Kevin Lee: Creativity and connection

August 1, 2014:  Kevin lee uses Mad Men’s “Monolith” episode as a springboard to talk about how creativity and automation relate to each other today in marketing. 

Matthew Weiner, Mad Men‘s creator, is making an important but unsubtle point here: that automation and creativity are inherently opposed to each other, and that ultimately, automation wins. At the same time, however, in today’s marketing world, which is far more complex than it was in 1969 , when the “The Monolith” happens, creativity hasn’t been replaced.

While it’s certainly morphed into a form that Don Draper might not recognize at first glance, it’s just as important now as it was then – in fact, it’s more important than ever.

Why?

1. Because humans still need to feel something. Emotion – not technology – ultimately drives online engagement. One of the big dangers inherent in techno-centric marketing is the tendency not to focus on the person – the individual recipient of a given message – but to instead obsess about the abstract, impersonal attributes of a person: those qualities or attributes making him/her a desirable “target” of a given marketing initiative. The fact that we’ve got all of this great targeting technology at our disposal is wonderful, but it falls flat if we fail to reach into the heart of our recipients and actually touch them. Thinking about personas (instead of “buckets”) is one step in the right direction, but I’d still like to see more thought put into what actually motivates individuals to take the actions they take. The answer to this question probably doesn’t lie in any online poll, focus group, or viral metric. It might, however, reside in something your child says to you, something you overhear while riding a Long Island Railroad coach, or a deep truth you discovered while shaving.

3. Because content still matters. Your landing pages will fail unless you give people a reason to stay. Your social media pages will fail if they lack the human touch. Your PPC campaigns will fail if you haven’t put yourself fully in the mind of the searcher and created something wonderful for them before — and after — they’ve clicked. What story is your brand telling? Where is the conflict (an essential element in any memorable story)? How is it resolved? Most importantly: why should we care about it? What, in other words, does what you’ve made add to our experience of the world? Only by answering these questions can a brand rise above the corporate sameness of so much advertising today.

4. Because we long to be connected. Think about the one thing that connects all people: we’re born, we live, and someday, we’ll die. We’re also flawed, vulnerable, and searching for some kind of meaning to light our way forward. At the same time, brands spend millions to demonstrate their immortal, immutable strengths. In so doing, they profoundly distance themselves from us, and no amount of contrived messaging can overcome this separation. There’s no simple answer to the question of how brands can really connect to people in an authentic way, but here’s a suggestion: take a cue from Polaroid, which hired the late James Garner to do a series of spots in which Garner, while demonstrating Polaroid’s latest camera, was continually distracted by his wife. People still remember those spots today – more than 35 years after they aired – both because of Garner’s winning personality and because the scenario of being distracted while trying to do something serious is universal and thus it connected us.

Yes, there’s tension between technology and creativity, but I’m optimistic about the future of both – and especially about the creative possibilities of their ever-changing fusion. The creative canvas might feel differently today, and there’s no doubt that being able to move the needle on a mass scale is much more than a matter of creating a great ad and faxing over a simple insertion order. But the essence of creativity — in terms of it being able to spark a memorable emotional response — will never die.