We’re in a technological era like no other before. Yet, I’m not the only one who has noticed an opposite decline in creativity.

In 1958, E. Paul Torrance pioneered a creativity evaluation system. Though not without error, these tests have predicted and projected children’s creative accomplishments as adults with enough accuracy to remain the standard tests for the past 50 years.

Based on these tests, a recent article in Newsweek, titled “Creativity in Crisis” shows that while IQ scores are up, Creativity is down:

Kyung Hee Kim at the College of William & Mary discovered this in May, after analyzing almost 300,000 Torrance scores of children and adults. Kim found creativity scores had been steadily rising, just like IQ scores, until 1990. Since then, creativity scores have consistently inched downward. “It’s very clear, and the decrease is very significant,” Kim says.

The article goes on to say:

It’s too early to determine conclusively why U.S. creativity scores are declining. One likely culprit is the number of hours kids now spend in front of the TV and playing videogames rather than engaging in creative activities. Another is the lack of creativity development in our schools. In effect, it’s left to the luck of the draw who becomes creative: there’s no concerted effort to nurture the creativity of all children.

I think there’s more to it than that.

Fear and its equally evil sister, conformity, are the culprits.

Over the last while, political correctness has threatened, cajoled and belligerently permeated everything in society, working its way into school and home. The altruistic idea of cultural relativism - the belief that everything is equal, including ambition and talent - is flattening the world once again and distorting reality.

Technology is helping. It’s enabled all arts – from design, to music, to film making - to be democratized. This mass access has hood winked people into believing that art and ideas can come from anyone. That there’s no such thing as a ‘big idea’ anymore. That nothing is original. That “genius steals.” And that the crowd is better than the individual.

The equality and validity of anybody and everybody’s ideas is promised without anybody having to possess a modicum of talent, or learn and practice to acquire skills, or be genuinely curious, or mature through the accumulation of knowledge.

Presto! Everybody is instantly creative because society says so.

But, societal conformity isn’t just wrong. The whole concept of creative equality is wrong. From the Newsweek article:

A fine example of this emerged in January of this year, with release of a study by University of Western Ontario neuroscientist Daniel Ansari and Harvard’s Aaron Berkowitz, who studies music cognition. They put Dartmouth music majors and nonmusicians in an fMRI scanner, giving participants a one-handed fiber-optic keyboard to play melodies on. Sometimes melodies were rehearsed; other times they were creatively improvised. During improvisation, the highly trained music majors used their brains in a way the nonmusicians could not: they deactivated their right-temporoparietal junction. Normally, the r-TPJ reads incoming stimuli, sorting the stream for relevance. By turning that off, the musicians blocked out all distraction. They hit an extra gear of concentration, allowing them to work with the notes and create music spontaneously.

But the conformists march on, regardless of the consequences. And even though the necessity of creativity should be undisputed.

A recent IBM poll of 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the No.1 “leadership competency” of the future. I’d argue it’s always been that way, whether through the invention of the wheel, the light bulb, Martin Luther's famous speech, or the Apple computer.

Advertising and other professionally creative disciplines are now being abused by things like crowd sourcing, where ideas are bought and traded for a few hundred dollars. Where it’s less likely that truly great ideas can be produced because the ‘contestants’ do not have access to the client and the marketing information, just a brief. Where qualifications, passion and experience play no part. Where mostly non-creative people judge and decide what is creative and therefore effective.

I’ve always believed that creative people have soldered abnormal connections in their brains that serve to quickly unravel mysteries and discover solutions to problems. These connections don’t come without curiosity, ambition, hard work and years of practice.

For example, the way I go about solving a problem is to immerse myself in all the facts and relevant information and then walk away for days, or as long as I can. Leaving the problem in the back of my brain to more-or-less solve itself. Afterwards, I focus on the possibilities - writing them down for further exploration, or rejection.

This isn’t a left-brain, right-brain approach. It’s a whole brain approach as the article goes on to illustrate:

When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions.

Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with.

Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.

Finally, I’m not saying that everybody can’t participate in adding to ideas and making them better. It’s just the hatching, nurturing, design, aesthetics, steering and judgment of ideas where I don’t think everybody is, or can be equal.

Lets not confuse amateurs, hobbyists and tinkerers (in other words ‘the crowd’) with talented professionals. Else we’re all doomed to mediocrity.

Agree, or disagree? I’d love to hear your thoughts and comments.

Another season of kids graduating from various advertising, art and design schools, looking for a break has begun.

I've often wondered how many will actually create a life long career in the industry. What are the odds? In Canada there must be a hundred or more dedicated art colleges and university programs teaching marketing, advertising and design. Graduates must number in the thousands. Match that against the likely number of available internships and jobs and it creates a dismal picture.

Yet, despite the reality, the schools keep churning them out, year after year. Enrollment, subsidies and profit being the motive.

Talent is important in acquiring a job. But I place a higher value on attitude and determination. It's all about hard work. Work twice as hard as the person with twice the talent and you'll likely succeed. Keep doing that and you'll become the more talented person.

The only other piece of advice is the most important campaign you will do is the one that lands your first job.

Don't send an email asking for an interview. Any hack can do that. Rather, do your investigation of the places you'd like to work for and offer them something they don't have. You.

Make your campaign interesting and relevant to your prospect's needs. Stand out and be consistent without being irritating. Make them want to meet you.

That along with a little luck and you ought to make it.

Companies pay precious few marketing dollars to research companies that all too often use a one-size-fits-all template for identifying segments. The creative work goes into describing the 'lifestyles' and customizing the titles of these segments, typically based on psychographics (more bunk). Then of course, the thinking and marketing dollars are segmented based on the segments and what do you get? Utter confusion and not enough money put towards any particular endeavor to convince anybody to try the product.

Marketing starts with the product. If you don't have a relevant and meaningful difference built into the product - and just as importantly, know how to communicate the difference - you will fail. And all the market segmentation research in the world won't save you.

Rather than differences, it's better to find the similarities amongst the audience. Once that's known, concentrate your message and dollars and you'll be more likely to break through and create a famous and profitable brand.

Any comments, thoughts and suggestions on this important topic would be most welcome.

Despite the title, this slideshow focuses more on convergent media and how best to approach it.

Given media fragmentation and the problem of too many choices, we are advocates of Purpose Based Planning. It's based on the understanding that everything between a brand and its audience is media. In other words, get rid of the terms and descriptions that are not useful (and may in fact be detrimental), such as traditional, digital, above-the-line, below-the-line, etc. Although each has its purpose and unique uses, it's all media and media is converging. Given that, Purpose Based Planning defines the purpose of the initiative and plots the simplest and most logical path in achieving the business goal.

Creative, original content, as usual, is the most important part of any endevour. Without it, media is empty space.

Others are starting to understand that old agency organizational structures (and even new digital structures) do not work and can't be fixed. The writers of this presentation put it this way:

There used to be information architects at the online agencies and copywriters at the advertising agencies. Now you need a creative thinker who reconciles both and thinks multimedia. Online art directors have to develop stories, and offline art directors have to learn to use the internet for more than checking their emails.

Good enough, however, not far enough. We think the best solution is to create a new organization around a new team that's responsible and fully involved with client business from the planning stage forward. Rather than ever expanding silos and departments, housing art directors, copywriters, planners, account executives, media planners, digital planners, interactive designers, et al - the team consists of a creative person, a technology person and a strategic planner / project manager - all with a solid understanding of all media. Everything and everybody else is in support. We call this a cell structure and it's at the heart of what we do.

Simplifying and clarifying otherwise complex problems is a practice that everybody in marketing communications should strive for. But all too often, they don't.

Rather than starting at the creative stage - reducing the complex to one word, or at least one sentence should start at the planning stage and extend into the brief.

It's also wise to reject ridiculous marketing language and use plain language instead.

Afterall, the whole process is called communications, not just the finished message.

There's an interesting article titled, "Brand Building: The Advantage of Easier" that delves into this idea more. Well worth the read.