It is the intangible quality of jaw-droppingly good creativity that makes up the final part of our creative cocktail. Focus all your efforts and your budget on digital while choosing to ignore creativity, engagement, storytelling, gamification and pure unadulterated fun, and you’ll be out of business quicker than a restaurant serving inedible food on dirty plates. A word of caution though. Just like you wouldn’t expect miracles if you hire inexperienced chefs, force them to cook with inferior produce or demand the menu contains only the type of food any Tom, Dick or Harry could rustle up on a typical weeknight, don’t expect miracles if you use this same approach when it comes to creativity either.

To help you find that perfect creative balance, here are a few pointers from our team of designers: Forget what you knew Divorce yourself from what counted as good creative in the past. Those standards will not stand a chance in the cluttered world we are about to return to. Stop copying This has nothing to do with copyright or Intellectual Property. If you are copying what somebody else has already done, your creative thinking is going to be out of date by the time it goes live. Focus on coherence, not consistency Old fashioned brand consistency is like a sleeping pill for today’s consumer. Inconsistency can make your communication stand out from the crowd. Keep moving Yesterday’s creative was passive and static. Today’s creative must be alive and constantly evolving. Keeping up with your brand is half the fun for consumers. Let ‘creatives’ do the creative thinking Unless your official title is Creative Director, give your agency’s creative teams free reign to develop creative ideas. Avoid death by committee More brilliant creative ideas have been hacked to death by groups of stakeholders that anyone could count. Appoint one single decision maker and stop each stakeholder from adding their own personal little tweak, just to demonstrate their involvement in the process. Be brave Taking creative risks not only pays off most of the time, it is also almost unheard of for shoppers to deselect your brands because they don’t like your latest creative campaign. In fact, you are likely to win over more people with your bravery. We are frequently asked by clients how we can be certain of capturing everyone’s data. The thing is, you can have as much technical wizardry at your disposal as you like but it doesn’t matter to a consumer. The very same consumer will, however, gladly hand over all their personal details to you if you are giving them something they want. Nothing stands in your way if the consumer sees a fair value exchange and the simplest and most effective way of adding this value is through top rate creativity. Over the coming weeks and months, you will see countless examples of brands and retailers launching digital initiatives, trying to find that crucial point of difference. Without a clever disruptive ‘hook’ to cut through the cacophony of noise which will greet passengers on their return to airports and without meaningful, compelling creativity which provides both fun and value, they are doomed to failure. The trouble is, you see, we’ve all been getting way too much meaningless digital sex and not nearly enough engaging, memorable and wholesome omnichannel creativity.