Tools Vs. Experience

We live in a world where anyone with a smartphone can be a photographer, a writer, a critic, a composer, or, heck, even an event planner.

Creative occupations that once required a college degree plus years of practice, patience, and maturity, have become democratized by amateurs with a mobile device.

Today’s marketers have, in some cases, delegated their content creation to influencers, who now have an absurd amount of publishing tools and platforms at their disposal.

Brand ambassadorship is nearly effortless when the YouTubes, Instagrams, Vines, and Snapchats of the world allow people of all ages to be creative, and to share that creativity with friends, family, and complete strangers.

Ansel Adams once wrote that the single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it. Without the talent, education, and experience, even the fanciest tools are just that: fancy tools (which don’t make us experts.)

As technology becomes more affordable, the threshold of what constitutes creative talent becomes more skewed, and self-congratulating neophytes sometimes lack the fundamentals or the experience (or both) to deliver the same quality we’re used to getting from professionals.

In applying this theory to marketing agencies, you could say that generalists and specialists have access to the same fancy tools and equipment, but the key difference is experience.