Creativity in the Face of Coronavirus
In moments of crisis, I’m always struck by a sudden, fuller understanding of human beings’ capacity for creativity. As a society, we tend to ascribe creativity to a limited sect of the populations – ‘creatives’. A subset of people seemingly supernaturally gifted with the ability to ‘create’ things or bring new ideas to the fold.
Yet, when our collective humanity is confronted by an obstacle, all of us create our own methods to overcome it. It is a testament to our innate ability to think outside, around, and inside the box in order to solve challenging problems. Trials like these give us a fuller picture into human potential and remind us – given the right environment and space – that anyone of us can be creative. Here are just a few of my favorite examples of creativity in the face of Coronavirus.
Virtual Happy Hours
As social creatures, we have a fundamental need to connect and share things with others. Modern technology platforms have quickly been retrofitted to serve a myriad of purposes. My own company, BEN hosted a company party, complete with a renowned DJ Captain Cuts! Over 100 employees participated as we jammed out as a company.
Distributed Creative Production
Remote production is ramping up, replacing larger productions with skeleton teams of creatives to push out content. Even after the shutdown subsides, this sort of production will have large staying power, especially for cost sensitive productions. Here are some of my favorites thus far.
SayGrace’s Boy Aint Shit music video uses a mix of 3 shots on our singers that oscillate between wide and close. Rotoscoped animation keep the music video interesting throughout the song.
John Krasinki’s breakout YouTube success, Some Good News, cleverly uses social media submissions to cobble together 15 minute episodes that showcase good news from the internet.
Budweiser | One Team campaign smartly leveraged licensed clips and effective voiceover to quickly produce an emotion ad about coming together, highlighting what the brand was doing to combat the crisis and support their community.
Community Creativity
Car Parades have become a community pillar, helping people celebrate together while social distancing. From teachers visiting their students to celebrating 100th year birthdays to a child beating cancer, these community driven events is a heart warming example of homegrown creative solutions in action.
Is there anything that encapsulates a quarantine better than a Rube Goldberg machine? Stuck in a house with nothing but time and bored residents, building an unnecessarily complicated contraption to do an inane task represents to me the pinnacle of global self-isolation. The immense joy these creative absurdities bring me is almost as silly as the machines themselves. I love the act of creating something so perfectly pointless just because one could.
Business Creativity
HEB is a San Antonio grocery store chain known for its Southern hospitality, fresh food, and reasonable prices. The Texas company has also been behind one of the most innovative grocery store transformations – parking lot pickup. Texas presents a dual problem for businesses, a car-centric state with rural communities that make delivery hard and expensive. HEB’s parking lot pickup system solves for both. Customers order their groceries via the app, pull into an HEB parking lot, text their parking spot number, and someone simply brings groceries to the car. A simple, creative solution that will undoubtedly stay well past the coronavirus.
Source https://www.instagram.com/nickelmine/
The Nickel Mine, my favorite LA sports bar, is getting creative with pick-up and delivery orders. They’re including toilet paper rolls on orders, giving their pick-up patrons the means to both chow down and squat down all in one order. Yet, my favorite thing has to be their DIY cocktail kits so anyone make their favorite boozy beverage at home. Creative pivots like these separate successful businesses from those that fail.
The outpouring of creative energy is inspiring. Large or small, take this time to write, build, design, work, or CREATE something that you are proud of. The act of creation - that’s what creativity is all about.