I was talking to one of my favorite headhunters—excuse me, one of my favorite executive recruiters—when he asked me, “How do you know what good creative is? How do you judge it?”
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Which got me to thinking…how do you judge it?
To me, great creative has something that you can’t even put your finger on. It moves you somehow. It’s like seeing a great movie that you want to watch over and over again. Or eating a great meal. It brings you to a new place. It forces you to trash assumptions. It makes you grow up. Makes you smarter. Makes you laugh, or cry, or get angry—it just gets something out of you.
Sure, it needs to sell a product, but it needs to do more than that. The best creative makes the product a part of the audience’s world in such a way that it ceases to exist as product—but as personal experience.
I don’t think there’s a formula for it. And I don’t think making it can be taught.
Ultimately, I think the best creative gets to the most human part of us and helps us see ourselves in a new way.
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“I don’t know,” I told my recruiter friend, “but I know it when I see it.”
-mike
