Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?”
Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?”

Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?

We asked respondents to define creativity. Their answers weren’t entirely surprising. From a set of multiple choices, in this order, these were the top FOUR: TRANSFORMATIVE, EMOTIONAL, MEANINGFUL, INNOVATIVE.

Each of the choices on their own is enough to suggest that those working in creative industries have an almost dogmatic belief in creativity as a force for good, so long as it's practiced with intention. “There's blind creativity and then there's creativity that sharply addresses a problem,” says Trevor Hubbard, founder and CEO at Butchershop, a San Francisco-based agency. “Creativity is using data and objective points of orientation to make better solutions.” The mere idea that this can be an expectation of creativity helps us understand a key component of what drives those in creative industries. Simply put, many of us believe that creativity can make our collective experience better. Which begs the ultimate question: In the face of the factors that we laid out in “The Moment” section, will creativity rocket us beyond the gravity of the current situation on earth?

“Will creativity rocket us beyond the gravity of the current situation on earth?”
Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?”
Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?”

Elon-gated Expectations

Of course it’s easy to make light of the Musk/Bezos/Branson billionaire space race. It’s even easier to be floored by the oft-cited stats about what those billions of moon dollars (and Dogecoin) could do for innovation and creativity when solving some of the world’s biggest social problems.

For instance, the UN World Food Program has said that it would only take £4.4 billion ($6 billion) to stave off the hunger-induced deaths of 41 million people on earth. Point being, there are a lot of socially oriented creative minds who’d love to get their hands on that cash — for good.

“We've got lots and lots of problems in the world at the moment, whether that's what's going on in Afghanistan to the polarization of different views, or this huge divide between rich and poor,” says Max Ottignon, founder of Ragged Edge, a London-based agency. “These are all things that creativity has got a really, really fundamental role in solving.”

Ottignon’s sentiments were mirrored by a number of other respondents who think the world is starting to understand that creativity isn't just about fun ideas for brands.

“We are going through a very challenging time, says Karina Rahavia, founder of Ollo, a Sao Paulo-based recruiting agency for creative talent. “As homo sapiens, I think creativity is really what's going to, in a way, save us from the destruction of ourselves.”

Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?”
Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?”

shifting orbits

To find signs that those leading the most innovative enterprises are putting more faith in creativity, take a peek into c-suites and board rooms.

In a 2016 move that surprised many in the asset management world, BlackRock Inc. appointed as its CMO the former CMO of American media company Buzzfeed. It goes without saying, these two brands could not be more different than one another. But look closer and we see that those driving big brands now see creativity as an asset.

“On average 60% of an organization's value is in non-tangible assets,” says David Johnston, Founder of Accept & Proceed, a London-based agency. “So effectively all of the brand work makes up a part of those intangible assets. Someone who can be the guardian of the integrity of that is absolutely crucial to any organization.” He goes on to suggest that’s a role creative agencies will begin to increasingly play for brands. “Guardianship is the future,” he says.

This trend of creatives moving into higher orbits amounts to “increased input from the creative folks to core parts of the business,” says Tom Hardy, founder and creative director at Manifesto Studios, a London-based agency. “In short, the more upstream you are, the better off you’ll be.” And perhaps we’ll all be.

Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?”
Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?”

CONCLUSION

All of this to say, we don't think that the future of creativity is particularly different to the present of creativity. “It's not like we're going to be flying around in outer space in space pods brainstorming … Maybe we will in a few years. That could happen,” says Joe Ryrie, founder at Onwards, a London-based agency. “But what I'm trying to say is the fundamentals of creativity won't change.” What certainly will, however, is how enterprises use it to envision a more transformative, meaningful and innovative take on the future.
Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?”
Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?” Part (1): “Is Creativity Our Escape Pod?”
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