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Creativity and Effectiveness

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I stumbled across this line from advertising professor Tyler Dolph:

“Creative without strategy is called ‘art’ — creative with strategy is called ‘advertising.’”

The annual Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, which ended a few days ago, always reminds me of the tension of creativity and effectiveness.

Last year was the first time I attended this most celebrated advertising award festival in person. In the basement of the Palais, there’s a giant room with all of the work that is up for recognition. It’s a lot of fun and much of it is very creative, but effectiveness is frequently treated as an afterthought. Much of the work is creativity for creativity’s sake.

In 2011, Cannes Lions added a separate award category called “Creative Effectiveness,” which is the only category that highlights a clear and measurable impact on business results. Apple won with Grand Prix this year with their 10-year campaign, “Shot on iPhone.”

In some ways, the creation of a “Creative Effectiveness” category underscores the absence elsewhere. This year Mark Ritson shared System1 research on Cannes Lions award winners over the years. They found that most of the campaigns that won Cannes Lions awards were not actually effective.

Sir John Hegarty, founder of BBH, had this reaction:

“Creativity without impact isn’t just indulgent. It’s irrelevant.”

Collaboration with BlueOceanAI

One of my favorite cartoon collaborations this year has been with BlueOceanAI, an Agentic AI platform built for marketing. Here’s one of the cartoons in the series we created together.

Podcast Interview with “The Sketch Guy”

Carl Richards is a friend and kindred spirit. He created The Sketch Guy column in the New York Times that combined Sharpie sketches with financial insights. Carl invited me to be on his podcast, 50 Fires, about aligning our financial goals with what really matters.

This is the most personal podcast conversation I’ve had. I talk about leaving a stable job to pursue cartooning. And how what looked like “career suicide” from the outside became my most stable and fulfilling career path.

Cartoon From The Archives

Here’s a related cartoon I drew on creative effectiveness in 2018:

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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.