Last week I noticed my friend wearing a shirt that said “Netflix and Bills.” Immediately, I pointed how that motto is truly sad and a disappointing way of living.
It made more sense when she turned around and I saw that her shirt was a gift Domus gave. But I was more intrigued by the text at the bottom that clearly visualized a collaboration between a hip marketing company and Domus. The real issue started here.
Firstly, the fact that a housing company had to collaborate to come up with such a simple shirt baffled me.
I couldn’t wrap my head around how out of touch the marketing department could’ve been to have to outsource a job like this. But that’s just one way of looking at things. There could’ve been a situation where the company truly didn’t have the time or resources to come up with ideas themselves.
We’ve all seen many renditions of the same old “Netflix and Chill,” but when you start seeing it being used so often by companies to connect to their customers, it makes you wonder if these companies really care or not. It’s not very creative to be using a format you didn’t create over and over again.
As I said before, that’s just one way of looking at things. My friend, whose shirt got me thinking in the first place, really likes that shirt. So maybe the companies achieved what they really wanted.
This is just one of the many situations where I questioned the creative presence in business.
I cannot keep complaining about the lack of creativity without acknowledging the fact that there’s countless marketing campaigns which exhibited creativity and originality like never seen before.
But just like everything else, the number of failed ideas due to the lack of originality outnumbers the successful ones. Through careful observation you can clearly see how the industry is heavily saturated with similar ideas and concepts.
This isn’t really an issue for most people but being a creative myself and seeing how hard individuals need to work to get recognized only to have to work creating things that aren’t very eye-catching is disappointing.
A lack of creative freedom definitely exists in various aspects of business, but where would the world be without the generation of original ideas? Sometimes I look at a particular advertisement and feel inspired, and sometimes I look at ads and just contemplate how I would’ve done something different, maybe better.
Here’s where I changed my thinking into a more optimistic one. There’s endless businesses and companies that need help connecting to their customers because the people in charge focus too much on the business aspects giving all of us the impression that maybe there’s truly no place for creativity in business.
There’s a very real opportunity for individuals who want to pursue a career in marketing. Granted, the field is very saturated and competitive but if you truly have ideas that are innovative, you can thrive.
