Do Copywriters Need Creativity?
Here’s what I think about creativity as a word used to describe creative professionals.
It’s a terrible word.
It’s the sort of word an uncreative person would use because they thought it was good to put on their CV. Creative means nothing.
And don’t get me wrong… I’ve used creativity in a CV before. It wasn’t a good choice.
If you refer to yourself as creative, you either a) aren’t as creative as you think you are or b) you’re socially awkward and don’t know how to talk to people about what you do and who you are.
When People Say They Need “Creative” Skills
Let’s talk about recruitment, business, careers and all of that kind of stuff.
Chances are your careers person at school/university said “employers want creative people.”
That’s because they’re stupid and don’t know what they’re talking about.
When a company thinks, “We like that guy or girl because they’re creative” they mean they’ve identified something within you that’s going to help them get out of a rut.
In other words, think not “creativity” but think instead, “out-of-the-box methodology.”
I say out of the box methodology as opposed to out of the box thinking because “out of the box thinking” is just like creativity. People say they can do it but they don’t really.
And let’s say you’re a writer. You’re applying for a writing job or striking out as a freelancer. You want to demonstrate that you think and act differently to the nine-hundred other people that are applying for the job you are.
Obey the big writer rule: show don’t tell.
“I’m a creative thinker” is the laziest way to express your creativity ever. It’s not creative and it doesn’t get you any brownie points.
Explaining how you’re the modern day Hercules and in one example of your approach to life you saved a company tons of money by restructuring their customer support process is much better.
Imagine saying, “After five minutes of being at my last job I realised the system they used wasn’t optimal. So I suggested that instead of answering emails first thing in the morning, each employee achieved their key task for the day and then emails were answered by 11.30am.”
This demonstrates value far greater than “I think about problems differently to everyone else, bro.”
But What About CREATIVE THINKING, JAMIE?
So you’re in a different profession where the rules of logic and reason don’t apply.
Let’s talk about copywriting and creative writing (and creative fields) in general.
Useful creativity isn’t about throwing mud at a wall and doing things differently.
This is a problem a lot of new folks to copywriting, marketing and advertising have. They say things like, “Well, I’m new to this and I know that I don’t like being sold to so maybe let’s be creative and we’ll talk about our product and not be salesy.”
Here’s the thing.
There’s a reason that people don’t do that, and it’s because it doesn’t work. Most jobs, careers, industries, vocations and basically everything have best practices because they work.
Until you understand those processes, you cannot be creative in a field. You can’t just do whatever comes to mind because there’s a 99% chance it’ll be wrong.
Think about children.
They draw pictures. If you sit them with some crayons and paper, some of them can draw for hours. They’ll draw unicorns with ice skates and fish in the sky and they’ll draw a picture of themselves but they’ll be bright purple and they’ll have hair that’s nine-feet long.
Kids are ridiculously creative in that way because they don’t know the rules and their ability to tie what they’re doing creatively to reality is limited.
It’s cute and parents love those drawings, but they don’t hang in art galleries.
So What Is Useful Creativity?
Useful creativity is comprised of three things:
- Being better at the fundamentals than everyone with a better framework for using them
- Asymmetric advantages
- Finding angles
All of those things tie into each other.
All of them contain an element of creativity, but all will train you to get better at creating usefulness to the projects you’re working on (or jobs you take on.)
And all of them are learned behaviours and skills, and none of them require some fluffy woo concept that you either have or don’t.