Data ≠ Numbers, Creativity ≠ Magic
If you have no interest in the behaviour of your audience, you have no interest in the success of your content.
Living, learning and working in the field that sits between the analysis and the ideas, between what has been and what could be, I’ve talked to countless people at all levels of seniority, within all functions of creative business about the apparent dichotomies and contradictions people find at the heart of the discipline. I’ve tried as hard as I could to decode the misunderstandings that recur most often. A large proportion seem to be rooted in associative assumptions about Big Words. When people hear a Big Word, the associations they have to that word arise, often hewn from a cursory understanding or a recent, popular New York Times piece, clouding their ability to fully grasp the insight available or visualize an integrative path ahead.
Two giant words which come packaged with all manner of varied and conflicting associations are data and creativity. My suspicion is that upon hearing “data”, many hear instead “numbers” and conjure nightmares of pivot tables and hazy memories of meetings where a graph, clearly visible on the big screen, is described by someone who seems exhausted by living. As you can see, there was a big drop in Q1. Conversely, when people hear “creativity”, they imagine “magic” and picture a numinous force, probably mysteriously emanating from a lone genius. Indescribable, alchemical leaps of logic. Lightning in a bottle.
“Data is the death of creativity.” - Jason Blum
I think a better understanding of these Big Words is this: data is truth, creativity is action. The data is what you know, the creative is what you do. The creative represents the decisions you make, the data is what you base those decisions on.
Data, handled well and read in a nuanced way, enables deep understanding of culture and human behaviour, psychology and taste. It allows creators and businesses to connect in a very real and often granular way, at scale, with their audience and the audience at large. It involves communing with the impact of work in an honest and direct way. Great creativity involves recombining, listening, receiving, deep comprehension and is, at its heart, concerned with imaginative problem-solving. Especially in tv, film & video, it’s about reconciling multiple perspectives in a spirit of collaboration.
Data isn’t just numbers and creativity isn’t magic.
Think About The Audience
Women Talking is a seriously impressive film. I hadn’t seen Sarah Polley interviewed before seeing it, but was fascinated by her process, as well as the ensemble’s, so paid fairly close attention to them popping up through awards season. She seems well cool. This conversation with Ruben Östlund included an interesting exchange about how much each director thinks about the audience during the process of creation.
I really liked Östlund’s analogy for filmmaking of talking to a table full of people. “So filmmaking is definitely for me like a way of, okay, we have this big screen, the audience is going to sit in the room… together. How do I create an experience for them where what I try to communicate is going to have an impact? So I definitely think about the audience.”
It feels like the current default position on this matter is closer to Polley’s - the idea that considering the audience will dilute the work, that the “conversation can morph…into a conversation with financiers about how do you make something the most obvious accessible version of itself.”
Rick Rubin writes, in his recent book, The Creative Act: A Way Of Being, “Part of the process of letting go is releasing any thoughts of how you or your piece will be received. When making art, the audience comes last. Let’s not consider how a piece will be received or our release strategy until the work is finished and we love it.”
When I was a DJ, I thought my job was primarily to get people to have a good time - challenging, surprising and taking the crowd somewhere new came second, though it was always a delicate but frenzied balancing act. My eye instinctively focused on the line between the people who were dancing and the people who weren’t dancing yet. I never felt that it made my work, if you can call it that, any less artistic or pure or worthwhile. I don’t see the sacrilege in figuring out if a joke will make people laugh or if a fresh cut of a scene in a horror film will make pulses quicken.
Especially given the new and mind-blowing tools we have for understanding people’s tastes and mass attention in deeper and deeper ways, I believe there’s a lot of space to think about the audience.
Links
My favourite “AI” to just have a chat with to date, from Inflection AI, is Pi. Described as “a supportive and empathetic conversational AI”. So far, so pleasant.
Jules Terpak is a really reliable smart follow on TikTok - thoughtful, insightful, curious. / TikTok
I chatted to Will Corcoran on the Small Pocket podcast about video things. / YouTube
If anyone’s going to teach you about lenses, it should probably be Roger Deakins. / Studio Binder
University Challenge is infinitely calming and has 37 episodes per series. Here’s five years worth of it. / BBC
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” - Peter Drucker