Where patterns are broken, new worlds can emerge: A life beyond advertising.

Hi, it's Saul here.

I have a love-hate relationship with Commercial Creativity.

By ‘Commercial Creativity’, I mean the loosely defined name given to a group of activities from the marketing function in a business, to those who help those marketers do what they need to do.

I was for a long time of this world: I did lots of things in those roles, some of those are still part of my life, but they are no longer all of my life.

This is a short exploration of the lessons I have learned at the coal face working with others as they chose to stay or leave that space.

Staying in your lane: the good, the bad and the ugly.

It’s an industry, which at its best, is the best of things: smart, creative people, pushing boundaries, often at the forefront of technology.

It can be the most invigorating kind of job. It is a wonderful mix of art and science. Its skills are transferable across geographies and cultures, they can travel the world.

There are many things I miss, but many that I don’t: For agencies in particular, there are the late nights and cancelled plans. There are pitches that can go on for years, where many resources are channelled and many sacrifices made, often with no reward for those who have lost.

Whether Commercial Creativity likes it or not, much of it is also deeply rooted in the way capitalism worked in the past, with what worked then. It is an industry that finds it hard to change, because it is bound to a different way of being.

But it’s also an industry that is able to change behaviours like few others. It can and should be the engine of getting us out of this climate mess, but only if it can change its own mind.

There is one other big challenge and it is a very personal one.

There is a lot of sameness in the work. I don’t mean the outputs, I mean in the inputs, in the making. The same things comes up time and time again. The subject may change, the year, the focus, the budget but there can be an unsettling sense of déjà vu. People get bored.

This is not industry specific, far from it, but it is something that causes many to ask - Is this it? Isn’t there more?

Seek the metas.

So what’s to be done if you are bored, frustrated? Where can you go? What can you do? For that you need to explore those gifts that the industry and its people share:

They can have ideas on demand, often under great pressure with limited resources. They can help get businesses out of a tight spot with clever thinking and bold action. They can help set businesses up for future demand.

And because they are often category agnostic, they come to the party without the institutional knowledge of a specific sector, they can see things others don't, because they don’t know what they are supposed to see.

It is culturally adept. It understands cultures because it is often either a mirror of them, or, when it is really good, a driver of them.

It is scrappy, it has hutzpah. This is an industry that can be unreasonable in the pursuit of results.

It can do this because it is also a place of diplomacy, where different agendas somehow find their place. Which means it can do something very difficult - compromise enough to get stuff made, without losing what makes it worth making.

‘Where patterns are broken, new worlds can emerge.’ - Tolkien

These are skills that can be used in lots of different places beyond the industry, they are valuable, they are powerful, but they have their limits.

Those edges are perhaps best defined by the idea of ‘Going upstream’.

I know where it comes from: it is commercially interesting: for agencies there are different, bigger pots of money if you can help in a broader, bigger way. For agencies and marketers alike it is also technically interesting, these are very different kinds of problems that are much deeper in the business and challenging in their scope.

This is a world where those meta skills, whilst useful, can only get you so far. It’s like peering up the river, seeing the destination, but only having a rubber dingy, a small paddle and knowing you probably need a motorboat.

It is here I found my limits, it is here you find my decision to go back to school.

When I did, I realised there were questions I wouldn't have got anywhere near asking, the answers to which I couldn’t have even begun to approach.

Questions like this…

How do markets form? How do they die? How do you think about commercial logic when you are about supply push vs demand pull? In inchoate spaces, full of ambiguity and nuance, how do you claim, demarcate and then control?

My ambitions and limitations they presented were difficult to accept, it has been a challenging journey, but my god it has been worth it.

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Saul Betmead de Chasteigner

Consultant, Coach and Associate Fellow, Saïd Business School, Oxford University
(First published on the 7th June 2024)

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