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Annette King: How creative industries became too hard for the world to ignore

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One hotly debated theory in linguistics is that our thinking is constrained by our vocabulary; you can’t discuss or promote anything until you’ve got a name for it. It used to feel a bit transgressive to watch five hours of Boardwalk Empire back to back. Then someone called it a “box-set binge” and suddenly it felt okay. “There’s a name for it, so it’s now officially ‘a thing’. So it’s not just me who does this.”

When I began working in advertising in 1991, there was no such thing as the “creative industries” as the phrase was many years away from being coined. ADVERTISING People in advertising, software, architecture, television and computer games design, might have occasionally socialised together, but we never realised we worked in the same part of the economy.

This was the era of the controversial Benetton advert; a photograph of a new-born baby girl still attached to her umbilical cord, an eruption of real life plastered across billboards, which changed the face of advertising forever. My first foray into this world was in a tiny agency of 12 people called Mighty Mouse Communications. The founder started his agency after having to leave his previous (large established) agency because he’d punched the 6 foot 3 inches creative director. He was shorter than me (I’m 5 foot 4). This resulted in him a) being fired and b) the now-defunct Today newspaper giving him the title The Mighty Mouse Supremo of Advertising. That was it; I was hooked on this crazy industry, where a whole company started because two blokes had a punch-up.

In the late 1990s the creative industries started to gain a clear identity with the formation of the Creative Industries Task Force by the then government. Without this articulation, the odds are nobody would have spotted that these creative industries are among the fastest-growing parts of the UK economy, an average of 10% a year in the past five years, and accounting for an ever larger share of our service exports. We might well have ended up bracketed in a category called “other”, along with our £77 billion contribution to the UK economy and 1.7 million jobs. We are the UK business’s white knights. Ours is an astonishing success story by any measure.

But I would like to contend that the UK should be disproportionately happy about any growth which comes from creative businesses. Why? First of all, creative businesses are clean. The amount of carbon dioxide generated for every pound of value created is very small by comparison with most human activities. Any activity where you can potentially create properties worth millions with nothing more than talent, a pencil, a laptop, a camera or a mobile phone (and a lawyer or two) is good news for those of us who believe it is possible to create wealth without imposing heavy costs somewhere else.

The second reason to be optimistic is that growth in these industries is surprisingly enduring. There is a path-dependence to the establishment of creative centres (think Silicon Valley or Hollywood), which mean your advantages cannot be easily stolen by someone who copies your process and undercuts you on price. Businesses may shop for cut-price Chinese widgets but Harry Potter fans aren’t yet buying cut-price Chinese wizards. Creative jobs are also much less vulnerable to automation than more traditional forms of economic activity.

But the biggest reason to cherish the creative industries is a much more human one, which is that they do something to counterbalance the rising problem of “bad inequality” in the UK. I wouldn’t claim for a second that creative businesses are egalitarian. However, almost all such businesses offer a lifelong equality of opportunity which other careers no longer afford. Though there’s no shortage of highly qualified graduates in our world, qualifications on their own are no guarantee of anything. The creative industries do not yet suffer from some of the credentialist rackets which limit the potential of people working in other fields, where the degree you get aged 21 sets a ceiling on your possible future success. It is still possible for someone to start their career rigging the lights and through effort and talent to end up as a film director, or to start in the postroom and reach the boardroom. The 1.7 million jobs are by and large emotionally rewarding. And, for all the Shoreditch stereotypes, they are astoundingly varied.

A successful creative business requires a diverse mixture of temperaments, talents and specialisms, which means they can ultimately provide rewarding work for a far wider cast of characters than finance or tax law. And they make Britain a more interesting place for everyone else. London’s role as a financial centre rests on its success as a creative centre. Let’s face it, few bankers, let alone their families, dream of moving to Frankfurt.

Annette King is chief executive of marketing agency Ogilvy & Mather Group UK

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