In the creative industries, there is a persistent belief that the gatekeepers – movie producers, book publishers, talent scouts – seek truly original ideas. Nothing could be more wrong.
Everywhere, the scene is the same. When the time comes for the gatekeepers of the creative industries to say what kind of new content they are looking for, one word pops up again and again: originality. Hollywood moguls declare that the hunt is on for original movie manuscripts. Broadcasters sit on crowded MIPTV discussion panels and state that they look for unique, original ideas for new prime time television series. At literary seminars, book publishers announce that they are on the lookout for original voices, novel approaches to the novella. Everywhere, originality is lauded as the key ingredient, the central requirement for making it through the very narrow gates that separate the directors and the authors from the multitudes of hopeful wannabes.
In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. All the talk about true originality is best understood as a sort of industry jargon, not to be taken at face value. The truth is that the vast majority of gatekeepers are looking for unoriginal ideas – old ideas in a slightly new wrapping, just different enough from the predecessors to avoid the most abject accusations of plagiarism. There are gatekeepers out there who on occasion take a chance on something truly, radically original, but they are few and far between – and for good reason.
The issue is not that the gatekeepers are conservative by nature; they simply wish to keep their jobs, and doing that means becoming risk-averse. The creative industries are all marred by one ugly fact: they have very high failure rates when it comes to predicting what new products will actually work in the market. And unlike other industries, where consumers happily consume the exact same product for years – think of Coca-Colas or Big Macs – consumers of creative products continuously crave small doses of change. They want their Big Mac to taste slightly different every time they eat – only they will not accept just any different taste, it has to be both new and good.
Getting this mix right has proven to be notoriously difficult for the gatekeepers of the creative industries; despite decades of looking, nobody has yet found the strategy that allows them to pinpoint the winners with any certainty (at least not before most of the production budget is spent). In the worst cases, like Hollywood, 95 percent of all movies fail to make a significant profit.
This is where the incentive structures that disfavor originality kick in – at the individual level. As a typical gatekeeper in mainstream Hollywood, commissioning a mediocre movie is not going to hurt your career significantly, because that is what most of your peers do in a given year, anyway. It is only the real flops, the catastrophic failures that can really hurt you. So, since success is unpredictable – it is basically a numbers game – the trick is to stay in the game long enough to get lucky. You do that by following a different, more viable strategy: avoid the risky-looking projects. Don’t bet on dark horses, or on new ones. Go instead for the safest bets: take something that has been proven to work, tweak one little detail, and pray. Specifically, pray that whatever it was that you tweaked, it hasn’t messed up the unfathomable inner workings of the tried-and-tested product line you based it on, and whose proven success formula you are now hoping to piggyback on.
This is the reason why in the creative industries, real originality is dangerous, at least in large quantities. Originality is an expensive and volatile spice, something content producers sprinkle cautiously on top of an old favourite recipe to lend it a veneer of novelty; it is never the main ingredient, not in mainstream media. Don’t blame the gatekeepers for this; if anything, blame the consumers, or perhaps the nature of the business, which on average punishes risk-taking more than it rewards it, at least for incumbents. People who want to make a living of selling ideas will do well to remember that in the media industry, ‘original’ is really just another word for ‘untested’.
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Interesting and true point – I think Luhmann among others said some of the same stuff (you can’t absorb/understand thinks that are not connected to an already existing knowledge) but none the less: You are so right 🙂