Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?”
Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?”

Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?

There’s an oft-used term in the gargantuan theatres and performing arts studios of Sydney, London and New York City’s entertainment districts. It’s in these spaces that writers, producers and casting directors review scripts and watch endless auditions.

Their goal, for generations, has been to painstakingly piece together a production of a breakout American musical such as “Hamilton”, or deftly navigate the complexities of “MJ The Musical”, the new biographical show about Michael Jackson.

These creatives pore over every detail and ask themselves what a show and all of its elements might bring that another hasn’t. Is it controversy? Is it reflection? Is it joy? In the end, it’s all about creating a world and a brand that fills an unfilled space, and moves an audience to emotionally invest in the production — enough so that they're willing to tell their friends to experience it, too. Sure, these creatives are in it for the art and their love of theatre, but playing even heavier on their minds is one word: Commerciality.

A number of the respondents throughout our survey indicated that commerciality is, in and of itself, a creative endeavour. “Being able to sell something is an incredibly creative task,” says Douglas Brundage, founder and CEO at Kingsland, a Brooklyn-based agency. “How do you take that and say, ‘Just buy this fucking thing,’ right? And, how do you wrap it so it’s a digestible pill to swallow; to convince someone that they do need to buy that thing?”

“Creativity is the answer.”
Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?”
Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?”

Take a knee to take a stand

But our understanding of creativity and its effect on commerciality is shifting. Or, not shifting perhaps, but growing based on the racial, social and economic currents at play in the world today (see “The Moment” section earlier in our report).

“Every period of time has had its own set of major seismic cultural shifts,” says Matthew Rowean, partner and chief creative officer at Matte Projects, a New York City-based agency. “Brands never would have been comfortable standing for things five years ago. Now it’s flipped.”

Yes, we know exactly what you’re thinking: Nike. In 2018, the brand stood for something when it wasn’t necessarily popular to do so. By supporting NFL player Colin Kaepernick’s decision to protest performances of the American national anthem when he took his knee at the beginning of matches, Nike made their controversial position clear. They even hired the athlete as a spokesperson and built a whole campaign around the line: Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything. “Nike is an example of making important statements versus selling products,” says Rowean.

In 2020, Nike also joined global brands Target and Spotify in recognizing Juneteenth, the long undercelebrated American holiday that recognizes the official end of slavery in the United States, again taking a position that most other major brands had hesitated to.

The proof for such moves is in the commercial results. The creative thinking behind championing Kaepernick alone precipitated £120 million ($163 million) in earned media, a £4.4 billion ($6 billion) increase in brand value and a 31% boost in sales, not to mention increased global relevance.

“We’re in the attention economy. How do brands get relevance in this world? They need to embrace dialogue versus rhetoric,” says Charl Laubscher, founder of Love + Money, a Melbourne-based agency. “People expect an amount of conversation and transparency. What are we going to go to the mat for?”

Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?”
Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?”

Designed Expectations

Not only does creativity help creatives and brands tell bigger, more resonant stories, it also allows them to go broad. “Creativity gives you a wider reach,” says James Kape, creative director at OMSE, a London-based agency. “Think Microsoft in the 90s. It was very unapproachable. Then think of Apple with a simple photo and an icon. That creativity made it more approachable.”

In this moment, the fact that brands use sleek design to appeal to consumers has also had a funny knock-on effect. “We’ve grown up on Apple phones and now demand a certain level of design,” says Jono Holt, a founder at Otherway, a London-based agency. “That forces change from a commercial perspective and means there is a huge opportunity to make things better.”

And it’s in this slipstream where many of our respondents see a huge amount of hope when it comes to what we can reasonably expect creativity to do for commerciality.

When Roanne Adams, founder of New York-based RoAndCo, started her career as a designer, she says creativity was deemed “not as important as the business objectives of a brand or a company.”

“We were the vehicle to help sell the business,” says Adams. “Now I think brands have come to realise that creativity is the source of innovation,” she explains. And innovation is the foundation of differentiation and thus commercial appeal.

Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?”
Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?”

Conclusion

From the creatives that set Broadway or West End shows, to the whizzes that position global apparel brands, creativity will always be the foundation from which all progress springs. A few of the creatives we spoke to even equate that state of the global economy with the sorts of creative risks they’re able to take.
“When the world's doing well — when people are making money — advertising becomes a little crazier and more aspirational; it can be a bit more emotional,”
says Brundage. “Either way, I think that it's a constant dance between the two — commercialism and creativity. It's a Tango that has been going on for a hundred plus years.” And will undoubtedly be the dance for hundreds more.
Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?”
Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?” Part (5): “Will you Just Buy This Fu$&!# Thing?”
See what we do
Edition 01.2022

We turned 10 last year, and whilst considering what we could do to mark the occasion, a sub-title stood out on the office wall, reading: ‘creativity is the last competitive advantage’.

A discussion circled around that idea for some time — we run a business that effectively trades in the stuff, connecting brands looking for the best creative thinking with agencies who are able to offer it. We see, more than anyone, the resources market-leading businesses are putting behind partnering with the best creative minds — it's clearly recognised that harnessing it properly will bring real value, that it's now a must-have vs the nice-to-have it once was.

Some of the most in-demand agencies are booked up for 6 months at a time — the cost for top talent is at an all-time high — tech giants are offering banker-like six-figure salaries to designers and product leads who just a few years ago would be biting the hand off anyone who would pay them a comfortable five figure wage. And the management consultancies are even on board, buying up agencies and publishing thought-pieces titled 'The Business Value of Design' and 'Creating Creativity: A Leader’s Guide' (yikes).

It’s gold dust basically, yet ask someone to define what it is, exactly, and the conversation pings in a thousand different directions. Conscious of the fact the world doesn’t need another white paper - we’ll leave that to the aforementioned consulting groups - we’ve instead tasked ourselves with a mission to seek out and better understand how the world’s best creative minds think about the subject (creativity as a currency) and begin to explore what we can learn from their thinking. We’re keen to know how can we measure it, how it is evolving, how it impacts the world we live in and how it can be leveraged beyond business to address critical questions on race, culture, economy and the environment…

These are huge topics, of course, and whilst very much not wanting to over-claim, we believe we are a business that is truly best-placed to unpack them. Not because we believe we have the answers, but because the people we champion do. We sit at the intersection of the world’s most forward thinking businesses and a globally minded set of the creative 'top 1%’ — a sort of gateway to creative excellence — with relationships that afford us the simple but rare luxury of being able to ask the questions.

And that’s exactly what we’ve done. Through extensive surveying and countless hours of interviews with 50+ of the creative industry’s finest, we’ve started to paint a qualitative and quantitative picture of the current creative landscape. We used bleeding-edge AI tools to evaluate a myriad of different responses and a team of editors to extract themes and form takeaways that, we hope, will be useful to anyone who values creativity in the way we do; as the last true competitive advantage, and something we, and the world, could all do with more of.

Thank you to everyone involved in the making of this, we’re humbled by the time and energy people have been willing to give, and very much hope this inspires you in the way it has us.

Celebrating 10 and seeing this as very much the start,

The AUFI team