Creativity Squared: Juliana Cobb on the Importance of Being More Wrong

Juliana Cobb is head of creative at 72andSunny's New York office. Juliana, joined after an illustrious run as an ECD at Droga5 New York.

Juliana joined Droga5 in early 2016 after five years at BBDO. She became ECD in 2019. In her time there, she led campaigns for brands including Prudential, Blue Apron, Pinterest and Chase. She most recently led the award-winning global Huggies campaign 'We Got You, Baby.'

A Hint of Press

Creativity can be defined a lot of different ways, by a lot of different people. For me, the most honest answer is that creativity is the art of being wrong. 

Ginger Baker was one of the greatest drummers of all time (go ahead, come at me). In the band Cream, where he made his fame, he developed this unique and disruptive style of drumming on the 'off beats' - meaning, he threw in extra drum hits in the gaps between where the rest of the music was hitting. It didn’t fit, those beats didn’t belong where Ginger was hitting them, and yet - and yet, it gave the songs this extra groove that was so banging, so swinging, so sublime that no one’s ever quite achieved anything like it since. 

So how did Ginger find that off-beat style? That experiment to drum 'wrong' led to the most creatively expressive drumming in modern times. (@hereisjulianacobb if you want to start beef.)

Person

Some years after Ginger was playing those drums in Cream, I was a wee toddler crawling around in diapers and drawing inside the covers of books. I probably wasn’t hearing the inspiration of Cream in our house, but my sister and I were brought up with loads of pens, drawing paper, and books on books on books. We never had a ton of dolls and stuffed animals. So our free time was filled with a lot of imagining and creating - drawing beds and tables with legs akimbo, writing stories that went nowhere (my particular forte - I was little, cut me some slack), and imagining we were explorers and wild animals loose in the jungles of the backyard. This was India. And we were growing up in a free spirited household where there wasn’t a ton of 'right' and 'wrong' language guiding our experiences. We were free to be and often our imagination was the funnest thing we could get our hands on. So I learned at an early age the advantage of being open minded in service of creativity. 

That open mindedness followed me into my career as a copywriter after I’d graduated Berkeley and was adulting in San Francisco. I fell into advertising sideways, never went to ad school, so there was a whole lot of mind-opening needed to get my head around this impossibly cool job. Because I never learned the conventions they teach in ad school, it made things much harder for me at first. I was hit or miss with lots of miss. But ultimately, it became an advantage. While I could see and appreciate a great ad - bona fide, traditional, the works - I was usually more inspired drawing from farther afield, which meant I developed a skill at recognising when a less wieldy idea might be the most right we could ever be.

Product

As a creative leader, that open mindedness becomes hugely important. We all struggle with the transition from maker to leader - it’s a whole different set of muscles, muscles we’ve never used before that quiver when we exercise them at first. (Like the scrawny guy on the back of the comic books getting sand kicked in his face…) But ultimately, we learn how to guide other people’s thinking and, hopefully, we learn how to do it not by imposing our own preconceived concepts into other people’s work.

Being open-minded is how we embrace lots of flavours of thinking that sit outside our expectations. And as I spend more time being exposed to others’ creativity among teams or award shows or out in the world, I can distil my appreciation down to two major factors. (I mean, there are a million ways to love a piece of work, but for the sake of this piece, it’s two. You’re welcome.)

First, originality is a key element that never fails to get my appreciation. There is nothing new under the sun and every idea has already been made and so on, so if someone comes forward with an idea or an execution that is truly original and unique and grabs your attention in an appreciable way, that’s a huge mark of creativity. I think about the first time the team came to me with “We got you, baby,” the global creative platform we launched for Huggies. We needed to connect with modern parents and here was an idea that spoke directly to the baby instead. “Wrong” on the face of it, but even in its first raw imagining, it was so clear to me that its originality was also going to its effectiveness. A platform where the brand itself is speaking to babies and conveying all of life’s weird and wonderful machinations to this brand new human? What a fantastic and endlessly fertile conversation we could have. 

Craft is also key because sometimes an age-old concept can be freshly done in such a cared-for and beautifully imagined way that you don’t mind if the concept is a familiar trope, you’re still swept up in the power of the telling. A lot of holiday spots fall into that camp. Two examples recently melted my cold, hard heart with their beautiful soulfulness. Apple’s 'Fuzzy Feelings' takes the “every grinch is just a regular person who wants to be loved” trope and spins it out of delightfully imagined stop motion, where there’s a story within the story and our protagonist has as much of a transformation as her grinchy boss. And Alto New York did a beautiful spot about a boy with cerebral palsy who uses eye tracking software to imagine the adventures he could have flying through his neighbourhood. Such an epic heartstring-tugger of the magical possibilities of the holidays - seen through the magical possibilities of that critical software innovation. 

Process

I really believe people need to be encouraged - and be given enough room and time - to get it more wrong, more often. Over lockdown, things necessarily got more linear and less spontaneous. These days, that’s compounded by this pressure to cover more ground, more quickly with fewer resources, which makes people want to land on the first idea “that works” and then build everything off that to meet the deadline. But for originality to win, we have to reset the expectation to seek ideas that might at first sit to the side of 'right' or 'working,' and which need more love, sweat and tears to come together. 

It’s always ironic to start cementing a process for something as volatile and surprising as creativity but at minimum, I like to set three expectations with creatives. One, come with more ideas that are less thought out. We can pull the wheat from the chaff together. Two, I want your ideas to succeed as much as you do, meaning, we’re on the same side. I’m greedy and will latch onto a cool nugget of an idea as eagerly as Gollum with his Precious, the difference here being that I’ll back you up in getting it out there, versus stealing it and disappearing into the outskirts of Mordor. And three, I’m not inherently 'right' because I’m the creative director - creativity is subjective and this is a collaboration between us. And between us and the clients. For that matter, between all of us and the world out there, who needs to see what we made and be moved by it in some way. 

Press - Part Deux

Growing up in other countries and moving around all the time got me comfortable being a bit of an outsider. It gives you a good perspective on the value of other viewpoints and cultures and beliefs. It feeds that open mindedness and curiosity that’s such a key part of creativity. 

I saw the directing duo the Daniels at AdColor in 2022 and their conversation blew my mind with the perspective of why representation and diverse perspectives matter. Daniel Scheinert made the point that his eagerness to work on Daniel Kwan’s ideas with him was not so much about a generosity of spirit as it was about a selfishness of wanting to work on cool shit. Kwan’s ideas were fresh and original. Daniel loved fresh and original and wanted to be part of putting that out into the world.

Originality feels exciting to a creative person and to this creative industry. It can also feel scary to business people who want to see more of what has worked already. The fastest way for great work to suffer is for fear to take hold of a group of people and turn the tide against an idea that needs people to believe in it and shape it. It takes work. It takes vision. It takes love. It takes every person on the team being ready to roll up their sleeves and problem solve at every turn to keep the idea moving in the right direction. Greg Hahn made a beautiful spot for GE that celebrated this notion of the fragility of an original idea - it can freak people out. But when people recognise the potential in it, can see what it could become and then do what it takes to guide it safely out into the world - that’s the stuff that gives you goosebumps. And that’s the stuff that gives brands their footing in the world and in people’s hearts.