Creativity, ethics and consequences

Creativity is an agency’s most powerful tool, and like any powerful tool it must be used with awareness. This guide is about two things that seem far apart but touch all the time: how to give a creative team the conditions to do its best work, and how to make sure that best work doesn’t do harm.

Leading creativity

Creative teams are made of talented, often visionary people, with very different ways of working. The PM’s job is to hold two forces together: leaving room for individual creativity and channelling the group’s energy towards a shared goal. From brainstorming to bug testing.

A few principles:

• A safe environment. Trust and respect, everyone’s ideas heard, no fear of speaking up. Mistakes as chances to learn.
• Clear, shared objectives, built together with the team whenever possible.
• Autonomy. Freedom to experiment within clear boundaries, without needless constraints; the resources needed to make the ideas happen.
• Recognition. Celebrating successes, individual and collective.
• A leader who coaches, not a dictator: who guides, inspires, supports, and clears the obstacles that stop the team from working.

Among the tools, besides brainstorming: mind maps, to see the links between ideas; Edward de Bono’s six thinking hats, which make you look at a problem from six different perspectives (facts, emotions, risks, benefits, new ideas, process); SCAMPER, a list of verbs for transforming what exists (substitute, combine, adapt, modify, put to another use, eliminate, rearrange); design thinking, with its path from empathy to prototype.

In digital products there is an extra delicate handover: between those who design and those who build, who have different languages and rhythms. What helps: shared objectives from the start, prototypes to reason on together, and continuous dialogue, not only at delivery.

Who has the final say?

It is one of the feuds I have run into most often in my working life: who leads a creative team, the project manager or the creative director? The answer is: both, on different things. The creative director is responsible for the vision and creative quality: direction, language, the standard of the work. The PM is responsible for how that vision becomes reality: time, budget, people, risks, communication with the client.

They overlap at many moments: in problems to solve, in choosing who to involve, in assessing a new idea (the creative director proposes it, the PM weighs up its time and cost). When they work in synergy, they almost always reach the best solution. When they pull against each other, inefficiency and stress grow, for them and for the whole team.

The line between creativity and manipulation

Communication is ethical when it respects the truth, doesn’t deceive its audience, avoids harmful stereotypes and respects different cultural sensitivities. It sounds obvious. It isn’t always, under pressure to deliver a result.

Some brands have shown you can be memorable while staying on the right side. In 2004 Dove launched its Real Beauty campaign, with real women instead of unattainable models; two years later, the Evolution film showed in one minute how much make-up and retouching lies behind an advertising image. In 2011 Patagonia bought a page in the New York Times on Black Friday to say “Don’t buy this jacket”, unless you really need it.

What they have in common is credibility. Embracing a cause only works if:

• you really know your audience;
• the company is solid enough to withstand criticism, counter-campaigns, sometimes boycotts;
• the brand’s values are consistent with the position it takes. Do first, tell afterwards.

People quickly recognise when a brand is authentic and when it is just riding a theme. And when they notice, the reaction can be violent.

When the shitstorm hits

That is the name, bluntly, for the wave of criticism that breaks online against a brand, a person, an organisation. It has four features: very high volume, violent tone, very fast spread, multiple origins. It can start from anything: an ad, a post, a joke.

Two of the most quoted examples: in 2017 Pepsi pulled, within two days, an ad in which Kendall Jenner seemed to defuse a demonstration by handing a can to a police officer, accused of trivialising social protest; in 2018 H&M was engulfed by criticism over a photo of a Black child wearing a hoodie reading “Coolest monkey in the jungle”.

The recurring causes are communication mistakes, cultural and social insensitivity, and ignored signals: the audience’s discontent was there, and nobody listened.

Prevent:

• always ask how a message could be read by people who don’t think like us, and have it read by people other than those who wrote it;
• test it, when possible, on a sample of the audience;
• monitor reactions from the very first hours;
• have a crisis plan ready, with clear roles.

Handle:

• respond quickly and transparently;
• acknowledge the problem and, where appropriate, apologise properly, without hedging;
• listen to stakeholders, internal and external;
• stay on top of social media, without forgetting traditional channels;
• bring in the people who handle crises professionally: press office, PR, lawyers, in coordination with everyone else.

Afterwards: analyse the causes, change what needs changing, prove it with facts.

Ethics is in the process too

It isn’t only about the final message. It is about the doubt raised by the team and ignored because the client wants that thing, only to find out later that the team was right. It is about the tools you use, and whether you know where the data and content they produce come from. It is about the consequences of success: what happens if the idea works too well? And it is about the environment people work in: eighty-hour weeks are not an organisational detail, they are a choice.

Whoever designs a project answers for what it does in the world, not only for time and cost.