Claims about “creativity” anchor LEGO marketing strategies and the meanings ascribed to LEGO products.  The company pledges parent- and educator-friendly engagement “in the development of children’s creativity through play and learning.”  Countless press releases tout this support of creativity; even the embrace of media licenses like Star Wars was framed as a boon to (rather than limit upon) creative imagination.  The ideological frame of creativity also underpinned LEGO’s most recent gender-differentiated appeals to girl builders.  While the 2012 LEGO Friends theme commendably corrected the exclusive focus on boys, would-be inclusiveness manifested predictably as market segregation.  Girls and boys were not imagined as playing together, but instead as two classes of builders with different creative desires and needs.  Girls, according to LEGO, needed more role-playing and even different kinds of human representations (“minidolls” instead of minifigures).  Notions of inherent creative difference legitimated narrowly gendered marketing appeals.

Defenders of Friends nevertheless pitched the modular creativity of LEGO as a get-out-of-gender-free card.  Kids “don’t have to follow” the included instructions, this thinking went.  Gender normative bakeries and beauty salons could become pink and purple starfighters.  Though packaging and instructions offer what Ellen van Oost and Mary Kearney term “gender scripts,” the reconfigurable nature of LEGO product promised such scripts could also be “backdoors,” enticing already gendered subjects to creative experimentation.  The ideological utility of creativity for LEGO came in both demanding gender conformity and offering ways out of it.

The LEGO Movie ruminates endlessly on this idea of following instructions.  “Masterbuilders” like Vetruvius and Wyldstyle initially devalue Emmet’s interest in building and living by the instructions of mass culture.  And yet, the film does not completely disarticulate creativity from such instructions.  As Emmet takes on leadership, he explains the virtues of instructions as a platform for creative teamwork.  And while the film culminates (spoiler alert) in a live-action meta-conflict over proper use of LEGO toys between an instruction-minded father and free-building son, the compromise reached suggests the father will continue building by instructions, just with newfound support for his son’s reconfiguration of them.  The climactic action sequence in the animated world too turns on the idea of LEGO people rebuilding a prefabricated world, turning ice cream trucks into winged attack vehicles.  In line with LEGO’s marketing of instruction-based building sets as “creative,” the film locates creativity somewhere beyond the instructions, but still figures those scripts as a key first step toward creativity.  Meanwhile, the Ice Cream Machine can be sold in stores with instructions for building both on-screen configurations.

And despite the mélange of LEGO product in the film, including a visit to Cloud Cuckoo Palace that offers far more queer combinations of bricks than ever offered in prior instruction-based sets, the gender-specified creativity of LEGO Friends remains absent.  The minidoll does not exist in this world.  In the film’s concluding joke, meanwhile, the live-action father insists that a toddler sister join in the family play—a moment some take to task for suggesting that girls would disrupt the masculine creativity being celebrated.  But that critique may give LEGO too much credit.  As imagined by LEGO marketing, this toddler would be a user of larger DUPLO bricks, a product LEGO is still willing to market (in part) via gender-neutral appeals, in significant contrast to gendered segregation for older markets. The LEGO Movie does not acknowledge the possibility of girls aged four-and-up (or mothers) sharing in this creative LEGO play, more easily recognizing the creative commonality of privileged male consumers with DUPLO toddlers than with feminized Friends builders.  Rather than entertaining disruption of LEGO’s creative ideologies, this narrative extension of LEGO play to a less fully gendered toddler market affirms their boundaries.

Ultimately, this film helps positions creativity as something that unfolds in relation, but not strict opposition, to clearly defined scripts (gendered or otherwise).  Obviously, that serves the instruction-based product LEGO markets, but it also has implications for how we understand the “creativity” of those who make use of it.

In advertising, the “creative” department makes the ads. Distinct from agency account executives (who service the client) or agency media buyers (who buy media time and space), the “creatives” are responsible for generating the advertising concept and executing it textually and visually. Through the first half of the twentieth century, copywriting departments produced text (“copy”), often guided by account executives, and art departments illustrated it. Historically, what is now called the creative was regarded as a service supplemental to media buying.

Before the 1960s, hard sell advertising predominated. Hard sell’s repetitive, annoying, grating “reasons why” to buy was the favored strategy when advertisers believed consumers were “stupid” and the market an undifferentiated mass. By the 1960s, however, advertisers realized that consumers could be sophisticated and that markets are varied and segmented. Advertisers turned to the strategies of subtle, humorous, high concept, and emotionally appealing soft sell advertising. Doyle Dane Bernbach’s 1960s Volkswagen ads, a humorous critique of 1950s hard sell automobile advertising, became the iconographic campaign of the “Creative Revolution.” Copywriters such as Bill Bernbach championed the idea that advertising is an art, not a science.

The post-1960s emphasis on creativity solves a problem for the ad industry. Despite the scientistic behaviorism dominating market research, advertisers cannot predict which advertising appeals will resonate with consumers. So if advertising is not a science but an art, creative advertising may succeed where data-driven advertising may not. Hence, since the 1960s the creatives have rhetorically positioned themselves not as instrumentalists pursuing selling goals but as artists expressing authentic meaning because only though artistry will advertising succeed in touching and moving consumers.

As depicted in The Pitch, the advertising industry is a hotbed of artistic romanticism. In each episode, two agencies meet a client, who explains a marketing problem. The agencies retreat to their offices to develop an advertising concept and a pitch to win the account. Scenes of brainstorming follow, intercut with talking heads explaining themselves directly to the camera. Finally, each agency presents its pitch and one wins the account.

Dramatic tension centers on which agency can prove they are the most creative. Their creativity, however, must be rooted in authenticity, as one agency leader explains in episode 102: “It doesn’t need to be clever, it needs to be honest.” In fact, being glib could undermine them: “We don’t want to outsmart ourselves with clever lines.”

Creative success in advertising should reflect a commitment to meaning; referring to a creative director, another explains, “He’s not in it for the power or the ego, he’s in it for the work.” Referring to careers in advertising, one man explains, “If you’re not committed, if you’re not passionate, you’re not going to be here a long time.” Passion, the byword of the creative industries, is something that cannot be learned. As one agency director explains, “You can’t teach passion, you have to hire passion.”

For one creative director, “The creative process is baring your soul.” Describing pitching to potential clients, another explains, “When you get up in front of them to present your ideas, it’s like being naked and hoping they don’t laugh at you.” Hence, whatever instrumental goal they may be working towards, such as improving the public image of a trash company or selling Subway breakfast sandwiches, these advertising makers insist on their artistic integrity, claiming “the work” is an authentic revelation of self.

The cult of romanticism, and its rhetorical strategies of passion and soulfulness, will continue to thrive in advertising because advertisers are not able to predict which ideas resonate with consumers, despite market research data. The Pitch documents the legacy of the Creative Revolution by showing proponents of creativity in advertising insisting on the value of artfulness over scientism.  Whether or not we believe that the advertising creatives featured in The Pitch believe in the authenticity of their creative work, they are certainly selling it. Hard.