What the F is creativity anyway.
“I think that’s the wrong question,” says Damon Stapleton, Chief Creative Officer and Co-founder of The Monkeys Aotearoa.
“Creativity is this vague word. If I say 'I’m a creative’, I could be a chef or I could be anything, a maker of something else.
“So I think a much better question is what can creativity do?”
He was speaking to Liana Dubois, CMO at Nine, in Talking Creativity, a special edition of Nine's podcast series, exploring creative minds at the Advertising Council Australia's This Way Up Festival.
“I’ve always thought this creativity is often just seen as something decorative or it can make things a bit more interesting,” he said.
“But I think creativity has the power to solve incredible problems.”
He gave the example of a Zimbabwean newspaper. The editor called him to say he couldn’t sell his newspapers because prime minister Robert Mugabe was beating him, and the people in the newspaper, up
And so he had to try and sell copies of the newspaper in South Africa, a bit like trying to sell the Sydney Morning Herald in Auckland.
Inflation had made the Zimbabwe currency almost worthless.
“We literally had nothing,” he said. “We had worthless money. And what we did was we made posters and we made billboards and we made flyers out of the money.
“So the money became the advertising campaign that’s now in the British Museum of Design. A good example for me of how creativity can solve a problem when you literally have nothing.”
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