She was our final keynote speaker at The 3% Conference Australasia yesterday in Sydney, and boy oh boy did Cindy Gallop not disappoint.
The industry trailblazer, and founder and CEO of MakeLoveNotPorn, focused her presentation on reinventing creativity Down Under, and challenged attendees to design their own creative venture.
Gallop noted there is still a “colonial” attitude from the big agency networks towards Australia, and that the key ingredient to driving creativity across the nation is diversity – whether that be gender, age, race, sexuality or disability.
“Australia has the ability to attract a vast amount of diversity to its shores. It’s better placed than most other markets in the world,” she said.
There are 10 ‘micro-actions’ to be the future of Aussie creativity, according to Gallop. Here they are (in her words):
- Say what you really think. By doing so, you find out what you really think. That is baseline, ground zero for creativity. Put your ideas down on paper (email) and claim them.
- Look around you. What’s missing? When you identify what it is…
- Start/do it yourself. When you start it…
- State your ambition. Once you say it, you’ll feel a lot better because it makes it concrete. It will also help identify your ‘default throwaway descriptor’ (how somebody quickly references you when you’re out of the room).
- Don’t spend any money to start it. You don’t need money to start your own creative venture, which can go alongside your current job. Road test it using channels like a blog. Identify your minimum viable cost of living.
- But set out to make an absolute goddam F$*@king shit-ton of money. Females need to build their own financial ecosystem, because the white male one isn’t working. Design your business model according to how you want to make money. Enable women the capital they need to scale and grow their business through ways such as crowdfunding.
- Design your business the way you want it to work. You cannot do new world order business from an old world order place.
- Do everything through a diverse lens.
- Your clients’ business partners and co-founders are all around you [at The 3% Conference]. Say hi now. There is a huge amount of money to be made from taking women seriously. Our industry is not putting its money where its mouth is. Invest in it, and boy oh boy will you see a return on investment.
- Don’t give a damn what anybody else thinks if you want to be the future of advertising.
Gallop finished her presentation with a final call to action: “Go out there, start your own thing, make Australia proud and show the rest of the world – and do it quickly.”
