Turns out, every day as a creative professional, I’m in a Keynesian Beauty Contest.
I think we all agree that an artist is someone who seeks the beauty of truth, someone who, by exploring and expanding his or her own perceptions of the world, enriches the lives of those who experience his or her art. That’s what we creative professionals do all day long.
Only we don’t.
That would never be enough to produce great creative work for our clients. We’re not in the business of simply arresting and elevating our audience. We’re in the business of arresting our audience and taking them on a journey to develop a relationship with a brand, a product and/or a service. So, my most effective work won’t necessarily be about what’s going on in my soul and how that connects with the larger world around me. It’s about what will arrest the target audience of my client and move him or her to action, measurable action. As a creative, I use my own perceptions to predict what my audience will respond to, but it's not the overriding factor.
That’s where the Keynesian Beauty Contest comes in. The economist John Maynard Keynes used the analogy of a beauty contest when trying to describe how rational people think in a stock market where value often depends on how many investors choose to buy stock in a company not the company’s actual worth. (Trust me, this connects back to creativity pretty fast.)
Imagine a newspaper contest where entrants are shown pictures of beautiful faces and asked to choose not the one they find most attractive, but the face they think most people would find most beautiful. That changes your judgment by a few degrees. You’re now not thinking about yourself — though you’re using your own view as a starting point. You’re running a simulation in your mind of another person’s perceptions. That added dimension changes the result of the contest.
That’s what creative professionals do every day. We conduct a kind of Keynesian Beauty Contest.
I’m not claiming there’s no art in creative work. There is — lots. But it’s in service to the client and our marketing goals. And really great creative work arrests, elevates and achieves business objectives. In other words, outstanding creative doesn't just win beauty contests, it gets the job done.
If you’d like to see a Keynesian Beauty Contest in action, NPR’s Planet Money did a fun practical demonstration here.