The art of "storymaking." Or, how creativity is redefining traditional industries.
Why the blending of entertainment and technology is my new favorite trend.
Throughout my professional career, I’ve always straddled multiple passions. I really love marketing and business strategy. But I’m also a comedian, and a writer, and a teacher. For a long time, I believed that keeping a “portfolio career” was holding me back from achieving actual success in any of those endeavors. If I’m honest, I still worry about that.
Maybe that’s why I am so bullish on the modern Renaissance. The idea that work can be reimagined, and that we can pursue more aspects of our professional and creative identities in our careers is really, personally appealing to me. Truly, it is time for a creative refresh, and no where is that more true (ironically) than in the field of marketing. Over the past ~two decades, there has been a dramatic shift in marketing away from creativity and story-telling in favor of programmatic technology and repeatable, demand-driving tactics (growth hacking), etc.
And yet, we face a new paradigm shift, driven in part by consumer data protection laws (GDPR in Europe, CCPA in the US), and a general race to the middle with bland brand campaigns and an erosion of effectiveness in conversion methods that have been in favor for more than a decade.
We’ve left the era of “storytelling.” Enter, “storymaking,” that is, brands as entertainers, entertainers as brands. A few years ago, Airbnb founder Brian Chesky made headlines when he shared that the company had divested from “performance” marketing efforts in favor of campaigns that would build the ubiquity of its brand — which has paid off spectacularly. And increasingly in a post-COVID era we have seen brands take bigger swings, removing the traditional direct ROI expectations in favor of more creative, impactful storytelling. Mattel and the Barbie movie, WeTransfer winning an Oscar, the rise of Liquid Death, the iconic “in-your-face” style of e.l.f. Cosmetics, the examples are myriad.
As David Lee from Squarespace says, in many ways “creativity is the only job left.” And for those of us who work in creative worlds, this should be an exciting (albeit slight) silver lining in the face of headlines that focus on the impending collapse of jobs for creators.
Brands becoming more centrally focused on telling great stories and building great experiences has led, perhaps inevitably, to a crossover between the kind of leaders that excel in tech and entertainment companies, respectively. Most recently, Scott Belsky, founder of Behance and the Chief Product Officer of Adobe, surprisingly left to join the famed independent film production company, A24. The creator economy is also bleeding the edge from social community into traditional entertainment. The latest example of this is creative production studio and community Creator Camp, which is hosting its inaugural “Camp Film Festival,” a two day film festival in Austin, Texas targeting digital creators with Patreon as the title sponsor.
Canva, whom I don’t hide is one of my favorite brands, has also bridged the chasm between tech and entertainment beautifully, sponsoring key traditional entertainment events like Tribeca Film Festival, Grammy Awards, and more, putting curated templates into the hands of creators looking to pitch and realize their creative work.
In an AI-led world, the kind of skills required to succeed are deeply associated with creativity. Novel-thinking, problem-solving, risk-tolerance, relationship-development and the “art of the possible” will need to be entrenched and encoded in the DNA of tomorrow’s marketing and brand leaders.
I realize that this scares people. Because the loss of work and the loss of jobs is inherently scary. And there are real consequences to the rapidly humanized world of technology that will create a lot of pain for a lot of us. Still, we can’t stop the inevitability of the future. So, as Brian Collins says, we need to shift our focus to creating a future so good, so interesting, that the vision becomes inevitable.
Again, I may be picking up on this trend because it is congruent with my own world and industry view. I wrote about the intersection of comedy, media and business in 2012. But I do think over the next few years, as AI takes hold on many aspects of our work across nearly all industries, the counterbalance will be an upshot of deeply creative thinkers, surprising and delightful partnerships, and a creative class that is uninhibited in relying on all parts of its intellectual identity to make cool shit happen.
What do you think?
Photo by Brands&People on Unsplash.