CANNES – What is creativity? Perhaps no question cuts to the core of the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity more than this. The word “creativity” has such a wide scope, and it was something that director author, and producer Hermann Vaske wanted to explore over the past 30 years. As he began interviewing people by asking them “Why are you creative””, it quickly came to him that creativity means different things to different people. The journey became an exploration into the different facets of creativity.
In his talk at the 2017 Cannes Lions, Vaske presented a short trailer of his film titled Why are you creative? which he hopes to present back here by next year. In the trailer, people from varied backgrounds such as actors Willem Dafoe, Diane Kruger, Mel Gibson, Tim Roth, Kitten Natividad, and Sean Penn, director Quentin Tarantino, fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto, artist Joe Coleman, director David Lynch, the late musician David Bowie, artist Ai Weiwei, musician Brian Newman, artist Jeff Koons, scientist Stephen Hawking, and the Dalai Lama. Each gives their own unique take in trying to answer the question, with the very scientific Hawking declaring that, “You have to be creative to do good science, otherwise you’re just repeating old formulas.”
Vaske’s exploration into creativity saw him enumerating certain facets of it. These facets, namely heritage, childhood, destiny, ambition, sexuality, rebellion, fear, immortality, and spirituality are examined in Vaske’s film. Other questions he asks on creativity helped him amass those facets. These include “Is creativity in our blood?” “Do we try to be creative to make ourselves immortal?” “Is creativity a compulsion?” “Do we be creative in order to make a buck?”
At this point of the talk, Vaske then introduced the most award-winning commercial director in the history of the Cannes Lions, as well as the winner of the Lion of St. Marks Award, Joe Pytka. As the friends examined what creativity means to Pytka, the director pointed out that we, as people, don’t create anything. “We manipulate things we have,” he says. “People take their challenges and take whatever tools they have to solve problems, and that’s basically what we do, as filmmakers. But we deal with finite objects. We deal with actors, lighting, cameras, film.”
“All creativity comes from God,” Pytka continued. “And it’s not god as much as some force where ideas flow and you accept them, you have to let yourself absorb it and accept them, and that’s the key. I’m not sure there’s such a thing as God in our various religions, but there’s a force that keeps everything going. We’re trying to screw it up as quickly as possible, but it’s still there.”
After Vaske showed a brief reel of some of Pytka’s award-winning ads of the past for brands such as Pepsi, Nike, Gatorade, and McDonald’s, the latter paid tribute to someone he considers as a more important advertising man than the legendary Bill Bernbach. Pytka believes that Roger Enrico, formerly the CEO of PepsiCo from 1996 to 2001, changed advertising together with then Pepsi marketing chief Alan Pottasch and Phil Dusenberry of BBDO.
“He said he wanted to do advertising that affected pop culture,” Pytka recounted. “Other advertisers picked up on that like McDonald’s and Nike, but Roger was the one who started that whole way that advertising was perceived by the public and putting a lot of celebrities and entertainment into advertising. Sadly, we’ve gotten away from that. We don’t see stuff that’s as much fun anymore,” Pytka said, giving the example of the recent disaster that was the Pepsi ad featuring Kendall Jenner.
Following Pytka’s part in the presentation, the father and son duo of Jurgen Knauss, former Chairman Hoyt, boardmember for DDB Worldwide, publisher and photographer; and Jan Knauss, Chief Creative Officer of +KNAUSS – Idea Agency in Hamburg, joined Vaske onstage.
The elder Jurgen shared how, as a parent, he nurtured a very creative household for son Jan, which the latter was thankful for because he was not given any creative limits. It was this environment, having artists around the household, for example, that helped Jan explore his own creativity, even as he and his father put up their own agency in +KNAUSS.
Jurgem shared that in 40 years of servicing McDonald’s, what he considers as the peak of his career was in 2003 when they beat out several other agencies to create the successful advertising campaign that was McDonald’s ‘I’m Loving It.”
For Jan, his own foray into creative advertising resulted in the ‘Smart = sexy’ campaign for condom brand Ansell. To take on the challenge of creating an ad for a condom brand, Jan and his team wanted their ad to talk to people who were using condoms for the first time.
