PM360 Greatest Creators June 2011

THINK DIFFERENT

Creativity is more than just eye-catching art and stick-in-your-head slogans. Often, the greatest creations are the result of some innovative and inspired problem-solving. In our third annual supplement we invited the greatest creators from agencies nationwide to let us in on their creative process as they explain the challenges they were forced to overcome along with the ingenious ideas that led to impactful campaigns. This year’s Greatest Creators Showcase features the old with the new. We received print campaigns, websites, billboards, and even an app...all of them illustrating the modernization and innovation revitalizing today’s advertising. Those campaigns had to negotiate a slew of speed bumps (including those dreaded black box warnings, new market competition, and a general lack of awareness about the disease or brand) that took some creative navigating to make them successful.

We were also interested to hear from the people who are expected to live, breath, and birth creativity on an everyday basis, to learn what behaviors absolutely choke off creativity. This experiment in crowdsourcing gave us “The 36 Deadly Habits of Dysfunctional Creative Programs,” a list of the most appalling suggestions and snarkiest comments on behavior that is sure to decimate any trace of originality, innovation, and insight. We learned, however, that the key to creativity is freedom—along with a little bit of structure. Creators need to have freedom from fear and change while also remembering that facts (especially about your target audience) and goals (don’t ignore KPIs) are equally important.

New this year is a directory of the agencies that encompass creativity as whole. These agencies are constantly adapting, always engaging, strategically thinking, visually appealing, and above all else agents of change. Feel free to flip through these pages to examine these agencies’ work or to take a trip into the creative mind to see how to inspire creativity as well as kill it.

ANDREW MATTHIUS
SUPPLEMENT EDITOR