“Every child is an artist, the problem is staying an artist when you grow up.” Pablo Picasso speaks the words of a true artist, one who did not allow society to make him deviate from his own personal drive to be a creative being. Our society doesn’t encourage creativity, nor approve of it. Society tends want people to live a normal life. Graduating from college provides young consumers with an easy way out by encouraging a ‘fast money’ and a ‘keeping up with the joneses’ kind of lifestyle. This is the exact reason why so many people experience a mid-life crisis, finding themselves miserable, burnt out, and lost. Charles Mingus says, “Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can plan weird; that’s easy. What’s hard is to be as simple as Bach. Making the simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” Many times in today’s world, there is no time allocated for real thinking. The pressure to produce more and more content cuts into the creative mind and distracts us from a real innovative product vision. When you allow creativity to prosper, you inspire yourself and those around you. Creativity is at the forefront of advertising. Creativity inspires us, moves us and directs us.
“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire,” says famous poet William Butler Yeats.
In a world where creativity is frowned upon, we must find ways to engage our creative selves, allowing our “creative juices” to flow. I believe that the forefront of our failure as creative individuals lives within our education system. In his TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson claims “we are educating people out of their creative capacities.” Let me explain. From a young age we are curious individuals. As children, we love to experience, discover, and explore new and unique things — from digging in the dirt to painting our latest imaginary creature. Our brains are wired from birth to focus and develop our creative capacity as human beings. Standardized education, within the United States, takes creative individuals and works to normalize the type of education that everyone receives. One of the goals of the standardized education system is to support the capitalistic notions of money and power we are so reliant on. We are training our children to be proficient in left brain activities such as reading, writing, and mathematics, but are failing with right brain activities such as how to think, how to respond, how to adapt, and how to work within a team of equally talented individuals.
After almost 16 years in school, I believe schooling revolves too much around a left brained approach to learning. Many times, students are not required to think about or engage with topics critically to develop and discover their own educated opinions, but rather are fed information via a semester worth of poorly designed Powerpoints. While I struggled in many left brained subjects like math and science, Advertising presented a way for me to combine creativity with business and technology to apply the things I learned in school to my career. Advertising, technology, and photography are vehicles by which my creativity thrives. For me, my discovery of Advertising and design have steered me towards my real potential as a individual. “Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status,” Robinson says. By adding a more creative curriculum into our public schools, our children will be able to actively engage with the world at large at a younger age. This would enable and encourage young adults to not only solve world problems, but additionally find ways to make money and innovate through creative design, business, and artistic means.
Change is beneficial – we are in the midst of a period of profound technological innovation. New media are created, dispersed, and adopted into culture at incredibly fast rates. Every major idea, image, brand, or relationship will continue to play themselves out across a broad set of media channels. Media are becoming bigger and bigger, beginning to reach a global capacity. A global reach allows media content to flow smoothly across international borders thus allowing brands to gain a wider audience. The global scale of the media landscape changes the way that we interact with each other, content, and the world. As the advertising world increasingly gravitates toward new media, there’s been a wave of creative new marketing strategies that may or may not have proven successful. For new media advertising, creativity is the key. Outstanding creative leaders don’t work toward uncompromising creative standards; they truly create a culture of excellence and innovation.
The Turbine 