The Sausage Factory of Ideas: Why Commercial Creativity Is an Oxymoron
- Martina Ellis
- Jun 12
- 5 min read
Inside the machine: on productised ideas, performative innovation, and the quiet urgency of creative revolt.
I’ve sat on both sides of the creative equation — agency and client. I’ve seen both the promise of creativity and the industrial process it so often becomes.
And somewhere along the way, I realised we weren’t making meaning anymore. We were making sausage.
This isn’t a takedown. It’s not even a lament. It’s a quiet reckoning — a reflection on how something so deeply human (the spark, the instinct, the story) gets processed into pre-approved, platform-ready “creative.” What once moved people now moves metrics. What once shaped culture now services the funnel.
There was a time — not perfect, not utopian — when agencies sold belief. Not impressions. Not CTRs. But belief in a brand, in an idea, in a version of the world where butter was luxury and soap could seduce. The strategy was a conversation. Creative directors were provocateurs. The job wasn’t to be liked. It was to be felt.
Then the machine caught up.
Enter - capitalism’s idea of efficiency.
As shareholder capitalism took hold, marketing became a dashboard. ROI replaced resonance. Brand building became pipeline management. CMOs stopped asking for “different” and started asking for “what worked last time.” And agencies — eager to stay useful — complied.
Creativity became a service. A deliverable. A line item in a budget spreadsheet.
And so here we are:
Idea factories producing brand-safe, channel-ready content.
Optimised for engagement. Designed to be approved.
Scaled for platforms. Sanitised for compliance.
What begins with belief is quickly stuffed with alignment, seasoned with key messages, and cased in legal and compliance review.
It might look like creativity — but it doesn’t feel like anything. It’s storytelling reverse-engineered for CTR. Art direction built for consensus, not conviction. It’s artisan sausage, cured and vacuum-sealed for quarterly distribution.
I’ve seen it happen. You start with something alive — urgency, tension, maybe even truth. And then the mincer begins. Decks swell with acronyms. Stakeholders assemble. Comments cascade. The work is softened, rounded, smoothed out. Until it’s safe.
And when it’s finally “done,” it looks like this:
Two headlines.
One Pinterest-inspired moodboard.
A campaign idea described as “disruptive yet digestible.”
Six social tiles that look like a Canva template doing its taxes.
Jony Ive once said, “There’s a danger of ideas being frozen too early because of the opinions of others.”
And it’s true. Death by a thousand polite edits. And still, we convince ourselves the pain makes it real.
We used to make culture. Now we make content.
Rick Rubin says, “The audience comes last.” In advertising, the audience comes first. Then the brand. Then legal. Then the media plan.
Then someone in procurement who forwards your email to someone else in procurement.
Rubin’s vision — intuitive, unresolved, discovered not manufactured — wouldn’t survive a single alignment meeting. It’d be politely “noted,” quietly deleted. Because today, anything unfamiliar is a liability.
And here’s the deeper irony: the economics of creativity now actively punish it.
Retainers reward volume.
Billables reward busywork.
Ideas that land fast? Margin risk.
So we pad timelines. Add backup options. Present one “bold” concept, flanked by two safe ones that look like Q2 activations. We dilute not because we want to — but because we know how the game is played. It’s not alignment. It’s erosion.
George Lois once said, “If you don’t burn out at the end of each day, you’re a bum.” The modern agency took that to heart. We wear exhaustion like proof of purpose. But the real cost isn’t the hours. It's a belief. And belief is a hard thing to get back once you’ve sold it out of habit.
As a result, we now live in a world of creative mimicry. As Ana Andjelic writes, brands no longer invest in creativity — they simulate it. Moodboards. Capsule drops. Art-adjacent language. A quote from Virgil Abloh on Slide 32. ROI projections on Slide 33. It’s all for show.
Looking creative is easier than risking actual creativity. The performance is safer than the possibility.
And yet — clients are not the villains. Most care deeply. But they’re caught in a different machine. CFOs don’t sign off on vibes. They sign off on funnel lift. So CMOs optimise. They trade conviction for consistency. They brief for what will clear the boardroom, not what will shift the culture.
And here’s the question no one wants to say out loud:
If AI can write the headline…
If the tone of voice is templated…
If every campaign ends in a dashboard…
What exactly are we still here for?
The answer is: meaning.
Not execution.
Not efficiency.
Not engagement.
Meaning.
The one thing creativity still protects — and the only thing worth fighting for.
Leonard Cohen said, “There is a crack in everything — that’s how the light gets in.”
That crack — between instinct and alignment, between risk and reason — is where real work still lives. The strange, specific, fragile thing that wasn’t obvious. That maybe wasn’t even welcome. But that made someone feel something.
Edward de Bono reminded us that creativity isn’t chaos — it’s mischief. A lateral step. A pattern disrupted.
But commercial machines don’t like disruption. They like benchmarks. Continuity. Certainty.
So we keep feeding the machine.
Not because it works — but because it’s familiar.
Do we burn it all down? Maybe. But more likely, we’ll tweak the workflow. Rename a department. Launch an AI plug-in.
The braver move is to rebuild the system around what creativity actually is.
Not decoration. Not seasoning. The engine.
