Keeping Creativity in a Corporatized Creative Process

Final research term paper for a Creative Arts Management course. This is my intro/problem statement: In an Association of National Advertisers (ANA) survey, approximately 78% of corporations stated they have some form of in-house agency department to support its marketing goals in 2018, nearly double the result of a survey in 2008. Out of the 412 respondents with internal agencies, 45% of the organizations have established this new team within the past five years. The top key benefits cited of having a dedicated internal team to execute creative were cost savings, the speed of development and the brand/industry knowledge of the associates. With this recent surge of bringing marketing functions internal, it is critical that corporations understand creative processes are not the same as other production processes. While the cost efficiencies of moving these services internal appear to be the main driving force, creative leaders must determine methods to negotiate with corporate decision makers to ensure the quality of creative work does suffer. A typical corporate environment tends to always have their mind on ways to reduce the amount of time and resources spent on production and manufacturing, and sometimes they begin to look at the creative process and try to align it with more regimented processes in an attempt to save costs and accelerate development. The creative process takes time and inspiration to be able to produce a solution that will answer the problem at hand; attempting to reduce the amount of time, reducing resources, or detracting from what feeds the process harms the overall outcome. It is crucial that anyone charged with motivating and inspiring a team of corporate creatives be armed with the tools to be able to work with other executives within the organization to negotiate how to resolve issues when your team’s creativity is being harmed by factors generated by others within the company.