Creativity

I have lots of ideas. This is both useful and a problem.

Running a creative media company means ideas are everywhere. Whether that’s a character, format, partnership, or product, it’s easy to get carried away with a creative idea.

I’ve spent enough of my career in product, marketing and audience insight to know that having an idea and having an opportunity are not the same thing.

I believe deeply in research, understanding the audience and looking at the data. It’s a knee-jerk reaction for me to ask what an idea is for, who wants it, why you should make it and, importantly, who is actually going to do all this work?

I know the last question has extinguished several sparks of inspiration, but here’s the thing: There is another side to creativity that I think we sometimes lose when we become too obsessed with validation: the best ideas don’t always arrive with evidence attached.

My job as a business owner is to ask all the hard questions, but my job as a product owner means I mustn’t forget customers can tell you what frustrates them, what they love and what they actually do today.

If every creative decision has to be justified by what audiences already watch, buy or understand, we risk using research to reproduce the present rather than imagine what could come next.

That’s why I like the tension between creativity and commercial like this:

Creativity asks, what if?
Audience insight asks, for whom?
Strategy asks, why this?
Commercial thinking asks, can we make it work?

The skill, I think, is knowing when the evidence is telling you to stop, and when you’re seeing something the evidence simply hasn’t caught up with yet.

Research can tell you a great deal about the world as it is. Creativity gives you permission to imagine the world as it could be.