The Rant: Does Denver Suck the Creativity Out of You?

By / February 9, 2009 /

Volume 22 In a Series By Felix

I’m going to start this one with an unnecessarily long trip back in time to my childhood. Sorry, but hey, it’s my column. Anyway, when I was 14 years old I was something of a fast runner. 100m, 200m, 4×100m relay, all that good stuff. I was relatively fast, but I wasn’t the fastest in my school though. That accolade went to a guy who was by all accounts a freak of nature; a superhuman 14-year-old with the body of an Olympic athlete.

When we were doing time trials, no one would ever run against him. To be honest, it was demoralizing. He always finished a good two seconds faster than anyone and he never even broke a sweat. When he threw the javelin, he launched it like a rocket. When he did the high jump, they had to raise the bar way higher for him just to keep him interested.

I would usually win my races when I was competing, and recorded some fast times; but I often felt bad for the Superman kid who was running on his own. So, one day I challenged him to a race. He was really happy and said he’d try and take it easy on me. But I said, “No way man, give me your best.” Needless to say, he won, and by an embarrassing margin.

Here’s the thing though…that race was the fastest race I had ever ran in my life. My time was a full half-second faster than any race I’d ever ran before, and half a second is huge in the 100m. Despite losing, and losing huge, I was competing at a higher level, and that raised my game. From that point on, I always tried to race against the freak of nature because it made me a better runner. But when we competed at a county level, he was reduced from amazing to just another great runner. And me, I was no longer a contender. I sucked.

Now, unless you suck at metaphors, you can easily see where this is going. My friend was a solid New York agency; he was a London boutique. And I was, well, your average Denver creative shop. I thought I was doing pretty good until I came up against someone way better. And even though he helped me raise my game, I was still way out of my league at a higher level.

I have seen amazingly creative people come to Denver and begin to coast, and then sink like a stone. To be honest, there’s very little creative competition here; it’s way too easy to fly on autopilot and still bring home the bacon. I know, I’ve been guilty of it myself. I have casually written copy with one hand while I was watching Flight Of The Conchords, and the client still loved the end result. Copy that would have been laughed out of the office of a big city agency was not only presented, but bought, by a happy client. After all, they know no better and why should I bother killing myself when pretty good is good enough?

Months later, when I have re-read some of the copy or ideas I have presented, I look down in shame. How dare I cheat myself and my client? But when I do go that extra mile, I’m often (almost always) met with puzzled looks from a client who only knows the Denver market and doesn’t like this “artsy-fartsy” stuff I’m presenting. To paraphrase Bill Hicks, “I feel like the client is staring at me like a dog who’s just been shown a card trick.” And when the client actually does get it, it becomes the victim of the death of a thousand cuts.

Worse still, even when I raise my game, I’m still not at the level I used to play at in the big cities. Ideas that I think are good are, well, not really that good. My friends in NY and London look at my “great” ideas with a heady mix of pity and disdain. And that is the problem with Denver.

As a city, we don’t have the quantity of quality agencies that we need to raise everyone’s game. Sure, there’s CP&B – a very large fish swimming in a very small pond. But many creatives I talk to think that CP&B is an impossible standard to hold yourself up to.

I disagree. Most of us don’t have their budgets or blue-chip clients, but CP&B prides itself on innovation and lateral thinking. The recent Whopper Sacrifice idea was cheap and effective, and could have been done for anyone from Chipotle to Daz Bog (indeed, I would sacrifice most of my Facebook friends for a big, fat Chipotle burrito.) But all too often, it’s a lot easier to kick back, go home at 5pm and collect a paycheck.

Here at The Denver Egotist, we occasionally marvel at some of the work produced by the likes of TDA and Sukle; but being great in Denver is not the same as being great nationwide. If I may continue the metaphor I started with, winning the race here does not give you the props to win an Olympic Gold. Indeed, some of TDA’s best work may not even make the cut on some of the reels of big NY and London agencies. It’s not bad work by any means; it’s creative and solid. But the big agencies have better work and there’s only room for so many campaigns. In short, Denver’s best is not up to par with the best in the USA, let alone the world, and sadly, most agencies and creatives are not close to producing Denver’s best work.

So what can we do about it? Many CDs tell you to give solutions, not problems. Well, I think the easiest place to start is to look beyond Denver when you’re doing any project. If you’re from a renowned agency and you arrive fresh-faced in Denver, continue to do work like you used to. Don’t look at Denver as your benchmark.

If you’ve lived and worked here most of your life, you can’t be an ostrich with your head in the sand. Doing work that wins an ADCD accolade isn’t the same as a One Show or D&AD (if you care about awards). When a lady from Waldport, Oregon, wins her town beauty pageant, she can feel proud. But that doesn’t make her a shoe-in to win Miss World. Chances are, she won’t even win Miss Oregon.

Denver has the ability to produce some quality work, but we must set the bar higher than Denver. As a city, we don’t have a steady stream of amazing work to measure our own creativity against. We must look to the best of the best of the best as our mentors. Only then will Denver have a chance of one day being one of those cities that can be called a creative hot spot without a sense of irony or sarcasm. Dream big.