Needle-moving marketing isn't output, it's art

TLDR: Most marketers, designers and communicators have been conditioned to believe the lie that writing and creating for organizations should be an industrial, factory-like process that prioritizes formulaic approaches and volume over quality. The truth is that thoughtful strategy, exceptional storytelling and inspired design are art forms, and pretending otherwise is hurting organizations and the talented people who can help them most. Read on for advice for leaders and creatives on how to avoid these mistakes and set yourself up for success.

“You’re a strong writer. You should consider a humanities major.” An otherwise innocuous comment that changed the trajectory of my life.

It was the first quarter of my freshman year of college and I had no idea who or what I wanted to be when I grew up. One of hundreds of scared and insecure kids milling about the campus, too old for the safety and routine of high school and too young to be out in the real world.

The week before, our class had turned in our first paper in “America in the 60s,” which is still one of the best courses I’ve taken. As we rose from our seats to head to our next class, the professor, Ari Kelman, asked a few of us to wait at his desk. I had a pit in my stomach as the other students filed out; I knew I’d screwed something up and was going to have to redo my paper.

Instead, Professor Kelman told the members of our small group that we were good candidates to declare a major in History, English or another area of the humanities. I was so surprised I made him repeat it.

Every professional writer and designer I know has a similar story. That moment when someone told us that we were good enough to pursue expertise in our craft; that we had the skill and talent to keep going. Twenty-three years later, I still remember it like it was yesterday.

And yet, most of us also have a different story that we remember just as vividly. One that still stings when it bubbles up in our memories when we’re feeling around in the dark to see if we’ve hit rock bottom.

That time someone we respected told us that our gifts were little more than hobbies. That, if we wanted to join the “real world,” we would have to soften and flatten and templatize what we do, because business isn’t the place for arts and crafts. An offhand, casually hurled stone that knocked us out cold.

“Too bad you can’t make any money doing that.”

“I don’t care what it looks like. Just use a stock photo.”

“It doesn’t need to be artistic. Copy the one-pager we already have and change a few of the words.”

“Half of every page needs to be about getting them to talk to sales. Add more links to the contact form.”

“We don’t need art. We need to drive sales.”

I’ve heard versions of each of these many times; sometimes from people I barely knew, sometimes from people I loved and respected and was desperate to please.

The most disappointing part? After hearing it far too many times early in my career, I started to believe it. “If I’m going to create art, it’s going to be through my novels or through crafts with my son,” I thought. “I’ll do the ‘professional’ stuff at work and be an artist on my own time.” I could almost see the ghosts of my salt-of-the-Earth ancestors nodding appreciatively.

The intent was right. The advice was wrong.

(In Lady Galadriel voice) But we were all of us deceived. It turns out these were no more than easily believed, well-intentioned falsehoods. After all, the people who love us weren’t trying to crush our spirits. They only wanted what was best for us, and they were afraid, sometimes rightly so, that we wouldn’t be able to make money or otherwise sustain ourselves with our “art.” And the people giving us this advice at work were only repeating the same adages they had heard on their way up the corporate ladder.

For a period of time, they were likely at least half right. Because even as we became entry-level marketers, junior graphic designers, production artists and communications specialists, organizations of all kinds could get away with creating and sending the content equivalent of plain Cream-of-Wheat and the customers would still roll in. Unveil an irrelevant mascot, create every sales sheet the top sellers ask for, spend a couple million on branded keywords via Google Ads, and call it a day. Hey, it (sort of) worked!

It all started to change when COVID-19 forced us into our houses and into often drawn-out and unwelcome introspection. As “creatives,” a problematic term to unpack another time, we had more time for our “unprofessional” art pursuits and to simultaneously think about what the Hell we were doing with our lives: “Is sitting at a computer trying to come up with another way to say ‘streamline’ really…it?”

While we were in the midst of our existential crises, the (way too many) companies who were fooled into thinking that a lucky bounce off the COVID trampoline meant that their product was suddenly more valuable realized in free fall that they were going to miss the trampoline altogether and land in that combination thorn bush/ant pile that they’d been meaning to get rid of.

Suddenly, marketing was important and brands were important and content was important, and they needed it all done yesterday! Everyone was immediately a lead – “just put them in the nurture campaign, where there are too many emails and no shame, and they’ll convert.” We all know or can guess how that turned out.

The last piece of the puzzle was the public launch of ChatGPT. Now, anyone could be a writer, anyone could be a designer, anyone could be a strategist for the low price of $20 per month. The same companies who had just finished making unforgivable forecasting and product strategy mistakes rushed to make the next one: getting rid of their creative teams.

This all sounds pretty bad for anyone who has ever been interested in doing any kind of work that doesn’t slowly suck parts of their soul through the foot holes of their Banana Republic khakis. Creativity is dead, replaced by a million versions of Desmond, pushing the button before the timer runs out and…something…happens.

Paradoxically, I think the opposite is occurring.

Mastery of the craft and unbridled creativity as the only remaining differentiators.

The supposition behind a phrase like “We don’t need art. We need to drive sales.” is that the two things are diametrically opposed. If something is art, it can’t be a component of driving something hard and tangible like revenue. If something is in the realm of business and professionalism, it can’t be “too creative,” lest we disrupt the sterility of how we show up. We sit in beige cubicles pushed up against beige walls, so our marketing will be beige as well.

In the environment we’ve created today, where a massively high percentage of people are now using the same software that uses the same data to pump out the same messages, the entire world is in danger of becoming beige. To ask the question in a way even Lord Business would understand, what’s going to convince anyone to buy from you? Why wouldn’t they just buy the cheapest version of beige they could buy, or keep using the beige they’re already using?

The answer is, of course, your story and your visual identity. I’d posit that, now that we’ve successfully commoditized the world, creativity and mastery of marketing and communications are the most valuable currencies of the realm. That the very things we patted on the head dismissively and categorized as trivialities are now some of the most important ingredients for moving the needle on the top and bottom line.

Crafting and telling stories, creating true resonance, harnessing and provoking emotion, making people feel and believe something, bringing authenticity and humanity to the inanimate — to do these exceptionally well is a form of art, plain and simple. To become a master of these crafts requires expertise, critical thinking and time. Time to be a beginner, to fail, to learn, to try again, to do it over and over until its second nature.

Many people believe storytelling for organizations is the same as writing a fairytale and that graphic design is the same thing as sitting down to paint a bowl of pears. To write fiction or paint a still life and come out with something that’s even remotely viable is hard. Doing the same thing for an organization or company can be even more difficult. Have you ever tried to write something about soybean seedlings that’s interesting enough to make someone consider buying a product? It takes skill and perseverance and an excess of creativity, and that’s precisely the point.

It's been said and I’ll say it again. Prompting ChatGPT doesn’t make you a designer. Prompting Claude doesn’t make you a writer. Asking Gemini to build you a plan doesn’t make you a strategist (side note: in my experience, asking Gemini anything is an exercise in futility, at least as it stands now). This isn’t an AI hit piece; these are tools with specific use cases and, like any others, they are great at some things and terrible at others.

My point is that writing, design and strategy are art forms that can’t be faked. You can’t take a shortcut, write a few lines of text, and say you’re doing them. The very best writers, designers and strategists have gathered knowledge over time, learned through experience, put in the requisite effort to improve, and bring a level of discipline, wherewithal and critical thinking skill that’s worth the premium organizations should be paying them.

More importantly, what you create won't work, which matters quite a bit in the end. Marketing and communications effectiveness, and as a subset, truly exceptional, needle-moving content, design and strategy, has little to do with the tools we’re using. The person using the tools is what will make the difference between success and utter failure. I promise that you want someone behind the controls who is an artist at heart, who has trained like an artist, and who will apply that artistic skill in helping you reach your most important goals.

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OK, you convinced me. What do I do now?

Great question! The reason this is a topic for Simply Great is that there are practical applications for organization leaders and business owners, as well as creative folks:

If you’re a business owner or a leader in an organization, ask yourself what you truly need to be successful over the next one, five and 10 years.

There’s a ton being thrown at you right now. How you’re behind if you don’t buy X tool, or build a team of people who only know how to use X platform, or build an army of AI agents to spam prospects at an even higher rate than is currently possible. They want you to play small ball. Don’t.

Instead, use another application of our accomplished and versatile friend, strategy. Dust off your strategic plan and look at your goals, objectives, initiatives and timelines. Have those changed fundamentally given the political environment, technological advancements, how you’re tracking against your core business metrics? Could they and are they likely to change in the 5- and 10-year timeframes?

You should be looking at the content, design and strategy support you know you’ll need to exceed your goals through that lens. Does eliminating your team and relying on $20 or even $200 per month software get you there? There may be exceptions, but it’s extremely unlikely. Does reimagining the team roles and structure based on the new tools that are and will be available? Probably, but again, cost savings should only be one part of the equation. The answer depends largely on how much very good creative you will need over these timeframes (likely a large amount) and where you’re going to go to get it.

Like everyone else, I have a bias. My expectation is that organizations are going to need more expert content, design and strategy support in the future, not less, and that the value of these roles will eclipse others that are more prevalent today.

If you’re a writer, content creator, designer or strategist, position what you do as an art form.

Whether you’re in-house or contracting, you’ll be offering services and deliverables. It’s a way in to showing what you can do and gaining the trust you need to get more important work, and the scope of work is always going to be a part of connecting the goods and services you offer to an organization’s budget.

 Don’t stop there. What makes you unique and valuable and able to command a premium is your experience in the craft. All that time and effort you’ve put into becoming a finely-honed X-ACTO Knife instead of a sledgehammer. In a world that’s quickly becoming 99% sledgehammers, the organizations that stand out will be those that understand they need the precision of an X-ACTO Knife and the brain of a critical thinker.

The most successful writers, content creators, designers and strategists will be those who position themselves as both, whether you’re in-house at an organization or not. That could mean: 

• Charging a premium for your services (even if it loses you opportunities in the short term)

• Pushing to present your work to the executive team instead of sending it via email or letting your boss present it

• Bringing a bigger picture lens to every project (asking “Why?” and providing suggestions outside the scope of your specific work based on business or organization goals)

• Showing your process from start to finish to highlight the intricacies and your thought process

• Finding ways to showcase your work next to the average work out in the market today.

Because you have been systematically devalued since the very beginning of your career, doing these things might be harder than you think. I can promise you that you’re worth more than whatever you’re charging, even at a premium level. And once people can see the strategy and precision you bring to the table, they’ll begin tying your value to a bigger number.

If you take one thing away from this edition, I want it to be that very little of this is black-and-white. That’s one of the problems with the conversations around content, design and Gen AI. Either you love AI or you hate it, your organization is skyrocketing into the future or you already perished and just don’t know it yet, either AI is already as good as it’s going to get or we’ll be living in a work-free utopia by 2026. The reality is, as always, somewhere in the middle.

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There are, however, a few self-evident truths that we can cling to:

Experienced writers, designers and strategists will deliver better output than Gen AI every time and in every way. 

If someone is pretending otherwise, they’re selling you their services, an AI wrapper, or both. Some experts are using AI liberally and others are not; to a business owner or organization leader, the output should be what matters, not the tools people are using. You’ll pay a premium for an expert because you’ll get better output, plain and simple. If you don’t pay a premium, you’ll get what you pay for.

Stealing other people’s work is wrong and will always be wrong.

I don’t care if it’s legal or a loophole. It’s just plain wrong and anyone that’s party to it is someone I would never trust with anything important. If I see it happening, I’m going to call it out. You should too.

Being kind and empathetic and aware that many people are struggling right now costs you nothing. 

A massive percentage of the posts about what’s going to happen to the content and creative space are from people who have never written or designed anything in their lives, and who have never worked in these jobs. Pay attention to these posts at your peril. 

If you’re someone in a high-level position who thinks that AI is going to eliminate all marketing, content and communications careers, think twice before you post it on social media. If that’s how you want to run your organization, you do you.

But consider the people who might be reading what you write. Does scaring them or making them feel small bring you any value? If it's truly what you believe, wouldn't it be better to give them your best advice on how to turn adversity into opportunity? There's never any reason to go out of your way to try to hurt other people or make them feel like they're somehow less important than you, and the worst reason in the world is so you can get a few likes on LinkedIn.

Creativity is not dead. In fact, there’s a chance we’re entering a Golden Age of Creativity, where it’s finally valued for what it brings to organizations. If you’re an artist that’s been struggling to extricate yourself from an ill-fitting business suit, now is the time to burst out of that frayed blazer and spread your beautiful wings. We have too long been drowned out by the louder voices in the room and devalued in favor of a lot of empty-calorie marketing that provides immediate gratification and zero long-term value.

And for leaders, as uncertain as this environment seems, you have an opportunity to filter out the noise and to firmly set yourself apart by prioritizing working with artists.

In an ever-growing pile of colorless rubble created by the constant pounding of sledgehammers, you need the precision of an X-ACTO Knife and the brains of people who will think critically about how each project fits into your strategy (as opposed to checking a box). And if thinking and art are truly the last remaining ways to set yourself apart in a commoditized future, make sure you’re planning accordingly.

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Thank you for reading!

If you’re interested in talking through any specifics or have questions for me on applying any of this information to your work or organization, email me at dan@heliosmarketingllc.com or send me a message here.

And if you think this information can help someone you know, please share!

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