Creative Marketers Have No Time to Think Since Turning Their Cameras Inward

'We test the angle 40 times instead of asking if we're standing in the right room'

Turning our cameras to face ourselves—inward instead of outward toward the wider world—has taken a heavy toll on creativity.

For years, we trained our lenses on others, at things worth noticing. Then, around 2010, the phone grew a second lens, effectively allowing us to change our focal point. And so we turned the focus on ourselves. And we’ve been staring inward ever since. Around the same time, the advertising industry did the exact same thing.

The selfie changed what we think a picture is for. We’re capturing endless iterations of ourselves, primed for immediate validation and posted before the implications are fully considered. Marketing is adapting this selfie behavior. We stare inward at our performance dashboards, content calendars, brand guidelines. We create dozens of variations of the same thing, optimizing for an algorithm instead of human consumption. We test the angle 40 times instead of asking if we’re standing in the right room.

The modern scope of work rarely highlights concrete ideas. Instead, it has 42 social assets, six cutdowns across three aspect ratios, an “always-on content engine,” a hero film—and don’t forget the :15s and :06s. We measure agencies by throughput, marketing teams by velocity and volume. The one variable that never shows up on a status sheet is the time required to figure out what to say.

This isn’t a critique of creators. They operate on the front line every day and produce some of the sharpest, most culturally fluent work out there. But while their lens is on themselves, their attention is entirely on the audience. A good creator spends hours in the comments, group chats and odd corners of the internet. Alas, brands take the camera and skip the attention.

Paying attention takes time that doesn’t look productive. Having built two creative agencies, I know the best work never comes from a spreadsheet. It comes from a long conversation on a couch or a thought in the shower. But because contemplation doesn’t fit neatly on a timesheet, agencies stopped budgeting for it. One of Bray & Co’s most effective campaigns was this year’s work for DarkSky International, built on the insight that the absence of light often helps you see better. Appropriately, that insight came at 3 a.m., looking up and outwards at the stars.

Great creative work has always been a rear-camera discipline. You point it outward at culture, at the customer, at something strange and true that nobody else bothered to notice. That requires looking up from the output. It requires idle time. Brands still need content, platforms remain hungry and no one is returning to the era of one TV spot per year. But volume is a manufacturing problem—and we have mistakenly let it become a strategic one.

So add thinking to the invoice. Not strategy, thinking. Actual time spent reading, wandering and talking to people outside the category. If it isn’t a billable line item, it’s treated as free. If you’re a marketer, ask your agency what it noticed, not just how many cutdowns were made. And agencies, protect the time and give it a name. Once the thinking is paid for, the rest follows. Forty assets become forty expressions of one sharp thought and briefs start with what we want people to notice, not what needs to be shipped.

The front-facing camera isn’t going away, and neither is the content machine. But high-velocity output means nothing if there is no core idea driving it.

Creators figured out how to use the front camera without losing sight of the audience. Brands can, too. But only if we turn our attention around and point it away from ourselves.

Related: Open Influence’s Alexandra Mathieu Charts the Future of Creator Marketing