Which are you?

I noticed something just now. If you mix up the letters of the word Creative you can quickly wind up with the word Reactive.

In a weird way, at least in advertising, the opposite of creative is reactiveness. After all, there are creatives don't create, instead they react to the burps, belches and farts emanating from client orifices. Sadly, most agencies and most clients, and I suppose most Chief Creative Officers and Executive Creative Directors, don't really want creatives. They want reactives. In other words they create a set or rules, protocols, strictures or time-tables so prescriptive and baroque that there is no way to create, only a way to react. So you fill your timesheet working on negotiations not communications.

Of course there's something worse. There are creatives who prefer to be reactives--who choose to be. It's easier. Easier to do the work and easier not having to fight.