From the mind of JIM
My Creative Philosophy
Nothing drives me more insane than when people tell me they aren’t creative. I don’t care who you are – accountant, lawyer, senator, housekeeper – you are every bit as creative as I am, or anyone on Earth for that matter. Sure, we all have different talents, and may excel at different things, but talent and creativity are not the same thing. You and Picasso? Different talents. Equally creative.
The difference, as it is with most things, is practice. Creativity is like a muscle, the more you use it the stronger it gets. (I know, like we needed another area of life where we don’t work out enough.) The more you work to come up with good ideas, the faster you will produce them over time. Even more importantly, the more you evaluate your ideas and sift out the good from the mediocre, the faster you get at that too. So even after spending twenty-plus years in creative departments, I’m still not more creative than my accountant. I’m just way faster than she is at having a bunch of marketing ideas, picking out the good ones, and refining them into great ones. Shift that task to finding “technically” legal tax deductions, she’d blow me away.
So what does all this mean for my creative teams? It means we turn everything into a chance to concept, so we’re always flexing that creative muscle. Simple email campaign? How can we improve the subject lines? Static display ads? Let’s reimagine the buttons. Every project has something we can make better than we made it last time, and that’s our goal. Because if everything we make is even slightly better than the last one we made, at some point we’ll be making some pretty badass stuff.