Crane, the business publisher not the toilet maker, puts out a magazine called CREATIVITY.

Its logotype looks like this:

Because, I suppose, that’s creative.

I’ve always found it a hoot. It’s about creativity in advertising, mostly, and it showcases creative directors, copywriters, art directors, producers, etc., as well as what those people call “the work” and the rest of us call ads and commercials.

There are more words in CREATIVITY than you’d expect, lots and lots of words that almost nobody will read because they’re all set in huge blocks of tiny type, often sans serif tiny type, even reverse sans serif tiny type.

If you ever want to make it impossible to read lots of words, follow the design of CREATIVITY.

The August, 2008 CREATIVITY is a double issue with two covers, upside down to each other so there are two front covers.

One of them is about production and the other is about awards.

The word creativity crops up in advertising all the time. You almost never hear it in direct marketing circles although we do use the word “creative” to mean the copy and images we use to sell things.

The CREATIVITY awards news this year has an astonishing tidbit in the side-by-side-by-side lists of most awards by creative directors, art directors and copywriters. There are 28 different people mentioned in those lists and as near as I can tell only one of them is a woman, although there may be a couple more because three of the people have ambiguous first names: Gerry, Takayuki, Omid. (I should know what those last two are, but I don’t.)

The male to female ratio of overachievers is somewhere between 27-1 and 24-4. Apparently the glass ceiling in advertising is made of concrete.

There’s a POV page in the awards part of the magazine.

A guy from a big LA agency wrote the August POV; he’s worried about awards for pure creativity as opposed to awards for effectiveness. In his opinion “Advertising is, and has always been, a balancing act between creativity and effectiveness.”

That’s as good a summary of the problem with advertising as I’ve ever seen.

In direct marketing, if we ever had to put it in words, we’d probably say something like “In DM creativity is effectiveness and vice versa.” To us, creativity in the CREATIVITY sense is meaningless. If it isn’t effective, it can’t possibly be creative.