My story
WHO OWNS CREATIVITY IN YOUR COMPANY?
"I’ll leave the big ideas up to you. After all, you’re the creative experts here. I’m just the account person.”
Over the past twenty years, I’ve heard similar statements from project managers, strategists, clients, and marketing managers. The essence is the same. They want to contribute, but don’t consider themselves creative.
To many in marketing, creativity is a black box. A mystery that only creative artists can figure out. Our schools teach us to be rational in order to succeed. Business encourages logical decision making based on hard numbers. The result is that creativity and design have been treated as a soft skill, a luxury that should only exist when business is prosperous.
Fortunately, science has finally caught up. Today we know more about how the brain works. How emotions are critical to decision making. How design-led businesses are dominating. And how creative experiences are now the way businesses will differentiate themselves. But how to create big ideas remains a mystery.
If creative ideas are so valuable, it’s time that more people understood how to create them.
I consider myself a central brainer. A balance of both right and left-brain thinking. This website is dedicated to demystifying creative marketing. And proving that creative ideas deserve an equal seat at the marketing table as strategy or data. I’ll go behind the curtain to explain in simple and logical ways how creativity works, the science behind marketing, and how you can more easily create impactful ideas.
To be clear, this website isn’t just for left brainers. It’s also for creative types. Many artistic people approach creativity with an organic, Zen reverence. For many, this works fine. But for others, it takes years of trial and error to get good at it. My goal is to explain the method behind the madness in a way that you can understand the patterns and theory and get better at it. And I’ll give you ammo to prove to clients and stakeholders why creativity is better for the bottom line.
Creativity isn’t a skill that only a lucky few are born with. You can certainly learn to be better. Anyone can and should make it a critical skill in communicating. No matter what role you play in business or marketing.
On my Medium magazine, The Creative Machine, I post articles on everything from writing better headlines and neuroscience studies that support creativity, to recognizing how strategy is really a creative act.
Everyone can be more creative. It doesn’t have to be a mystery. The more we all understand how it works, the more our businesses and marketing efforts will improve.
Join me in exploring data-driven creativity.
Adam W Morgan
More about Admo's career history.
Adam W Morgan is an Executive Creative Director at Adobe, with experience in creativity, strategy, and storytelling for 24 years. In 2020, AdWeek named him one of the “Creative 100”—the top inspiring creative minds in marketing, media, and culture—in the world. He’s the author of the book, “Sorry Spock, Emotion Drives Business,” that proves the value of creativity and design with hard science. He’s a keynote speaker at conferences and events on the topics of creative leadership and content creation. And the host of the podcast, Real Creative Leadership, that offers inspiration and guidance on the day-to-day job of being a creative leader.
Before Adobe, he was a creative director at several international ad agencies, delivering award-winning advertising and campaigns. He was named a 40 under 40 business leader by Utah Business Magazine, and Utah Ad Professional of the Year in 2014. And he’s one of the few creative leaders to have a master’s degree in marketing strategy from Northwestern. To read one of his articles on data-driven creativity, you can visit his magazine “The Creative Machine” on Medium. Or learn more about his book and speaking topics here.
And for eight years now, I've been working at the perfect company for me — Adobe. In the industry, it's known as the ultimate company for creativity, and a force for digital marketing. So like me, it's a perfect balance of creativity and science. At Adobe, I'm an executive creative director and I manage a team that handles all the creative work for our enterprise business, including writing, video, and design. And in the past I also worked on Adobe Document Cloud and Adobe Creative Cloud for enterprise. This spans everything from thought leadership articles to lead generation and Adobe.com. It's a great company and I'm proud to work here. If you want to know more details about my work history in advertising and marketing, feel free to check out my LinkedIn profile in the footer below.
Join my list
If this strikes a chord with you, please sign up for my monthly email. I’ll notify you with any updates and when a new article is posted. And I’ll give updates on my book: Sorry Spock, Emotions Drive Business: proving the value of creative ideas with science.