GPWA Times Magazine - Issue 50 - August 2021

BUT IS THIS THE WAY FORWARD? Let’s take Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign, which has generated billions in sales. If you watch those ad campaigns, you will realize that, ironically, Nike does not focus on the shoes. They focus on cultivating a relationship with their audience and urge them to overcome their boundaries. This non-traditional approach to sales, where the conversation went beyond the product they were trying to sell, was vital in their overall strategy and success. Their message is built around precisely developing a brand identity, encouraging creativity, and innovating in the way they make sales. Some would say it was a risky move. But who knows where Nike would be if they didn’t make it? It sounds absurd to argue that marketing and creativity go to- gether, but the creative crisis speaks for itself. WHY THE CREATIVE CRISIS? Today’s world is heavily data-driven. The questions that dominate the marketing discourse are how to achieve the perfect ROI and how to collect data to make informed marketing decisions. Don’t get me wrong — I am a big fan of data myself, and even though working with your intuition and gut feeling can sometimes prove extremely fruitful, it’s always best to analyze data and think some steps ahead. The real problem is when the focus lies only on data because people believe creativity is way more complex than it really is (and I will explain this point later on within this article). Focusing on numbers and the desire to know what worked and where to invest our efforts and money often come with the fear that exploring our creativity and moving beyond the conventional (proven) methods bring us further away from answering these questions. Moreover, the proliferation of tools and software that focus on measuring numerical results has shifted the emphasis to numbers, and therefore quantity, as opposed to quality. Today, we measure the success of the articles we write by the number of clicks it generates, the social shares, the organic traf- fic it brought to the website, the click-through rate of the links and our Google rankings. There is no need to read the article and reflect on it if it ticks all these boxes, right? Even though these are all good indicators that the article is resonating with your audience, we have to start thinking about the time that the audience spent reading it, the bounce rate, and its educational value. These are the actual indicators of your success and simul- taneously the metrics that are typically excluded from reports. HOW TO NOT GET DISCOURAGED WHEN GOOGLE RANKINGS MEASURE YOUR SUCCESS It is important to remember that creativity, innovation and brand identity can also convert. A 2018 study by the World Economic Forum revealed that 34% of businesses have seen a positive impact from their digital transformation and that 51% of organizations with a formal innovation system are first to market with more innovations, products and services. When discouraged, you should never forget that creativity is not merely about flashy campaigns that cost tons of money. Today, creativity means leveraging the data you have in hand, adjusting your methods, performing A/B testing and measuring impact. Creativity can be as simple as changing your call to action button color or your slogan, going for a bold design or exploring new formats. Creativity is about repurposing your material and finding alternative ways to promote it via all the available channels. You can revive the blog post you wrote some years ago through updating it with useful information to make it relevant today or creating an educational video on the same topic. An old visual can be optimized and transformed into a fantastic billboard. The notes you took in a meeting can be your next big marketing message. Even though we often think that the way forward is adjust- ing to the new trends and sophisticated tools on the market, we should sometimes take a step back and think about how companies used to work before all these were available. They invested their time in understanding people’s motives and Illustrations by Maisei Raman/Shutterstock, Golden Sikorka/Shutterstock, Artem Kovalenco/Shutterstock 39 G P W A t i m e s . o r g