Pat Garvey

Until a few years ago, I would often wonder: what does it mean to be creative?

Over a long tenure as a marketing professional, I’ve done work for some of the world’s elite brands, such a Disney, Mattel, Electronic Arts, Mazda, and others.  I have always been accountable for creative processes.  I worked with art directors, writers, photographers…you name it.  But I stood at arms length from the “creative” world.  I wasn’t the maker.  I was the account guy, the business & strategy guy.. the “suit”. It was my job to set the table with a strategic framework, get out of the way, and let the “artists” do their magic.

Then digital media blew up marketing.  Social validation defined a new marketplace. No more shouting into a megaphone about your product or brand.  People stopped listening.  Consumers wisely started ignoring advertising and listened to each other instead.  So began the age of content marketing.  If you want people to listen and pay attention, you have to make it worthwhile. A marketer needs to be less a pitch man and more of an editor-in-chief.  Storytelling ability is now the great differentiator.

So what was a “suit” to do?  In an act of purely accidental genius, I had taken up photography over a decade prior, initially for business reasons.  But it soon became a personal passion.  Some would say an obsession, but I digress.  Thousands of hours of photography reorganized my brain to see the world differently.  I came to see the world in terms of light & shadow, composition, color, and movement.  At the same time, I was being approached and often hired to write copy. Writing was what I considered an “organic” ability of mine.  It came naturally to me, unlike the visual arts.  I grew up being told I would be a famous writer someday.  It just always seemed like a distant fantasy to me.

But there I was, transformed by personal passions and market forces.  I became a photographer and a writer.  And people wanted to pay me to do both.  And so I thought “hell, I have a marketing background and I know how these two disciplines work together.  Why not make one plus one equal three, and be a content marketer?  And I haven’t looked back.

And creativity?  No longer a puzzle for me. It’s quite simple, in fact.  It is the ability to notice things that most people don’t notice, and the act of calling attention to them.  It’s not difficult, but there is a good argument that it runs counter to human nature.  So in that sense, it takes work, perhaps years of work.  I now have enough work published that I can comfortably allow it to speak for me.  I might blog in detail on that at some point.  Suffice it to say that if you want to be creative, its more about letting go than grabbing on to something. 

I produce content.  I do it for fun and for money.  And what is better than that?  If you need your story to be told, get in touch!