Link This | Email this | Blog This | Comments (0)

Navigating Creative Transitions

August 19, 2008 Last week, I was in Milwaukee for the inauguration of a new event, C2’s Creative Transitions Conference, where I got to sit on a keynote panel along with a representative from Adobe Systems who had won an Oscar for the visual effects in Titanic. (The closest I could come to that was being a consultant in the printing industry, which often gives me a similar sinking feeling.)

It was a generally young crowd—I would guess, out of the 150 people or so who came to the dinner keynote session, more than three-fourths of them were under 35. As a result, my quickie survey at the beginning of my talk (on the growing prevalence of cross-media and multichannel marketing) found that the majority of the crowd were heavily new media based, and even more heavily cross-media based already.

The sessions, targeted toward creative professionals, were divided into three tracks—print, interactive, and video—and yet there was so small amount of overlap. Let’s not kid ourselves: creative professionals have an increasingly holistic attitude toward media these days and even print, which is not the hippest medium in the world, is still respected and turned to “as needed.” And this is the key descriptor of any media channel: “as needed.” What medium/media is/are needed for a given marketing campaign to attract a sizable audience fitting the desired demographics?

Mobile devices and the potential for developing content for the iPhone and other Internet-enabled mobile devices were also very hot topics, and given the questions from the crowd during the Q&A portion of the keynote, is something that gets creatives jazzed.

The point of marketing is not to get creative professionals “jazzed,” of course, but it does provide an indication of where they are likely to dedicate their energies. Flash applications, Adobe AIR implementations, and other such things also get the creative juices flowing. And since the key to marketing today is to not only think “outside the box” but to often deny that the box even exists at all, it’s easier to elicit creative—and effective—strategies when people are enthused about them. This is why viral video is such a hot topic; when someone (in this case, the audience) is sufficiently enthused by something, they will do the marketing legwork for you and propagate your message themselves. (Interestingly, as an illustration of viral video in my presentation, I cited the number one viral video of 2007—Cadbury’s “Gorilla Drummer” which, for those not in the know, if little more than a guy in a monkey suit sitting at a drum kit miming Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight.” Someone in the crowd asked me if I knew why it was so popular; I had to confess that I merely report the phenomenon, not explain it, although this audience member admitted that he found the video “just beautiful” and seemed distressed that I found it more silly than beautiful. Chacun à son goût.)

Marketing has to be a creative endeavor today in ways that it never was before. The old models of advertising and marketing seldom work as well as they used to, and this situation will continue. Therefore, ever more creative solutions are required—and this requires a healthy dose of those old creative juices.

Posted by Richard Romano on August 19, 2008 | Comments (0)