Creative Business Wrap – August 2022

Busy days here at Sharpe Advisory mean we’re getting this month’s newsletter out at the very last minute! But even though we’re taking it down to the wire, hopefully there’s plenty of material here to keep you busy reading well into September, with a particular focus on technology and its transformative impact on creative industries.

Katy Walman’s article in the New Yorker about the anti-trust trial that could block Penguin Random House from acquiring Simon and Shuster and dwarfing its rivals makes a potentially dull subject entertaining. She describes the attempts by publishers to draw attention away from the data-driven decisions of publishing towards a more romantic view of publishing as a “business of passion” where success is unpredictable, quoting the CEO of Penguin Random House who testified that “everything in publishing is random”. Mega-author Stephen King turned up to testify that “consolidation is bad for competition” and pointed out that new writers stood to lose opportunities if smaller publishers were forced out of the market. Walman points out that previous mergers resulted in streamlining job losses for editors, marketers ad publishers. A delicious peek behind the curtain of the big publishers.

Don’t be put off by the title “10 mind blowing ways robots are being used in the creative industries” which sounds like it could have been written by a robot. It’s a fascinating read, with examples from architecture, design, music, and body art. “Tatoué”, for instance, is an industrial robot arm that can autonomously draw intricate tattoos on humans. Using 3D scanning technology, the body part is captured and then software converts the form into a geometric language the computer can understand. The software applies the design onto the scanned surface and exports the pattern code to the robot that uses the same needle and ink as traditional tattoo guns. Would you trust your skin to a tattooing robot?

Who could resist the line “LinkedIn has become a cesspit of toxic positivity and a temple to cringe”? Arwa Mahdawi in the Guardian tells a cautionary tale about 32yr old CEO Braden Wallake who made the mistake of posting a selfie of himself crying on his LinkedIn profile after laying off two staff. Along with a message that was meant to be inspirational and position him as caring and empathetic. Instead of getting “likes” for exposing his vulnerable side, his post went viral, and “crying CEO” became a meme. It wasn’t the crying that infuriated people, but the performance of it: his attempt at authenticity just didn’t seem authentic. Mahdawi calls LinkedIn “insufferable” and “a self-help blogging platform for business types”.

Is LinkedIn even still relevant? I’ve got to say I find it a increasingly tiring place to be, and if it is about self-help, I’m not sure exactly what help it’s offering. A recent article in Forbes titled ‘5 ways to make your LinkedIn in profile Pop in 2022” finishes with the advice: “Be honest and authentic, If you have the skills, don’t be timid, show off but do so authentically, not in a hot-headed manner”. Braden Wallake should have read that article before posting.

Say it quietly, but the working from home (WFH) backlash is out there. Sela Al  Zaidi in Mumbrella interviewed four Australian advertising industry leaders about the impact on creative output, and client outcomes of Working from Home (WFH).

All four gave a nod to the opportunity for flexibility and inclusivity of WFH arrangements and the use of Zoom and Slack for transactional interactions, but they argued strongly that collaboration and interaction in the physical workplace are crucial to producing high-quality creative work. The incidental interactions, exchange of ideas, healthy debate and fun generated by meeting and working in person were seen as essential to creating with passion in this industry. The downside of WFH was seen as working in isolation and falling prey to confirmation bias and missing out on the element of play and fun that fuels creativity.

They made the point that it is hard to read the room in an online meeting where the majority of people are on mute. The most telling comment for me was from Ben Lucas: “To get really futuristic, if you can do your job in isolation, you’re at greater risk of being replaced by a robot.” See also, tattooists.

Creative jobs are not usually in the top 10 of those predicted to be taken over by artificial intelligence but I was interested to read about the uses of AI in graphics and advertising, particularly the text-to-image app DALL-E (Dali meets WALL-E, geddit?). It can create new and unique images from text prompts and images that users upload. This article in Bloomberg includes some amusing illustrations from DALL-E: I loved “Genghis Khan giving a makeup tutorial on YouTube”.

The article goes beyond the predictable arguments that AI couldn’t replace human empathy or evoke emotion. It looks at some of the more disturbing issues with DALL-E such as the tendency to produce lots of images of white men when prompted by words such as “CEO” or the difficulty of filtering out pornographic images, or preventing abusive behaviour if images of real people are uploaded. Rather than replacing the work of graphic artists, AI could speed up creative processes. For example, by communicating ideas to colleagues visually even if you lack the artistic skills, or tweaking a draft of a new branding campaign in a hurry for a presentation.

Photo and video editing app PicsArt, has used the search data from its more than 150 million active monthly users to create a report and e book on design trends for 2022 that appeal to millennials. Ironically, number 1 is “modern nostalgia”, a mash-up of images and styles from the 70’s to the noughties.

The metaverse and avatars is the second biggest trend, along with the use of memojis, where people can ‘become’ sharks, cows, or cartoon versions of themselves. Millennials create and relate to images of gender diversity and “organic digital” images which imitate the organic feel of print material, old paper or vintage film with digital tools. For instance, ripped paper has had a 909% increase in searches and handwritten fonts have increased by 270%.

I was fascinated to read that teal is a huge colour trend in 2022. There is a 101% increase in searches relating to teal and blue, teal being calming to the eye but still evoking a sense of fun and a connection to the digital world. Teal worked politically in Australia in 2022 but I wonder if tastes will change in 2023?