The Future Is Now. And Now. And Now. By Tom Christmann

It feels like everyone is talking about the future of marketing and creativity these days, with many citing Ai, Web3 and Augmented Reality as the technologies that will usher in this “future”. The marketers who figure how to best take advantage of these new technologies, the reasoning goes, will be the ones who “win the future”. So I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the finalist entries for the Ad Age Young Creatives Contest.

In the past, Ad Age had asked contest participants–all young creatives in advertising–to design a cover for their magazine. But this year they took a step into the future and used TikTok to ask the question: WHAT IS THE FUTURE OF CREATIVITY? The answers they got included all the usual buzzy technologies, but not in the way you might think.

In this blog post, I’d like to discuss some takeaways from these insightful answers from the next generation of advertising minds. I hope you’ll find them as valuable (and hope-inducing!) as I did.

THE FUTURE IS NOW

The winning entry was from Ziwei Koh, a Creator at VaynerMedia APAC. Ziwei stitched into Ad Age’s TikTok from his account to take issue with the entire premise of the question.

The future of creativity, Mr. Koh posits, is unknowable. And, what’s more, it’s irrelevant. All that truly matters is what is happening at this very moment. Where is your customer’s attention? Where is cultural attention? Go wherever the attention is and listen. Then, once you truly understand the space, start to play along.

A lot of marketers don’t think they have a place on TikTok. If any of your customers are there, you should be there. Find your niche audience. It may only be a small number compared to the old broadcast days. But it doesn’t matter. Just listen for the gold.

DON’T CREATE. DOCUMENT.

Many of the entries focused on the importance of humanity. Sarah Ko, an art director at TBWA\Chiat\Day in Los Angeles, made her TikTok about not trying to be creative in a certain way and instead just “embracing your mess”. It might be easy to dismiss this as so much artistic hoo-ha, but marketers can take away some solid advice: Stop trying to create an ideal version of reality. You literally can’t do it. Don’t create. Instead: Document.

What if you were to be just totally transparent with your brand? Show it warts and all? What if you licensed content from real customers, not based on their follower count, but based on their authenticity? What if you could license a track from a customer’s Soundcloud account? (You can.) What if every employee in your marketing department were to follow one random customer on TikTok every month? You might just discover the person that will introduce your brand to a whole new audience in a way you never could have imagined.

Employees are a great resource of humanity too. DuoLingo struggled to find their brand voice on social media until their social media manager Zaria Parvez asked about the owl mascot costume in a closet. “Oh that’s just for events and stuff,” she was told. She decided to use the costume to create a character that made the brand more human and brought followers (and customers) running.

What piece of content is just lying around waiting to be found? Maybe it’s an old commercial from the 1960s that your brand forgot even existed. Maybe it’s a jingle written by your founder’s wife from before you were born. Content is everywhere if you know where to look.

THE MAGIC OF CREATIVITY

Emma Murphy, a Senior copywriter at 22Squared, turns to her future self in 2071 to learn what the future of creativity is. But her future self turns the tables and asks what creativity is today. “adding something new to the human experience.” A new way to tell the truth about the world. Ai can help you have more novel ideas. But it can’t tell you what is going to work. “Only you know when you’ve broken through,” she says. “And therein lies the magic of creativity.”

These days, you never know where the next novel idea is going to come from. It could come from ai. It could come from a customer. Or an employee. It could come from someone’s grandmother. As Cole Davis, an Art Director at Deutsch, points out in his entry, there are 300 million photos uploaded by real people daily. That’s a lot of creativity to compete with. But what if you didn’t compete? What if you could pay a creator for their great idea an hour after it was posted?

I know a way.

A BRIGHTER FUTURE

In conclusion, the future of creativity is happening all around you. All you have to do is listen. And if these young thinkers are any indication, the future of creativity is going to be more human than ever.

Tom Christmann is a veteran advertising creative and a Found Content Evangelist for Catch+Release. You can contact him at tom@catchandrelease.com.