My Beef with “Creatives” 

In my business – the idea-publishing industry – some workers are valued more than others. These are the so-called “Creatives”: writers, marketers, advertising copywriters, and sometimes publishers.

The reason they are valued more is that their work contributes more directly to revenue and profit growth. Thus they earn more – sometimes 10 times more – than an equally intelligent and hard-working person that happens to work as an accountant or inventory manager or customer service manager.

This relationship between rain-making and money-making is true of all businesses that operate in free markets. It’s the reason actors of questionable technical skill, such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Will Smith, get paid tens of millions for every movie they make. And it’s the reason Tiger Woods and Floyd Mayweather were able to make hundreds of millions of dollars after their athletic skills were in decline. They bring the gate.

It makes perfect sense to me that this should be so. In any given profit-making business, some professions will contribute more to the bottom line than their peers. If you want the revenue pie to grow bigger, which allows the business to pay everyone more, including the “non-Creatives” you have to pay the rainmakers.

Nevertheless, I have a gripe about the rainmakers in my industry. I object to calling them Creatives.

In my experience, only two or three in 10 marketers, copywriters, salespeople, and publishers are creative. The rest are good at only one or maybe two ways of stirring up the rain.

A creative person, by definition, is someone that instinctively and incessantly innovates. Someone undeterred by obstacles. Someone that vaults over obstacles with new ideas.

That means someone with the emotional and intellectual flexibility to come up with and adjust to dozens of new and different ways to achieve any particular goal.

To merit the title of Creative, one has to be able to innovate easily, constantly, and brilliantly. When the business or marketing landscape changes, a Creative will see it as an exciting opportunity to quickly discard the old, proven practices and the ideas that were derived from them in favor of new ones that would have been considered idiotic just a few months or weeks earlier.

When I think of Creatives in my industry, I think of Jay Abraham, with whom I worked closely 30-odd years ago. What always astonished me about Jay was not his natural intelligence, which was considerable, but his ability in brainstorming sessions to come up with alternative ideas in rapid succession. If, as often happened, his client would object to his earlier suggestions, Jay rarely spent more than a minute arguing in favor of any particular marketing idea he had put forward. Whenever one of his ideas was objected to, for whatever reason, Jay would almost instantly come up with another idea. And if that wasn’t taken, he’d come up with a third. And on and on until his client was happy. That was Jay’s genius, in my view.

The idea-publishing industry has gone through several dramatic changes since the conveyance of ideas moved from printed paper and the post office to digital delivery on the Web. And with one of my clients, in particular, recent challenges have required fundamental changes in our approach to sales and marketing, from beginning to end.

To deal with this, my partners and I have been busy urging our rainmakers to start thinking out of the box. And I’m happy to report that some have responded to this quickly and even gratefully. But most are struggling, and some are downright resistant.

Those that are resisting are not stupid or belligerent. Nor are they blind to what is going on. The problem for them is that however smart and skillful they may be, they do not have the creative flexibility to succeed in this new environment.

The old tricks they mastered, the ones that worked so well in the last era, cannot work today. But since they aren’t accustomed to thinking creatively, they feel trapped. Rather than acquiring new tools, they insist on using the old ones that no longer work.

Tiger Woods was a world-class rainmaker. But he was not creative when it came to making his money. His trick was being the world’s greatest golfer and a seemingly nice person. But when his world changed, he had trouble finding a new way of earning back his fan base. His tendency was to stay under cover, and then to come out to play and keep his head down. Because of his enormous global popularity, he was still able to bring viewers to every tournament he played in. But it was a diminishing game, because he could not reinvent himself. After winning his last tournament, he retired. A smart ending to an amazing career.

Floyd Mayweather was a rainmaker too. He made tens of millions when he was at the top of his game. And he, too, had public image problems as well as personal financial problems that could have left him – like so many boxers before him – a once-great athlete struggling to pay his bills.

Instead, he reinvented himself by doubling down on his reputation for being financially irresponsible. He bought a strip club, promoted himself as Money Mayweather, and agreed to take on an exhibition boxing match with Conor McGregor, a top-notch MMA fighter. He made something like $50 million for slipping McGregor’s punches until he closed out the fight in the sixth round. It didn’t bother him that he was fighting a non-boxer, someone that was, in theory, beneath him. He not only embraced the change, he produced the fight. He made more money as the producer than he did as the star attraction.

And just last week, he did it again. With a social media personality that had no professional boxing experience but millions of followers, a percentage of which were willing to pay $50 a pop to watch the fight.

It’s great to be a rainmaker. It’s fantastic to develop a financially valued skill. But if you want to be in the game for the long haul – long after the world you entered has changed a half-dozen times – you have to be a Creative. And not just in name, but for real.

(I’ll talk about how to do that in a future essay.)