Creativity Memes = Profit?

The advertising world is getting really void of creativity, yet producing great ads. How is this possible? Because it is actively raiding the creative energy of our collective minds via the internet. Ad firms no longer have to come up with the “great idea”, we do that all the time for them, they just have to spot ours’, and that’s not hard, they spread like wildfire. Then, all they need to do buy us out, usually rather cheaply, or not at all and just steal it. This spreads beyond product advertising. The news and other media are just as guilty of stuffing their reels and pages with unthoughtful drivel on these creativity memes as they surface. The people that come up with these things are usually quite bright, why don’t they try asking them some intelligent questions and educate their audience a little?

This is speaking from my own experience with major firms and media outlets approaching myself and others in my community for our photographic content, often after attempting it themselves and failing, and then I see these two commercials:

And the much less interesting, although, slick edition for business class:

What does the creative brilliance of animating a scene with LED lights and stop motion photography have to do with cell phones? Answer: absolutely nothing! They can’t even claim their brilliant ad firms came up with anything original. Perhaps if they shot it on one of their camera-phones, sure… but I seriously doubt that was the technique.

It’s kinda sad really…

I share the things I create online in a optimistic attempt to inspire and get the public to create! I often aim to educate, but will settle for entertainment. I do not aim to encourage people to buy things, especially completely unrelated things.

The question becomes, what do we do about it? Does every good idea have to continue to die by over saturation within 6 months? What can we, as a creative online public do to protect our own creations from creatively bankrupt corporations? We could just not put anything online, but what fun is that?

An interesting question to think about.