We are not facing the end of creativity at the hands of artificial intelligence; we are witnessing its birth as one of the highest-paid management disciplines in the world.
The Question
Who in a company decides what is worth making – and who is accountable for it?
Roughly half of a campaign's incremental sales effect comes from the creative, roughly a tenth from targeting. The industry believes the opposite – and allocates its budgets accordingly.
In most companies, creativity is still treated the way Don Draper was: admired, not understood, and in the end shown the door. There are budgets for its production, but no metric for its judgment and no owner on the org chart.
rosenthal.io collects the theses and work on this question. From them, a model is taking shape that anchors creative judgment where budget decisions are made: Creative Architecture.
Theses
For decades, the creative industry gave the idea away and made its money on production. Now production has become a commodity, and nobody has ever named a price for what remains: the judgment about what should be made at all. Whoever pays an agency today is buying production and hoping for judgment.
Every rule derived from what has worked makes what has worked more common, until the feature that once set something apart no longer sets anything apart. The machine is merely the fastest way to follow that rule. Every single campaign gets better through optimization; what gets worse is the market in which it disappears. A mistake gets noticed. Sameness does not.
The machine has made production cheap; deciding what should not be made is something it cannot do. Statistics has no category for it. Nor can an agency, because neither the savings nor the budget belong to it. That decision belongs to the company that pays for the advertising. And there it holds only as long as someone counts its result: a position without a metric is decoration.
About
Managing Director at Saatchi & Saatchi in Germany, then at OgilvyOne.
Eleven years at Google, most recently as Head of Creative Works for Central Europe and a member of the Global Creative Steering Committee.
His thesis: Creative excellence is the last competitive advantage a company cannot buy – and the only one that protects the margin once the machine makes everything else copyable.
On method: Every figure and every quotation in this work is backed by a source; where that source is not publicly accessible, or rests on first-hand observation alone, it says so.
Contact
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