing. It can change the marketing being made. Because if some marketing activities are easier to prove, they may become easier to approve. If they're easier to approve, more of them get funded. If more get funded, more get made. Nobody ever has to make a conscious decision to make marketing more systematic. The system can select for it. There are probably organisational and economic reasons why this effect might be particularly pronounced in technology businesses. I'll come to those in due course.
Perhaps I’ve been asking the wrong question
But before we open Pandora’s box, let’s return to the original question: When did marketing stop trusting creativity? I’m beginning to think this question is wrong. It lacks the necessary nuance. Perhaps marketing didn't stop trusting creativity. Perhaps it became more comfortable trusting the characteristics of creativity it could explain, test, systemise, measure, optimise, repeat and defend. It’s much harder to go into battle for intuition, metaphor, ambiguity, lateral connections, emotion, humour, surprise, novelty and the apparently unnecessary. Those things are harder to guarantee. You can undoubtedly feel them but they’re harder to quantify, test, defend, put into a deck and insure. Ultimately, we are all trying to buy trust. The currency of How? can appear initially more valuable than the currency of What if? Frameworks, systems and methodologies have become more highly valued than flights of fancy. Maybe the shift I've experienced isn't from trust to distrust at all. Perhaps it's a shift in where we've chosen to place that trust. From judgement towards evidence. From intuition towards systems. From uncertainty towards apparent certainty. From What if? towards How? Twenty years ago, sitting in that coding course writing increasingly tedious instructions for how to drink a cup of tea, I thought I was being taught the opposite of creativity. I don't think that anymore. I think I was being introduced to another kind – the creativity of How?. Today when I look for it, I see How? everywhere.
So how do we know when marketing needs What if? and when it needs How? This will be the subject of my next instalment.
If you’ve worked in technology marketing for any length of time, I’m interested in whether you recognise any of this — particularly if you don’t. Where do you think I’ve got it wrong? I’m going to post regularly as I unpack numerous hypotheses that surface from these personal experiences and subsequent explorations.
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