Why Generalists Are Critical For Creativity

Generalists vs Specialists, Promote Iceland, and The Anvils Awards

Author

Pedro Porto Alegre
January 10, 2024

In this edition:

Column: Why Generalists Are Critical For Creativity

SEO Strategist, TikTok Manager, Affiliate Marketing Manager, CRM Specialist, Community Manager…

These are just a few job titles I’ve come across by doing a quick Google search last week.

Over the years specialization in marketing (and in most other industries for that matter) has reached new levels. To the point where an individual might get hired to manage a brand’s TikTok account alone, and get paid $80k/yr for it.

Students who have spent $100k in a marketing education are getting hired at agencies to think day and night exclusively about SEO, manage its CRM, or simply monitor social listening.

Don’t get me wrong, early in one’s career the types of tasks you’ll be asked to do can be quite monotonous and repetitive. This is usually done on purpose since they are typically low stakes and give you exposure to collaborate with several functions across the business and learn from your peers.

But what I often see now are marketers getting funnelled into a social media role, for example, and being reduced to “social media experts” for years on end, effectively trapping them within a small cog in the wheel, leading to accelerated burnout and resentment towards the industry.

How have we gotten to this point?

Moving At Breakneck Speed

In the 80s and 90s, advertising and business magnates recognized a major opportunity in the industry — mergers and acquisitions. With the globalization of brands, agencies were looking to tap into new markets, but instead of going through the difficult and uncertain process of setting up shop in a new country or city where no one knows your name, M&As were the obvious solution.

If you had an agency in NY and wanted to penetrate the LA market, well why not just acquire Chiat/Day which had an incredible roster of clients and award winning work already (cue Apple’s “1984” Super Bowl ad)? That’s what TBWA Worldwide did back in 1995.

And so this exercise of consolidation to gain global market share was a major driver of profitability in the advertising world for over 20 years — in conjunction with removing media departments out of individual agencies and setting up new entities to buy media for the entire fast-growing network of creative agencies, effectively giving them more buying power.

But as we moved into the 2010s and 2020s, new technologies began to emerge at breakneck speed. Social media, AI, Web3, Gaming, and many more. Independent creative shops saw this as an opportunity to compete with the big players by specializing in a sliver of the media landscape in order to attract clients looking to experiment with new technologies.

This naturally led these up-and-coming, cutting-edge agencies to get acquired by large networks, which instead of building expertise in-house from the ground up, now had a shiny new expert workforce to spearhead new communications territories — Twitch Streaming, NFT Minting, TikTok Content Creation, Metaverse Event Planning, and much more.

Insiders vs Outsiders

In a specialized world, generalists are seen as pre-historic beings. Walk into a strategy department in any given agency today and you’ll find folks that plug and play into the creative process by owning a small portion of the assembly line — SEO optimization, email strategy, social media management, communications planning, etc. — without quite understanding the big picture of the project’s objective.

While processes are put in place to loop these folks into what’s happening at a high level, these specialists are set up to yield repeatable, consistent, and predictable results.

When someone lives and breathes a small portion of the world, they naturally become insiders. While insiders know a lot about how things work in their domain, they start their thinking from the inside. To understand how this can be a problem, take the following example.

If you ever had the chance to visit a foreign country that’s completely different than yours, even the sidewalks catch your attention. While I was born and raised in Brazil, I have lived in Canada now for over 15 years. Every time I come back home I seem to notice things that went completely unnoticed while I lived there — such as the vibrant colours of the trees, the sound of the birds in the morning, or simply the way traffic marking looks differently. 

This seemingly mundane experience is actually a key ingredient for creative problem solving. When you approach issues from the outside, you’re not restricted to the natural order of how things are always done — unlike insiders who are head-deep in the inner workings of their environment, no longer noticing opportunities for doing things differently.

This rigidity that comes with specialization is a major source of concern for me when I approach creative problems. That is why I hire wide for expertise, but deep for curiosity. 

This type of creative person today is becoming harder to come by — people who read widely, have done uncommon jobs, grew up in opposite environments to ours, and who are not afraid of being the stupidest person in the room — yet, they are critical for advertising to work the way it should.

The Extra-Environmental Man

When you take a problem to a specialist, you’re inevitably wired into a specialist solution. While the result will likely be exceptional, it may not be what you really need.

The “extra-environmental man”, as Howard Gossage coined them, are generalists who view their environment with fresh eyes. This outsider angle is critical for novel ideas and solutions to emerge.

As Gossage said it before:

“The extra-environmental man —we might as well give him a label—has a great advantage in the creativity race. For one thing, his mind isn't cluttered up with a lot of rules, policy, and other accumulated impedimenta that often pass for experience. I think that if there is anything overrated, it is experience of this variety. It is experience for experience's sake; what we might call "experience" experience. It is the sort of experience they ask you if you have when you go to look for a job in advertising. Do you have food experience? Do you have farm machinery experience? If any of you are asking advertising job applicants if they have bank experience, I would suggest you quit it. What if somebody answered "Yes" and started turning out bank ads for you? What you really need is a nice, extra-environmental; someone who will look at your environment with fresh eyes.”

For the reasons I described above, I am a huge advocate for my fellow generalists — the extra-environmental man, the Renaissance man, the outsider — these creatures roam our world unnoticed. They’re told from an early age to pick a lane and stick to it. 

Yet, the ones who put a dent in our universe — Leonardo Da Vinci, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and countless others — oftentimes were the ones who approached challenges with a beginners’ mind.

Inspiration: Promote Iceland’s “Let It Out!” Campaign

Now this is how you do a tourism campaign.

One of the main issues I see with poorly performing campaigns is that they use the solution (their product or service) as the main focus of the campaign.

The issue with this approach is the same reason why people don't rubberneck when there's no accident on the road - humans are naturally inclined to pay attention to conflict, and not to when things are all good.

A couple years ago Promote Iceland launched this brilliant campaign to drive tourism to the country by putting the customer's truth at the centre of the story, with its "product" taking the simple role of an aid to help resolve it.

During the pandemic most people were burned out, cooped up in their apartments, uncertain about their futures, leading to this mounting tension within themselves wishing they could just let it out somehow.

By recording your scream in Promote Iceland's website, your frustration would be aired into the wild via speakers spread throughout Iceland. You would then be invited to explore all these amazing scenic sights which, you guessed it, led to a 5.7x increase in travel booking intent.

Lesson: much like when giving your dog medicine, the key message always has to be tactfully enveloped within a treat.

In advertising terms: your product will never be as important to your audience as it is to you - always put the customer at the centre of the story.

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The Ad Rodeo Association is the celebration of creative excellence in the Prairie provinces. Each year, Ad Rodeo provides creative professionals the opportunity to meet, talk, learn, mentor and celebrate what they do through several events that culminate in the Anvil Awards. The Anvil Awards represents the special talent and effort it takes to be recognized by your peers for creating the very best.

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