Creativity is the final product

drop marketing, losing creativity to KPIs and trying to remember what it's like to put creativity first

Since discovering that I can buy books with my corporate card and claim it as “learning and development” I’ve been breaking my rule of not buying any new books before I finish the ones I have. Unlike many people, I am actually pretty good about it. It’s not like a book I want to read is ever going to be sold out, so dropping the title in a Notes app usually does it for me. 

The books that are on my company’s suggested list for “learning and development” are all the good old management and self-help books that could be found in the business and self-improvement sections (which usually face each other) of any bookstore. Those books weren’t my plan. I haven’t browsed through those sections since I fell out of my ‘peak productivity’ era and worked for the guy who wrote a few of them. What me and my corporate card were after were those weird Art and Design bookstore sections where boys in carpenter pants and beanies flip through laminated pages of coffee table books, in hopes that I would find something that will help me disconnect from Twitter, TikTok, Instagram shopping, influencer merch lines, Met Gala outfit reviews, project KPIs - really anything that capitalizes on ‘creativity’ and turns it into boring mass produced goods. 

I recall being asked a few times this year about how I ended up working in marketing, whether I liked it, and whether it’s something I’ve always wanted to do. “Hmm it’s not something I’ve thought about really…I like that I am able to have some kind of analytical base of, you know…strategy, growth…while also getting to be creative.” Complete bullshit. Do you ever say something at a party just because you’ve learned how to come up with a smart-sounding answer to any question on the spot and then later think to yourself “why the hell did I say this? This is not even true.” Guess that’s what we pay the big buck for college tuition for. To be honest, the “while getting to be creative” bit I made up sounds like such a normal thing to say that for a while I believed in it myself until very recently, when I started to make a vision board for a happier career and life, and well…going to therapy. 

Browsing through Art and Design sections at a bookstore can be uncomfortable. The shelves are full of heavy books with laminated pages and more pictures than words. It’s like browsing through books in a different language. “Where the hell do I start here? I don’t really understand how half of these books got printed. Is this normal? Do other people think that? Oh god maybe I am just not creative enough,” - all kinds of questions were roaming through my head. Some of these books treat art and creativity as the final product. They are the weird coffee table photography books printed by some white guy in his forties or Brooklyn Beckham because…well, his parents are commons at the Buckingham Palace.. Some are very clearly treating design, art, creativity as a utility, a method, a secret to selling more things, attracting more users, or getting a promotion. And if you somehow find yourself in a marketing section, creativity is really just a way to get a leg up in the corporate competition. And of course can’t forget books about colors, lines, typography - the very technical graphic design stuff. Not really what I was looking for. 

I never really wanted to work in marketing, I just kind of stumbled into it. I figured out the code to making people on the internet like me and then got a job managing social media which later evolved into a broader marketing role because “social media manager” sounded like a nice little box that industry adults put young people in and never really treated them seriously. I wanted to learn more traditional marketing stuff, just now coming to realize that social media is probably one of the most exciting parts of today’s marketing for me. 

Before working in marketing, my friends and I worked on spontaneous little projects on the internet that sometime took over the whole tech twitter and sometime bled into normal people’s world. Projects like this happen naturally - out of a tweet, a joke, a bit that you and your online friends take a little too far. Of course, there are always people who treat these projects as a marketing case study and are taking it apart to see how they can replicate it to promote their creator economy app. People on tech twitter are obsessed with “drop marketing”, an online version of guerilla marketing to the point where the marketing drops are a distraction from the main product and brand.

The secret to most of these marketing drops that are reverse engineered to take over your timeline is DMing your friends, investors, advisors, and customers who all have some kind of internet following and getting them to engage with it. The secret to projects that take over the feed by storm - like eye mouth eye, gm app, constitution dao - is randomly coming up with a dumb idea, committing to the bit and doing the work (a lot of work) that will take it too far. The other secret is that you should want nothing to come from it. The second you start thinking about clout, twitter followers, partnerships, PR, investor intros, or money that can come out of it, you stray away from the sun. I don’t think that the artist should be hungry: recognition, money, clout are not entirely bad things that can happen along the way, but the second you start making decisions optimizing for any of these outcomes, you are losing the sight of what’s important. 

When I started to work in marketing, I was promised creativity…or at least that’s what I thought. Running “left field initiatives” is literally in my job description. A few months in, someone asked me “I don’t get it. Why do you need this job if you can just run projects like this by yourself or with friends on the internet?” “So I can get paid while doing it?” I said squinting my eyes in confusion. I thought I figured out the recipe to getting paid while doing things I like. Things that are more creative that I ever imagined myself doing. Things I was better at than I ever thought I could be. 

Somewhere along the road things started to change. Ideas came out of need to promote something that was not exciting by itself. I started saying KPIs, setting up UTM links, and looking at sign up dashboards. I started teaching people who sign brand partnerships to monetize their creativity, what a better CTA is so I can keep signing off their invoices. I never really wanted to be a creative or thought I was good enough but oh man…the little bits of creativity and freedom that I used to enjoy and have started to feel a little confidence in turned into something that overwhelms me.

When I think about what a happier life could look like, I always think about young people who chose paths where creativity is the final product. Whether they are organizing a dinner, so they can share their love for food with others, design and make clothes to help others feel beautiful, or skip around the stage at Terminal 5 because they feed off the energy of the crowd that loves their music - all of them look so peaceful, content and happy with where they are that I can’t help but envy them. There is money, following and all other capitalistic perks to be made from dinners, fashion, and music, but I’ve got a sneaky suspicion that these people sell out dinners, clothing, and arenas because their creativity, thoughtfulness, the love for their craft, life, and themselves first. Nine times out of ten if you make something you love and you put it out there for others to see, you get a positive response. Other things start falling into place. 

I am trying to figure out how I lost that. I am trying to imagine a life where creativity, the love for life, and myself come first again as I search for clues in the empty Art and Design sections at a local bookstore. How do I reframe my thinking to focus on creativity and process and let the rest fall into place? How do I build up confidence to call myself a creative? Am I just not cut out to be one or does everyone else feel like an imposter at first? What are some next steps I can take towards a more creativity-first career and life?