Rassak’s Law: Creativity and Competition

Over the years Rassak has helped a bunch of companies solve sticky problems through creative communications. So when I was invited to present to a group of business execs and investors at Gild International in Barcelona last week, I thought Creativity itself would an interesting topic. Big thanks to Saar Gur,  David Hornik, and Steve Reale for the great ideas to prep for this talk. I wish I could’ve used all your examples.

BTW, if the bit in the video about “brutal editing” in the creative process speaks to you… it’s a theme I have spent some time on in this blog. See Editing Engineers, What’s In a Word?, Less is More, and Where Blood Tasted of Blood and Honey of Honey.

“Creative Risk” … Seeking Ideas and Data

I’m slated to give a talk at Gild International in Barcelona in December on the topic of Creative Risk. My thesis is pretty straightforward: the more competition you have, the more creative you have to be to get noticed and win.

Playing with the theme of risk, I’m planning to take a quick look at the types of risk investors (especially VC investors) think about when looking at companies to back (or not). I’ll then introduce a less-talked about type of risk: creative risk—basically how adept a management team is at leveraging creativity to win. I created the little graphic above for the talk. I might adjust as I get feedback and refine my thinking.

Any thoughts are much appreciated. I’m looking in particular for cases with data… examples of companies that have taken creative risks to stand out. Examples I’m playing with right now are:

• DoubleTwist’s placing of a highly competitive ad ON an Apple store — and their handling of the fallout.
• Mixx using creatiivty in their user interface to fight against competitors — and what appears to be some success in their usage numbers.
• I’ll look at how Microsoft has chosen to deploy creativity more now that they are seeing real competition from Apple — and how some think this is bad idea.

Either leave comments or mail me at barak@rassak.com

Thanks so much