The Magic of Illogical Creativity
According to creativity researchers, there are four sides to creativity. Person (personality, habits, thoughts), product (the thing that results from creative activity), process (how you work), and press (environment factors, education and other external factors) all play a part. So, we figured, let’s follow the science to understand your art. Creativity Squared is a feature that aims to build a more well-rounded profile of creative people.
Justine Armour is partner and chief creative officer at New York agency FIG. Prior to joining FIG in 2023, Justine took a career break - a period that she looks upon fondly in which she learned vital lessons to keep her creativity at work topped up.
Before the career break, Justine led the creative department at Grey New York, helping the agency be named Comeback Agency of the Year in 2022, and leading winning pitches for Las Vegas Tourism, Modelo, IHG, Georgia Pacific and others. She has spent three-and-a-half years at 72andSunny New York, worked at Wieden+Kennedy Portland for five years, and spent time at agencies in her homeland of Australia such as Publicis Mojo Sydney, Saatchi & Saatchi and Clemenger BBDO.
Get to know more about Justine’s approach to creativity below.
Person
I’ve been in our business for a long time, and I came into it because I wanted to live a creative life. But as I got further into leadership roles, I noticed I had become mostly logical and rational in my creative approach. We need our leaders to be smart and clear, that’s how we trust them, but something was missing for me. So much of real creativity is emotion and illogic, and I had to find the confidence to let that true and important part of me become integrated into the work I do. So I’ve started to trust more in the intelligence of my feelings around creative things, and I’m having more fun and I think making better creative calls. I enjoy my role at work, but what energises my day-to-day job is making real time for personal creative projects. When I took a career break for a year, I joined a writing programme and wrote the first draft of a book, and I just finished an acting programme here in New York. It’s incredibly energising to tap into these different expressions of creativity that are outside the realm of my CCO job. After using creativity to make ads for 25 years, I’ve realised I do need some projects for pure indulgence that feed the part of me that’s still an artist.
Process
If you’re not starting with an intuitive truth in the brief, it’s going to be hard to get to compelling creative work. So I like to be in there with the strategy team from the start. Amber Higgins [chief strategy officer] and I are joined at the hip, and we call strategy at FIG our first creative act. We try to give the teams as much juicy inspiration and clarity as we can to make their process prolific and fun.
One of the things I did not enjoy as a young creative was when my leaders forced their ideas onto me, or couldn’t get attached to my or my partner’s ideas. So I’m conscious of encouraging my team to author the ideas, and we work closely together to shape them into something that they can feel real ownership of. I’m fortunate to have a great creative department of clever people whose taste I trust, which is everything.
Product
Judging a piece of creative work comes down to taste, and whether you trust your own gut feeling about something. As humans, we all have an innate coding system that dictates how we react to anything. Basically, we feel a yes, a yuck, or a meh, and it’s that simple. We need to be available to the sensations in our bodies to know how we feel about an idea, and you can know a creative idea has a magic that makes it worthy of being amplified in culture when you get physically excited about it. I invite our clients to judge the work that way as well. Then, is it simple? Ambitious? Beautiful? A set criteria for judging work is helpful, but relying on logic alone can still lead to boring, ‘correct’ but uninspired work. It’s taken me decades now, but I trust how I feel about a creative idea from that first instinctual reaction.
You can also feel when a creative person has brought something personal to the work. A few years ago I worked on a campaign I’m proud of for Secret deodorant, called ‘Stress-Tested for Women.’ A lot of female creatives worked on the idea and were drawn to the brand, and I loved that an idea coming from our personal experience was so magnetic to young female talent and resonated so strongly in the market. The personal is universal; something you felt deeply as an individual can be very powerful and impactful to a wide audience.
Press
I had a tough season a couple of years ago, got very stressed and then very sick, and from that experience I learned to keep my sense of humour about me, no matter what. I gave myself the gift of no longer engaging in stress-creating narratives that I have no control over. Keeping your energy around an inspired vision of how you intend for things to turn out, and not focusing so much on the fears and traps and complaints, is as important in life as it is on any creative project. I also stopped drinking alcohol which has made a big difference to my overall health, energy and creative output. I’m a lot lighter in spirit than I’ve ever been, and I’m enjoying my work more than I have in a long time.
As a creative person (which is all of us), it’s so crucial to play every day. As an industry sometimes we try to justify our value by turning it into a science, and we tend to make it boring and math-y to make ourselves sound smarter. But by far the single most valuable and impactful thing we do is the illogical part, which is also the fun part. That’s where the magic is.
