How to be innovative and find your voice when you use it to make money in advertising
Experience provides wisdom to draw from, but it tempers the power of naivety. The more ingrained your adopted approach, the harder it is to see past it. Through experience doesn't rule out innovation, it can make it more difficult to access. -Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being
You wouldn't run a marathon without training.
Or start shooting half-court shots in an important Basketball game without warming up.
Or make yourself the center of a crowded dance-floor without any sense of the basic steps, rhythm, or cultural context.
Or really, for that matter, expect the type of attention you want in any space without understanding the basic norms and rules for engagement.
But at what point is fear of failure and avoidance of risk more negative than overconfidence? At what point do we need to let go of what has served us and transcend it to keep growing?
When I started in the subscription space at Calm, the competition was generally not sophisticated. This wasn't only in terms of product, onboarding, and monetization but especially true in terms of ads. It was clear that, outside of one or two apps, people really didn't have a sense for what they were doing in direct response creative.
Further, the idea of copying competitors was taboo, to the degree that we were some of the first to do it.
Today, the subscription space is more sophisticated and fragmented, with dozens of competent apps all jockeying to be in first place. Many came from behind, first copying ruthlessly, iterating quickly, and now making their own innovations. Even as they start to make new contributions, the next wave of apps is now following in their footsteps, and the edge that comes from copying is now eroding as more people take on the practice.
I still recommend copying from others to learn the foundations, and think you need to adopt frameworks to help you scale. Further, at scale, there's a lot that can be solved through brute force iteration. But at some point, the safety and familiarity of frameworks will lock you in a box and run the ecosystem dry of ideas. You need to regularly figure out what's missing and what your contribution is going to be in order to breathe life into things, both internally on your team and in the context of the larger ecosystem.
If you are successfully copying others, iterating within frameworks, blending frameworks, and bringing ideas in from disparate places (such as other industries or user research), you should also be trying to get to the place where you can sit down with a piece of paper and write a good ad from scratch, in your own style.
This is the point where you want to run your race, shoot your shot, and dance your dance.
Athletes call this state being in the zone. Musicians call it being in the pocket. It's more colloquially known as being in flow, and is the end goal of The Meta Game.
Being in flow isn't a set of skills. It's a mindset and a practice – both as an individual contributor and as a team.
Just like in sports, or in improvised music, nothing is ever created in isolation – it's a group thing, cultivated from collective energy.
On that note, innovation can look like writing incredible copy, or thinking of the best idea, but it can also look like being a great teammate. It can come from intentionally curated creative time, but it can also come from mundane moments in a creative culture.
You don't need to be the star of the show to be impactful. In both music and sports, the most impactful thing you can do to help the group get in the right groove may mean not trying to score or not playing, and the same applies in business. A well structured production process or a well timed question in a creative meeting, intended to bring out other's creativity, is often times the most impactful part of the creative process.
Regardless, knowing what part you need to play in order to leave a mark starts from understanding yourself – from knowing what unique contributions you can make that other people can't copy, and owning them.
The Afterward: Finding Yourself
The first iteration of the Meta Game took me about 10 hours to write. The result was 25 pages of raw stream-of-conscious instruction to standardize my strategy around creative for an internal team. I wrote it in a fever dream when I was at my peak performance.
Translating it for a broader audience, at a different point in my life, has drawn out over 15 months. This post in particular, started three months ago and has taken multiple forms.
Most of the tactical advise of The Meta game looks similar to the original 25-page-fever-dream. Breakdowns of the levels and the tactical practices around iteration, brainstorming, user research, etc are all something I was able to quickly articulate when I started writing the blog.
But the original section about the last stage of the creative hierarchy of needs was mostly blank. I've taken these last three months to reflect on the notion of innovation and creativity in hopes of having something more tangible to share. The result was a good amount of content which I've now scrapped.
Instead, what I've settled on is that I was right to leave that section mostly empty. It’s not really for me to tell you how to be creative.
I believe innovation and creativity in most contexts is highly personal. It's a combination of mastering foundations, and leveraging the parts of yourself that are uniquely yours – the skillsets, interests, experiences that might seem disconnected from the practice at hand but have been accumulated over a life of living. It's developed through an awareness of yourself, and only something that you can discover through your own process of toiling through the work and discovering your own strengths and style.
For me, my innovation at Calm was driven mostly from a true passion for mindfulness, psychology, and desire to make an impact on the world in a work-culture that embraced and rewarded experimentation and creativity.
It was a reflection of a life growing up on the frontiers of the internet, curiously scouring the obscure corners and getting a sense for what is likely to crossover into the mainstream, and a long career of making money off of trends. It was activated through a daily practice of reading and writing that I've cultivated throughout my life, that has allowed me to articulate what I saw in an audience that I was well attuned to, and the workhorse energy I had at that time to drive it forward.
My innovation now largely lives through The Meta Game. It's a reflection of being inspired by others, wanting to give back, and needing to explore my own creativity. Ironically it's also been the tool that has made me economically free – something I've always desired and aimed for when I started my first career as a proprietary trader, but without the cost of feeling disconnected from others and doing meaningless work that drove me from that industry.
In those days, I remember my world opening when I read Godel Escher Bach – which illustrates how lower level mental systems stacked on top of themselves in beautiful recursion and emerged as our conscious world. It planted a seed in me that not only opened my mind about how consciousness works but shifted my perspective on my purpose.
I have immense gratitude for contributions of people like Eric Seufert, that made tactical and useful content about the foundations of User Acquisition, such as User Acquisition 101, writings through mobiledevmemo, and exposed me to a broader community through his slack server. When I stumbled into the industry this was how I started running with things, and The Meta Game is my way of trying to make good on what has been given to me in the creative part of UA, that I felt was largely not understood at the time.
And lastly, the idea for The Meta Game was partly born through my exposure to Will Larson, the Calm executive who wrote the book An Elegant Puzzle. Similar to Godel Escher Bach, this is a series of well-ordered, recursive principles, stacking into something much larger than it's individual parts – but instead of an ode to consciousness, it's an evergreen engineering career guide.
As a final note, innovation is not only a reflection of your skills and your craft but your energetic state.
Work motivation comes in peaks and valleys and for those who are in the field of doing creative work for a business, it's critically important to understand the relationship between your own creativity and the work you're doing to fulfill other people's creative dreams.
In this regard, there has been nothing more valuable to me then Poetry and Preservation of the Soul in The Heart of Corporate America.
Simply said, while there are varying levels of alignment between your own creative dreams and those of your employer, it's important to stay connected to when these things are in tension and cultivate a creative practice outside of work that fills up your cup, so you aren't run dry by the flow of energy you use to stay alive.
There are times I would have written The Meta Game in a month or two. But my life is much richer now. It's because of this book that this blog was created and also the reason it has taken fifteen months to get this far.
Next steps of The Meta Game
The Meta Game does not start or stop. It is a strange loop. While this is the end of the Creative Hierarchy of needs, The Meta Game in practice is just beginning.
In future chapters, we will be exploring how to structure The Meta Game tactics into week-to-week strategies based on things that are unique to your business, such as market size, spend levels, and rates of creative fatigue – and how to stack strategies in a way that regularly has you producing innovative concepts as a team.
As a result, don't forget to subscribe to the newsletter for future iterations and to share with friends.