What Dance Teaches
Us About the Creative Process

Where Creativity meets purpose

By: Rebekah Essick, Group Account Director

Before I worked in advertising, I was a dancer. I’m still heavily involved in the ballet. It is such an ingrained part of who I am. Throughout my years of training, teaching and performing, I have learned so many lessons. I often catch myself thinking about how relevant those lessons are to many areas of life. And given that we work in a creative business, many of these lessons are highly applicable to the creative process we work through daily.

TECHNIQUE & DISCIPLINE

When watching an on-stage performance with trained performers, one may think based on their graceful movements, that dance is easy to learn. However, training is rigorous and foundational techniques are drilled into the mind of dancers to the point that the body remembers, and the muscle memory is absolute. This type of training requires discipline and consistency. The building blocks of ballet translate into almost every style of dance.

Parallels can be drawn to the fundamentals of marketing. Basic principles such as brand positioning, target audience research, and more are important for building campaigns that are effective and meet goals. Sometimes, going back to the basics is best, and the building blocks of marketing and advertising translate into almost everything we do.

STRUCTURE & CHOREOGRAPHY

Depending on the style of dance, choreography can look chaotic and random. However, there is always a framework and a set of steps to follow, no matter how wild the dance is. This structure allows performers to explore creativity within defined boundaries.

Advertising is a creative field, and we love unique, innovative solutions. But no matter how ground-breaking an idea, it still needs to fit within a construct that ladders up to a business goal. The most beautiful and creative ad in the world is wasted if it doesn’t meet the campaign objective. Briefs exist to provide this framework for both media and creative and ensure there is enough freedom to produce impactful work while addressing the end goal.

IMPROVISATION & ADAPTABILITY

Adaptability is an important skill to learn as a dancer. Being able to adapt to new music, rhythms, emotions, or changes in choreography is necessary to succeed.

As marketers, we need to be adaptable as we must navigate changing client needs, market trends, new industry developments and disruptors (like AI), micro and macro changes, and more. Our ability to improvise and adapt can lead to new and innovative solutions. Being able to quickly pivot is the key to staying relevant and ensuring we are delivering the best strategies for our clients.

COLLABORATION & TEAMWORK

Very rarely is dance not a highly collaborative endeavor. Even when dancing a solo, the piece is usually part of a larger picture. Often, choreography includes detailed steps that must be done in synchrony or weaved together with other dancers. Dancers are trained to look beyond what their own body is doing and put the group first. It’s not about how high you can kick; what matters is that your kick is the same height as the rest of the chorus line.

Teamwork is of vital importance across many professions, but when looking at advertising agencies, specifically, there is a beautiful dance that happens with account managers, strategists, copywriters, designers, media planners, analysts, and more. All must work together harmoniously to achieve a shared vision and the best solution for a client. Collaboration and trust among team members are important for driving success and innovation.

EMOTION & EXPRESSION

Dance is a story through movement. I love to think of it as visual art in an instant. That beautiful picture is there, and then it’s gone. The best dancers use movement to tell a story, and they let us feel their emotions through each step.

This is not unlike what we strive to do through powerful ad campaigns. At &Barr, we believe in changing people’s lives for the better. Consumers will emotionally connect to why you do what you do, not what you do. All our work is filtered through this lens to create work that taps into emotions and resonates with the target audience.

REHEARSAL & REFINEMENT

Rehearsal can be tedious, but it is a necessary part of the process in dance. Once choreography is learned, rehearsal provides the medium for refinement, fixing technique, and playing with iterations of movement.

The rehearsal process is similar to what we do in the ad world, with testing strategies and iterating on them until we find the best solution. This is done with creative through versioning and A/B testing. On the media side, we are constantly evaluating all aspects of performance to see how we can optimize. The work is never done. There is always room for improvement.

If you have never experienced the artistry of dance, I highly encourage you to do so. Especially as marketers, seeing a performance or taking a class puts all of this into perspective, and the lessons learned can be applied in so many areas of what we do. Being mindful of these aspects and how they can be applied in advertising gives a great framework for the creative process.

Excuse me while I recruit our whole agency into taking a dance class!