Creativity Squared: Danny Paul on Why Story Is King

Danny Paul is the executive creative director at The Electric Factory, a creative innovation company focused on elevating the present by applying the opportunities of the future.

Danny leads creative teams at The Electric Factory to build targeted immersive tech experiences for clients like Walmart, Netflix, Amazon, and META in a world that’s in a constant state of digital disruption. Throughout his career, Danny has led teams to provide creative solutions for Fortune 500 companies at Leo Burnett, PwC, and Cramer-Krasselt. 

While much of his work has been globally awarded, Danny is most proud of his collection of bar napkins filled with creative solutions to unique industry challenges.

Person

I’ve always considered myself something of a wide-eyed cynic. When I first learned about Einstein and the equation E=MC2, I was immediately convinced that if mass and energy were equivalent, telekinesis should be possible. Yeah, I know. But eight year old me immediately started staring at a pencil, willing it to float, or even…just…wiggle…a bit.

An hour later, the pencil hadn’t moved at all, but through bleary eyes I figured something out. At some point my vision had begun fading to black. And in that moment, I could suddenly see everything BEHIND the pencil, as if it wasn’t there anymore! That shocked me back into normal vision, but I realised what had happened. In the absence of sight, my brain was filling in the spaces, recreating the scene with my imagination. After a few more tries, I was able to do more than just see through things, I could change what they looked like, even make them move. Maybe not levitation for real, but pretty rad nonetheless.

It may sound strange, but that’s kind of what I do for a living. I see the same thing that everyone else sees, but I keep looking until I can see through it and manipulate it. I keep looking until I understand what it means, what it is trying to say. And I figure, if I can see through it, hopefully I can make other people not only see it, but see it for what it is.

Product

Creativity is all about finding meaning, creating resonance, and that has everything to do with the audience. Meaningful to who? In what context? It’s important to view the work as it was intended, through the appropriate lens. I've seen some amazing work that I would not consider creatively successful, because it didn’t speak to the correct audience. And no, award show judges are not the correct audience. The correct audience is the people engaging with the work, affected by the product, participating in the world of the campaign.

Impact is the first thing I look for. What effect did the work have? Did it change behaviour? Did people share the work organically? Did it motivate people to buy something that will change their lives? To think differently?

Right now, we are living in a time of constant disruption and transformation, an era of overload. Between AI, the Metaverse, XR, and tomorrow’s headliner, there is something new to play with or contend with on a daily basis. In times like this, I think we start to get tired of all the uncurated stimulus. Tired of having to figure out why something is important. Tired of originality for originality’s sake. The truth is, right now we’re just trying to figure out how to live our lives amidst so much change. The best creative work should serve as a north star, making our lives more meaningful through meaningful interpretation of the world.

Process

So, I’ve probably already established that I’m a huge nerd, but if you have any doubts this will settle them. I have a tattoo of a Franz Kafka line translated into binary code over my heart.

The line: “A cage went in search of a bird.”

No, I’m not about to go off on how creativity is a beautiful bird that can’t be caged or understood. Far from it. As human beings, we’re inherently limited by our ability to understand the world and communicate our experiences with each other. Creative work speaks to us, but to speak it must have a voice, it must use language. Whether visual, vocal, or experiential, language is an ever evolving negotiation between different perspectives.

So truth be told, creativity is not the bird, it is the cage. It is an attempt to capture something ephemeral and make it tangible. A gambit to translate a feeling, a sense of meaning, a purpose into something that we can understand and share.

When I start a new project, I try very hard to understand what it is I am trying to capture, the “why” behind the work. Why are we doing this? What is the purpose? The meaning? That is the foundation, and it is absolutely critical, but it is not what I would call the creative process.

The creative process is figuring out the language to use to translate that “why” into a “what.” To cage the bird so we can experience something meaningful. For me, this usually ends up being a story, a narrative that strives to make the “why” so obviously important and relevant, so critical to the audience, that they can barely remember what it was like before they understood.

Press

I started out writing poetry. Long before I ever considered myself a “creative” or had even heard the term used as a noun, I thought of myself as a writer. I went super deep, writing for hours every day for well over a decade. That really helped me understand the attention to craft that is necessary for good creative work in any format.

But sometime around the glory days of early digital, back when Flash was king, I got into the interactive side of things. At first, everything seemed really cool and exciting, which is when I started to realise the difference between shiny and new versus compelling and resonant.

Shiny and new eventually ends up in the graveyard of abandoned toys, while compelling experiences stay with you, becoming part of who you are.

From there, I ended up doing TV commercials, experiential, print, 360 campaigns, innovation, and had my own entrepreneurial ventures in digital music communities and physical product design. I later found myself in experience design consulting, digital transformation, and immersive tech. Through all of this, I became extremely platform agnostic, which is very important when trying to develop the most effective creative. The creative insights that drive concepts shouldn’t manifest a particular technology or delivery mechanism from the off. You should discover the best way to bring the vision to life for the audience, and it helps to have a wide angle lens.

Now, as an ECD, I work with teams with a vast array of specialities in creative, strategy, and tech. I listen to everyone. I do not fall in love with my ideas... at least not so much that I’m unwilling to abandon them for something better. I believe story is king. Passion cannot be taught. And if it doesn’t hurt sometimes, you aren’t trying hard enough.