“I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep, I know for certain I’m somebody else.” — Bob Dylan
Consider the chameleon. Few species are better able to adapt to their environments. One minute, it’s there. The next, poof, vanished. Gone full B1-stealth-bomber mode. Of course, it only seems that way. The little lizard hasn’t gone anywhere. But what he has done is adapt to his surroundings.
By contrast, I give you the cave bear. Everything was going gangbusters until 24,000 years ago when something called the Last Glacial Maximum came along and the poor guy couldn’t keep up with all the snow and ice. When it was all over, where other creatures had found a way to adapt, the cave bear was a goner. The drive-in movie theater of the Ice Age.
Like the Last Glacial Maximum, creativity is going through some pretty extreme fluctuations of its own. And if we know anything, it’s that creatives aren’t going to be able to skate anymore. You want to crawl into a hole like those cave bears and pretend like things are going back to what they used to be? Well, can you say fossil?
“Time was, creativity in advertising meant simply filling in the bars on a media flowchart with ideas: Here’s an idea for TV. Here’s one for print. Here’s one for out-of-home,” says Will Burns, founder and chief executive officer of virtual ideation company, Ideasicle X . “It’s different now. The center of gravity has moved upstream. It’s no longer just what a brand says and how, it’s what it does. And every day, it seems there are more ways for a brand to behave.”
For years, Madonna was the high priestess of chameleondom and as artistically pliable as ever at a time when she could have been howling at the neighborhood kids to get the hell off her lawn. Rock, pop, R&B, EDM, disco — what hasn’t she done? Did I mention she won a Golden Globe for Best Actress in Evita? She knew how to change, change hard and fast.
Don’t even get me started on Ziggy Stardust. Um, Aladdin Sane. Um, Diamond Dog. Um, Thin White Duke. Um, who were we talking about? Oh, right, David Bowie. For a while, Bowie was reinventing himself every eighteen months, turning himself inside out and outside in, always a near-perfect mirror of culture at any given moment.
Lisa Clunie is chief executive officer and cofounder of red-hot New York ad agency JOAN. As far as she’s concerned, we wouldn’t be in this business if we didn’t already have a whole lot of chameleon in our blood.
“While many people in this world crave routine, most advertising people got into this field for the unexpected, the unknown, the variety,” Clunie says. “The problems we solve are often similar but never exactly the same. We look to do work no one has done before; if it smacks of familiarity, it’s less valued. We are people who did not want an assembly line job. And while today’s changes are asking us to move a little faster, we must tap into our original spirit to feel the thrill of what this means: invention, adaptation and pure white snow.”
Few would argue that what works creatively in North America doesn’t always work somewhere else. Your huge Super Bowl idea might kill it on Ad Meter but fall flat on its face in China or Bolivia or Sri Lanka. Different cultures. Different sensibilities. They’re not going to adapt to you, so you better damn well adapt to them.
There’s a concept called transcreation. While translation focuses on replacing the words in one language with corresponding words in a new language, transcreation focuses on communicating the same concept in a new language.
Cut to Shanghai Disney. The question was: How do you adapt the pure essence of Disneyland so that, as Disney chairperson Bob Iger said, the new theme park would be authentically Disney and yet distinctly Chinese?
Here’s what you wouldn’t do:
You wouldn’t have a Main Street USA. You wouldn’t have a Sleeping Beauty Castle that wasn’t bigger, higher and wider than any other before it. There would be no paddle wheeler and no steam train. Those things might mean something to us but in China, not so much.
What you would have are a lot more live shows: a big deal in China. You’d have The Garden of The Twelve Friends, with Disney animal characters filling in for the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac. It would still be Disney, but reimagined to accommodate a different climate. A uniquely different culture. When in China, do as the chameleons do.
Obviously, there’s a gorilla in the room. AI is big. It’s nasty. And right now it’s on a rampage the likes of which we’re only just beginning to experience. Friends, if you think keeping creatively relevant was hard before, well, like Bette Davis liked to say, “Buckle up, it’s gonna be a bumpy night”. Bumpy? More like tectonic upheaval. Creative jobs are going to implode faster than a sand castle in a tsunami. And if you think that’s still a long way off, I imagine that’s what the cave bear thought all those epochs ago.
So what can you do to inoculate yourself against the storm upon us?
It’s A Tool. Think Of It That Way: Yes, AI is a threat but don’t think of it that way. Embrace it as a powerful tool. Explore ChatGPT, Midjourney, Dall-E, Stable Diffusion and other software that can streamline processes, automate repetitive tasks, and provide new creative possibilities.
Get Good At It. Really Good: While AI can automate a lot of tasks, focus on developing skills that complement, instead of competing with, its abilities. Creative thinking, problem-solving, emotional intelligence, and storytelling. AI isn’t likely to be brilliant at any of that. But you can be.
Collaborate, Not Irritate: Better to collaborate with AI than look at it as some kind of real life Borg. Explore partnerships between AI and your own human creativity to produce innovative projects. AI is no creative genius but it can generate rough ideas, analyze data, and enhance the creative process.
Learn, Grasshopper: Invest in acquiring new skills. Keep ahead of technological advancements. Identify emerging trends and technologies relevant to your field. Sign up for courses, workshops, or online resources.
Get Your Human On: Focus on areas that exploit the realities of human creativity. Create authentic and personalized experiences. Understand human emotion like you never have before. Basically you need to become a genius on what makes humans human. Something AI will find to be a bitch at replicating.
Let It Go: Be open to evolving roles. For years, maybe you were a writer or an art director. Life was good. But get over it. Be prepared to let all that go. Turn yourself into something else. You might be surprised how much you thrive in a new role.
The Shape Of Networking To Come: Whoever you hung out with before, that’s fine. But find yourself new tribes. Help each other stay informed, find opportunities, collaborating with like-minded creatives in this new creative world order.
So what about it?
On the one hand, you can be a cave bear. You can prattle on about Volkswagen and 1984 and Real Men of Genius while the business morphs into something unrecognizable and light years from what you once knew. Or you can be a chameleon and morph right along with it. You can flatline on the relevance meter or you can spend the rest of your career lost in time.
When I take a roadtrip, I value having a sense of direction and access to a map. I don’t mind asking for directions when necessary. I definitely like getting an overview as to the itinerary and know my possible routes. I sometimes compare GenAI with Waze. Waze isn’t actually human. It is artificial. However, it was built for humans that want to go places. Cave bears don’t need Waze, Google Maps, or a well worn Rand McNally road atlas. These tools are all “superhuman” in the sense that one human being could not practically make them independently. AI seems similar. Not human, but imminently useful when a human wants to accomplish something. When push comes to shove, I’ll take the human. However, consider that human eyesight can achieve the insights that microscopes give us. AI seems the same.
Insightful, Ernie! Thank you, Joe