Creative as a commodity: Design outside the box

Much is made of the role creative plays in digital and traditional design. 

In traditional agencies, creative is even a noun, usually synonomous with an entire group of people, organized in a box...on a chart.

In much of the digital world, creative is more an adjective, used to describe the manner in which people approach something...these people may be technical, client service, analytic or image + word focussed among others. 

Inevitably, there is a role--and a need--for both definitions. It's often the tension between the interpretation of terms like 'creative' that makes for the most interesting reading. Especially when the digital domain becomes a channel for selling 'creative'. Like CrowdSpring.com

CrowdSpring.com wants to make graphic design and creative a commodity. Done on spec. 

Here's how it works: you need something designed. A website, a logo, a tshirt (an ad campaign?!). You lay out the specs, what you are willing to pay, and run a competition. Anyone...credentialled or otherwise...who wants to submit a design can. You pick the winner, you get the design, the designer gets the dough.

In some ways it's like submitting a bid, but with the spec creative attached. Of course noone wants to do spec work, but there are more than 12,000 designers registered with the site, a sure sign that there are many who are willing.

So What?

Three possible implications jump out (I'm, sure there are many others...please append as you see fit):

1. With increasing competition and a show-me-what-I'm-paying-for approach to bidding, downward pressure on design rates would seem inevitable through sites like crowdspring and others (e.g., elance.com, guru.com).

2. With increasing competition, perhaps agencies will resort to spec work to keep their creative departments engaged? It might be effective in retaining current clients or in the hopes of turning a project into an account with a new prospect.

3. When creative is commoditized, attributes like customer service and value adds may become the table stakes of differentiation (now there's a bundle of buzzwords!).

Surely there will be legitimate hue and cry about quality and credentials from entrenched interests in the creative-as-a-noun club (see prior post here). And while some large companies have signed up and used CrowdSpring and similar sites, noone expects large scale creative work to be bid on spec...yet. Then again, many have been slow to realize the online impact on offline business...notable among the late adopters are the creative-as-a-noun agencies.

In the digital space, like the free market at large, a little creative destruction can go a long way toward encouraging out of the box thinking.

Misperception of reality: The creative class

Perception is reality. I perceive the world as flat...is it? I perceive all children in Lake Wobegon to be above average. Are they?

I perceive that there is a creative class in human society. Is there?

Jeff Jarvis has a well-thought post on the Myth of the Creative Class...and how that myth is being shattered in what he calls the Google Age. The Google Age, to my mind, is a creative way of encapsulating the previously explored trends of cheap computing; always-on, interconnected relationships; and a transparent society into an easy-to-pronounce label.

From the post at Jarvis' Buzz Machine site (full version here):

"...The internet doesn’t make us more creative, I don’t think. But it does enable what we create to be seen, heard, and used. It enables every creator to find a public, the public he or she merits. And that takes creation out of the proprietary hands of the supposed creative class.

Internet curmudgeons argue that Google et al are bringing society to ruin precisely because they rob the creative class of its financial support and exclusivity: its pedestal. But internet triumphalists, like me, argue that the internet opens up creativity past one-size-fits-all mass measurements and priestly definitions and lets us not only find what we like but find people who like what we do. The internet kills the mass, once and for all. With it comes the death of mass economics and mass media, but I don’t lament that, not for a moment."

The notion of the online world enabling a creative meritocracy seems particularly relevant to marketers and agencies. As marketers, we don't have to rely on assertions of superiority: be they about our approach to the four P's, our client's prospects and customers, or our 'creative' product.

In the pre-Google Age (also known as the Mass Age) one could assert, for instance, that half the advertising worked, but that it was impossible to know which half. In the Google Age, we can put such assertions to the test and evaluate them against the facts.

In the Google Age one can know whether any part of our marketing works at all and, if so, how it can work better.

In the Google Age, creative isn't a department.

Perception may be an easy existence in our own private Idaho's. In the Google Age, reality will set us free of our delusions...Class dismissed.