Marketoonist: "Creative Review by Committee" cartoon

Weekly hand-drawn business cartoon from Marketoonist Tom Fishburne

Author

Tom Fishburne
September 23, 2024

Welcome back to Marketoonist, the cartoon I’ve been hand-drawing to poke fun at marketing and business nearly every week since 2002. Was this email forwarded to you? Please subscribe here.

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Creative Review by Committee

A few months ago, I heard Adam Morgan from eatbigfish and Jon Evans from System1 give a talk on the Extraordinary Cost of Being Dull at the Cannes advertising festival.

Adam and Jon shared analysis from Peter Field who found that a “dull” advertising campaign has to spend £10m more a year in media on average to get the same results as a campaign that’s “not dull”.

Yet the majority of ads are dull. System1 collects how people feel about more than 100,000 ads to predict their long- and short-term potential. When Jon sorted the System1 database of ads by emotion, the most common emotion in these ads wasn’t Happiness, Surprise, or Anger; it was Neutrality, the absence of an emotion.

I thought about this in the context of how the creative sausage gets made — the internal process of making any sort of creative work. It’s frequently dull by design. Creative work is usually not a Darwinian survival of the most interesting ideas; it’s survival of the safest ideas. And safe ideas tend to be neutral.

Some of this I think comes from the creative review by committee. Creative work is inherently subjective. If you try to appeal to everyone, you’ll appeal to no one. A creative review by committee leads to a peace treaty rather than interesting work.

To carry over the emoji metaphor in this week’s cartoon, trying to make everyone happy can lead to everyone feeling neutral.

I think we have to apply as much creative rigor to how we manage the creative review process as the creative itself.

Creative projects require an editor — someone who can sort between frequently contradictory feedback, listening to some, ignoring others, and making the final call.

A handy rule of thumb for creative reviews I heard early in my marketing career: “everyone should have a voice — not everyone should have a vote.”

Speaking at 3M this week

I’m headed to St. Paul, Minnesota to speak at the 3M Global Marketing Excellence Award Summit on Thursday. I first started drawing this cartoon (originally called Brand Camp) 22 years ago as an Associate Marketing Manager at General Mills in Minneapolis and I’m excited to be back in the Twin Cities.

Here are a few other speaking events in the next 2 months. Hope to see some of you on the road!

Please let me know if you’d ever like to talk about bringing levity to any events you’re planning. And please recommend me to friends or colleagues.

Cartoon from the archives

Here’s a related one that I think still holds up from 2006 (back when this cartoon was called Brand Camp).

Thank you for all of your support (and cartoon material)!

-Tom

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About Marketoonist

Marketoonist is the thought bubble of me, Tom Fishburne. I first started drawing cartoons as a student in the Harvard Business School newspaper (not quite as well-known for humor as the Lampoon) and later started this newsletter from a General Mills cubicle in 2002. The cartoons have followed my career ever since. I poke fun at the ever-changing world of marketing and business because I believe that laughing at ourselves can help us do our best work.