Creativity is more about making commercial decisions rather than so-called brave calls on out-there ideas.
Brent Smart, CMO at Telstra, and Micah Walker, founder/CCO at Bear Meets Eagle on Fire, were interviewed by Liana Dubois, CMO at Nine, on Talking Creativity, a special edition of Nine's podcast series, exploring creative minds at the Advertising Council Australia's This Way Up Festival.
In this marketer and the agency chat, Dubois asked Smart: “Can you set the scene for us in terms of how you foster that all important culture of creativity in your organisation, which is a big corporate and with your team and, and sort of further to that what the role of your relationship with Micah plays in being able to do that.”
“Creativity for me is not about my vanity or winning awards,” Smart said. “It's a smart commercial decision and any marketer should approach it that way.
“I think there's an incredible misnomer of the courageous marketer who approves the brave idea.
“Creativity is a commercial decision, it's about being more effective.”
He said most corporations are geared to kill creativity.
“You have to think about what we need to do in terms of our culture? What do we need to do in terms of our way of working?” he said
“And then importantly, what partners do we need from the outside, who can bring more creativity than we could ever have at a place like Telstra.
“Who can bring an outside perspective because the thing that happens when you work in these big corporations is you very quickly become indoctrinated and you become very insular and you suddenly start talking and all these weird acronyms and stuff.
“And I think it's really important to keep that outside perspective, that beautiful perspective you had the day you started, but you lose every day that you walk into the building.”
And that's where Micah Walker and the team at Bear Meets Eagle on Fire come in.
“We don't bring anything into the room and share it with Brent until I believe it's worthy of being in the room,” said Walker.
“What we hope for in return is conviction and respect to kind of be able to commit and then believe and work around something because it always takes a bit of a village to build anything that's irreverent or different or distinctive.
“And and so it's our job to make sure that we're bringing in that kind of work and then in return, working through that with them to make sure that it lives.”
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