Creativity Squared: Why Haley Garyet Is a 'Feel it in Your Gut' Kind of Person

Haley is a creative director at WorkInProgress, where she creates action-based advertising, innovations, content, and campaigns for brands like Mike’s Hard Lemonade, Jimmy John’s, Nescafé, and Capital One.

Prior to her time at WIP, Haley worked at TDA Boulder on advertising and design for Patagonia, General Mills, Daiya, Chobani, and Noodles & Company.

Here’s what people have to say about her work: 

“How about a happy ending instead?”

“If Quentin Tarantino Directed an Advertisement.”

“Finally, someone who compliments Millennials.”

“I love how it says “DO NOT ATTEMPT” at the bottom, as if anyone would actually try to do this.”

Haley lives in Boulder, Colorado with her husband Michael, daughter Navy, and cat Honey.

Person

What kind of creative person are you?

A pretty nervous one, to be honest. For someone who generally likes to know that things are under control, creativity can be way too horrifyingly uncontrollable and intangible. What if it doesn’t show up when I need it to? What if it shape-shifts? What if it moseys on out of my brain when I blow my nose and I never get it back? I know what creative inspiration feels like when it hits, but how to harness it or control it or tend to it? It’s a mystery.

Creativity feels a little bit like this parasite that I’m symbiotically involved with – it doesn’t belong to me, but it’s in me. It takes up a lot of brain space and eats up a bunch of energy, and sometimes it keeps me from sleeping at night. But I’ve become used to it, and I like feeding it, and a lot of my favourite people have their own creative parasites, and sometimes we trade parasites or toss them back and forth, and when we put our parasites together they make more parasites and it’s fun for everyone. Weirdly, someone pays me to have this parasite…though maybe you’re wondering why, at this point in the interview.

Attempting to wrangle creativity and losing an arm in the process

Product 

How do you judge the creativity of a piece of work?

I’m a big 'feel it in your gut' judger of creative work. Which does not automatically translate to being an excellent director of other creatives. The big challenge of this job is to take that 'oh crap, that’s IT' feeling you get when the spark of something amazing comes across your desk, and then communicate (1) WHY it’s gonna be good and (2) HOW to make it come to life.

So research plays a big part in grounding my emotional reaction to work and rooting my feedback in something tangible. The more I know about a product, brand, cultural touchpoint, or territory, the more honed my instincts get, and the better I can be at communicating why an idea does or doesn’t work.

But in reality, I know we work in a highly subjective industry. I’m not the target for every piece of creative. And no matter how much I read, watch, or steep myself in different ways of seeing things, I’ll never share the lived experience of every single person in the room, much less the world.

So I try to encourage the other creatives I work with to hone their own 'oh crap, that’s IT' muscle, to fight for the ideas they feel in their gut, and to root the work they really love in strategy and research. That way they have all the fodder they need to tell me my feedback is short sighted or irrelevant, and go on to make work I’m jealous of. Which is a scenario that makes me really happy.

Oh crap, that’s IT!

Process

Oh man, I wouldn’t recommend my 'process' to anyone. It’s a hot mess of waiting for inspiration to strike and trusting that it will before deadline. I’m going on 15 years of working in a creative industry, and I still get nervous *every *single *day that the ideas just won’t come (See: Harnessing the Parasite, above).

But I’m here to answer your questions and I’ve already demonstrated that I’m excellent at metaphors, so here’s a garden analogy:

First, I till and prep the creative soil by making sure I’m well-rested and well-fed (food is v important to my garden).

Next, I plant seeds by collecting inspiration, mostly in the form of YouTube videos of robots failing at their tasks, directors’ reels, some New Yorker article I read five years ago, plus all the other articles I encounter while trying to track down said article. 

Throw in some market research fertilizer. 

Then I just have to sit there with all that rich, seeded soil and hope that it churns together and grows into something insightful, clever, and on brief – a perfect flower to pluck and present to the client (and not, say, a screenplay nobody asked for about idiot robots failing hilariously in their mission to take over the world).

Having a creative partner to throw ideas at can help determine which thoughts are the seeds of good work and which are the seeds of a dumb robot screenplay. But sometimes I just have to get that dumb robot out of my head and onto paper before all the good, useful ideas hiding behind him come pouring out. Or blossoming. Or whatever. I’ve lost track of my metaphor (See: Really, Who Is Paying You?, above). 

Tilling and prepping the creative soil

Press

I was brought up in this industry by people who thought every ad had to justify its existence. So I don’t have much patience for advertising that doesn’t give something back to the people whose time we’re stealing – the people whose show or podcast or unimpeded view on either side of the highway we’re interrupting. Whether it’s by making viewers laugh, or making them think (even if what they think makes them uncomfortable), or giving them something truly useful in exchange for their attention, I feel strongly that every ad should do something more than exist just for the sake of filling a media placement. 

There’s a godawful amount of money in this industry, and without getting too far up on my high horse (and boy, that horse can get high), I think it’s pretty crappy not to use that money at the VERY BARE MINIMUM to create something that entertains the people who see it.

I’ve been lucky to work with agencies, clients, and teams who feel the same way I do about advertising, and we’ve made some work I’m really proud of. I don’t take that lightly, because I can be confrontation-shy, and sometimes pushing work beyond the status quo takes some good ol’ healthy confrontation. I don’t mind saying that I’ve benefitted nicely (and learned a lot) from the talents of smart, passionate people who are willing to fight for work that respects the people who will see it.

Getting comfortable with making people uncomfortable