Photo credit: Duane Mendes via unsplash
I read a sponsored headline on LinkedIn recently that said – The Opposite of Inconvenience Is Innovation.
(Not quite true and it resonates as an AI headline, but I’ll withhold judgment).
Then you had to “unlock” their gated, six-carousel slide deck to understand their point.
To that I’d say: unlocking gated material on LinkedIn is the opposite of convenient.
Fellow creative and copywriter Mike Roe recently shared an article on the death of creativity. I was drawn to a particular claim about the near-uselessness of three-fourths of the brands paraded in front of us, and how we wouldn’t miss them if they disappeared.
Think about that: the vast majority of companies/brands are easily forgotten, including yours.
The premise here is that we’ve killed creativity — meaning we aren’t creating anything memorable — in lieu of being efficient with time and speed at the lowest possible cost.
That, friends, is how we end up with headlines and campaigns promoting products like the one above. And it is also how they falter because they fail to entice, and in turn expect something from us long before earning our trust.
What might’ve enticed me to open this sponsored campaign and discover their offering? Simple:
1. Don’t lock your content on LinkedIn (be generous, be a thought sharer)
2. Entice us with stories/snippets that will resonate, something like…
Opportunities are created more than they are granted.
Your team keeps looking for opportunities, but when was the last time you granted them time to create something that turned heads? Got people talking? Shook the industry?
Here’s the rub: creating takes time. This can feel wildly inconvenient. It is far from instantaneous. But it is worth it. Just ask the computer maker not named Dell, or Gateway, or Compaq, who put a jukebox in the palm of your hand, and gave you a phone that still functioned like a phone, but became your essential life assistant.
Innovation isn’t doing what you know how to do a little differently. That’s called chasing the market leader. And, whoa, talk about inconvenient.
Remember — you have a choice: to either keep looking for opportunities — or start creating them.
To be fair, maybe this was the same kind of sponsored content the company gated, offering me to dive deeper into their offering, their own unique solution.
But I’ll never know – because I wasn’t compelled to look.
Think of it this way:
How many times has your audience been dismissive or not compelled to look because the creative was rushed, roadblocks to engagement we intentionally set for the sake of data, and meeting the artificial deadline prevailed over doing the best possible work with a better chance of resonating? Have any of us ever been guilty of such a thing?
When we rush creativity (the very thing that leads to innovative ideas) we take away the power of its potential.
We’ve been conditioned to “box it up” and promise what it will do in terms of metrics, sales, and how it measures up on spreadsheet – literally putting it in a box. When we do this, we have succumbed to the antithesis of creativity. Everything begins to look the same. No wonder three-fourths of brands are forgettable.
We neuter creativity before it has a chance do its intended thing – which is to wow people, stop them in their tracks, and get them talking.
And yet that is precisely what every company says it’s pursuing, but typically with poor copy that falls on deaf ears.