Futureative began as an idea; that the future belongs to those who publish great creative projects. It didn’t begin with a marketing plan, a clear product or service or even a business model. Just an idea. But an idea with two beating hearts.
The first is that creative people who commit to making their best work over time, have a shot at living a creative life. In this process, those hard won creative skills become assets over time that pay dividends in other areas of our careers and our lives.
The second is that this goal is far more likely to be realised when those same creative people commit to the marketing process, as an extension of their creativity, as something that can and should be planned for, that can be a contribution to the world in and of itself, that houses pathways and opportunities for audiences, sustainability and impact.
Creative people cannot shy away from the future. We cannot shy away from our creativity and we certainly cannot shy away from the market; the town square is where someday our art must belong.
I share this note because Futureative is being built quite literally from the ground up, in real time, it is not a clean, clear or simple process. It is creative, messy, exploratory and we are learning things daily, weekly, monthly.
At the start of this year we learnt our biggest lesson yet; that great marketing is as creative as the larger body of work itself. We are learning that because we set out to “do marketing” one way and immediately the market showed us a way to do it differently; a better way.
A more creative way.
What came next was significantly more experimentation and iteration than I ever expected for 2026.
But we are beginning, now at the 8 month mark, to begin to see the earliest signs off payoff; a unique creative brand that will stand tall, proud and be resilient to the test of time.
And over the next few minutes I’ll be sharing my current reflections on what we’re learning this year about marketing through a creative lens and some ways it might help you to bring your creativity to the world too.
What we’ll explore together as you read along:
The problem with trying to create an optimised content strategy for your creativity.
Three real-world lessons looking back on projects that have worked.
How we are framing our content strategy today, but not even calling it a content strategy.
Optimise For This, That & The Other
If you want to extract every bit of soul, fun and creativity from your projects, the best way to do this is to try to optimise your marketing by using today’s hot new marketing strategy.
And even the best of us can find ourselves there. “Here’s what works” is a well-used hook because it draws attention; humans crave answers, shortcuts and results. We are biologically wired to seek these things, even if we’ve been burnt before.
That’s why this article, is about marketing, but not in the way that’s designed to get readers. This article is really about creativity because I believe the best marketing is just creative work existing in new spaces and in new formats.
But the world doesn’t want you to think that way; that your individuality could be a super power. That your time and effort could be better spent by ‘wasting’ time not optimising your time. That' doesn’t get the same amount of clicks.
The world wants you to optimise, and deep down you may at times want this too. Because wouldn’t it be lovely for our marketing to ‘just work’ for once so that we could go back to being creative?
But optimisation culture does not make your marketing better; it makes you bend yourself towards the shape of a box that somebody else made. And you know better than that, don’t you?
This is why I think we are all overthinking our marketing; especially when it comes to content and our creative strategies.
How do I know this is true? Because this year it happened to me again; and it’s not the first time. Where the thinking, design, strategy made our marketing perform worse, not better.
Over January & February of this year we began rolling out a content strategy that was months in the making. And then watched it get outperformed by a couple of completely unplanned posts on a channel we never expected to be on.
At first, I was surprised, but then again, I also wasn’t at all. Because every time I’ve experienced growth online, it has never been about what the marketing we planned for; it’s always been about the creativity that followed.
The best way to explain what we’re doing now and why, is to go back and explore a few lessons learned over the last decade (and then some) of throwing my entire being at being a working creative. So here goes.
Lesson #1: Connections
This lesson came in 2013, when I was getting started in the industry as a music industry consultant, I spent my first 12 months on Twitter just connecting with people; I connected with new folks daily, whilst posting perspectives, ideas & commentary on the music industry. People that had shared interests became more than ‘connections’, we grew a connection. Some of these people I would go on to collaborate with for years to come, others became clients, one I still meet with for a weekly creative mastermind call.
Simply following people wouldn’t have worked, nor would posting content for content sake. I was able to grow my first real following and get my start in business because of a presence I was bringing.
Within 12 months I’d grown to about 3 or 4,000 followers from memory, which turned to 10k over the next year or two. Perhaps small by today’s ‘standards’ but I think there lies the problem; the standards and expectations we’ve placed on volume, which encourages us to do things that are against our very nature. And believe me I got things wrong back then too; overoptimising for reach instead of connection, despite the lesson staring me in the face then and there.
We are forgetting that audiences are built by shared experience; and that shared experience is what creates connection. Isn’t that what the promise of ‘social media’ was always meant to be, anyway?
Lesson #2: Community
Fast forward a few years, I had just enough clients to call myself a business but needed a breakthrough to be able to make my business model more sustainable. I had been learning everything I could about community based marketing concepts and what goes into a powerful community.
I also always wanted an actual brand-brand (not just operating under my name) so in 2016 after a good 12 months of planning I launched a new brand called the Music Launch Hub; it began as a Facebook Group and an email list. It had an event attached to it called the Music Launch Summit and the idea was to create a home for independent music artists and professionals online. I wanted to specifically bring these two groups of people together. It was certainly not the first music industry group like this but it was the first large-scale online music conference in the world.
I brought together quite literally all of the DIY industry’s top names into one event for the first time. Over the course of 6 months our little Facebook Group grew from its first few members, to about 2,500. No ads, nothing went viral; we just sent out invitations and put on an event.
Why did it work? It was community at the core. People connecting with people.
The first hundred or two hundred members came because I emailed everyone I knew personally that I thought might be interested in a new community. Those people invited others as the network effects kicked in.
Only one problem; it grew faster than I expected, and my business model wasn’t clear enough. It wasn’t long before the community grew to 10k members and I’d lost the magic; the connection became harder to faciliate at this scale and I began to burn out from the sheer weight of trying to make this initiative sustainable.
But the lesson has always been obvious to me, even then; this worked because I was on a mission to bring likeminded people together; it worked for as long as I was able to effectively bring people together. I didn’t shut down the Music Launch Hub because I didn’t know what worked, it was the opposite; I knew that connection was the key and I simply ran out of steam to be able to deliver on that promise.
It turns out, lesson #2 looks a lot like lesson #1, doesn’t it?
The idea for this Deep Dive was first explored as a video essay on our YouTube channel, you might like to watch this next.
Lesson #3: Content
Fast forward to 2026 and a new lesson appears; this time, about content. But I can’t ignore the fact it’s the same lesson again. Because content in today’s world that is devoid of community & connection is devoid of the thing that makes it work long-term.
We started a content plan and we’ve ended with a creative project; why? Because creative projects stand the test of time. I standby every decision we’ve made over the last year of developing our content strategy, what got us here was simply beginning the creative process. But that doesn’t mean we got it right from day one. Here’s what we did:
We dialled in our brand voice and our brand kit, we chose our platforms and created a way to produce a weekly YouTube video that could also be turned into daily content across TikTok, Instagram & LinkedIn. Video first, easily replicable; it ticked all the boxes, until it didn’t.
As we began to roll this out, news broke of SXSW Sydney being cancelled. I wrote an article n a whim, needed somewhere to put it, opened up Substack, hit publish and then over the next week began posting notes across Substack. This experimentation brought me back to my early days on Twitter, which led me to Threads as well.
We had our first connections forming right there; not on the content that we were meticulously crafting, but on the real-time thoughts and discussions.
Shared interest + shared experience = better creative strategy.
What’s followed is an entirely new journey of creative output. Where we’ve slowly shifted our focus towards acting less like a thought leader and more like a publication, which makes far more sense for the brand and our founding team of two.
Now we have been experimenting creatively on social media for the past few months as we’ve been using this experimentation to also improve our brand voice and brand kit.
We no longer have a content strategy; we simply have a creative strategy.
Because a content strategy that isn’t creative lacks something key; it lacks an opportunity for connection. It lacks a chance to build more than audience; to build community.
And that’s where I think it’s so easy to overthink our content strategies. We all need to start somewhere and it helps to have a plan. But at the end of the day, the goal can’t be to “just go post”. It has to be to move the needle on our own creativity.
It has to, surely, be about creativity itself?
I hope you notice this is not a blog telling you what to do. We are far from at a point where we “have the answers” and we still have a long way to go to prove to ourselves that Futureative is a brand worthy of people’s time.
But I believe we are taking the right steps to get there. We’re doing it our way. We’re not following one person’s step-by-step plan. We are not determined to produce at scale just because we can.
We are doing our best to be creative, reflect on creativity, document that process.
And when it’s time to teach best practice, we’ll have our online conferences for that; so we can bring together multiple perspectives, voices and experiences (not just our own).
The future of creativity starts with being creative. Creativity first, always.
Next, it’s how we turn that creativity into experiences people can consume; an opportunity for 2 or more people to connect.
Then it’s about making sure we’re evolving our creativity to something people can participate in; by opening the doorway to community.
That’s why we’re calling this a creative strategy; not a content strategy.
Creative people, need more creative strategies, not less.
And I only write that with so such certainty because this is the reminder we needed as we started a content strategy and bit by bit used that as a gateway into a creative strategy.
The Takeaway: Our Creative Publishing Phase Begins
That sounded like the takeaway, didn’t it? Even I thought it was, until I walked away and came back the next day. This Deep Dive keeps asking something more of me, to go dig for the next layer. Here’s the actual takeaway…
Creatives find marketing hard because it takes us away from our creative work. But what if our marketing could also be our creative work? What would need to change?
I explored this in my last Deep Dive; Fast Lane, Slow Lane. In it, I discussed a mental model I use to have two complimentary creative projects running at once. One that acts as a deeper body of work, the other as a form of marketing.
But the whole point was to help eliminate the need to “go do marketing” and instead replace it with something focused, fun and creatively rewarding.
Well it turns out, what we learned and what we’ve ended up doing, is to go all-in on our fast lane. So much so, that we’ve ditched the idea of having topics to talk about. Instead, we’ve created formats to create within.
Our first strategy involved a weekly idea, turned into the video, cut up into repurpose-able content for other channels. A totally plausible, well used approach to creating content.
Then, we shifted gears and starting focusing more on creative practice, exploration and creative development; it kept things moving and allowed us to test out content ideas and make some connections; we turned out content strategy into a creative strategy.
Now though? We have by nature of our creative strategy found ourself with a publishing strategy; instead of topics, we now have formats.
We now have a clearly defined fast lane project that isn’t simply content creation; it’s a publication that houses a range of formats interesting to us.
The Deep Dive — Steve’s long-form take on creative practice, process, and where the creative industries are headed.
The Round Up — Kaye spotlights working creatives (and, soon, our summit speakers) to unpack what’s actually driving their creative careers and creative projects.
The Practise — Kaye road-tests real creative programs and practices in the field, with our own creative experiments to follow.
The Rotation (formerly Futureative Favourites) — Our monthly overview of what’s on rotation at Futureative this month; what we’re listening to, reading, and watching that’s inspiring us creatively right now.
The Toolkit (coming soon) — Practical rundowns of tools for creative professionals, and for launching and running a creative practice.
The Gameplan (coming soon) — Paid-subscribers only, step-by-step mini workshops and sprints to get a specific project or goal into the world.
Our formats create a space to produce content that inspires us creatively, that is a creative project in and of itself, that it just so happens can inspire other creative outputs.
We don’t have a content strategy anymore. We have a publishing strategy.
And not a traditional publishing strategy; not about deadlines and reach but one that is being designed to continually inspire us creatively. So we can produce things for the world that we actually want to produce.
The resistance to “go do marketing” surely comes from a place where marketing is taking us away from our craft.
What if our craft could simply exist in new ways, or in this case, new formats, so we never have to do marketing again?
I appreciate it’s early days; this isn’t an article sharing what I intend to be my new found approach to content that while change your life. I don’t yet know how this story ends. I don’t yet know if it’ll work.
But I do know it’s working for us. Creatively. And with that, I have clarity on what we’re making.
A space that can allow once again for real connections, real community and content that’s designed to savoured.
We’ll keep you posted on how it goes.
Some questions to sit with:
What would your content strategy look like if you led with creativity first and let the platform strategy follow?
How would your overall marketing change if you looked at it through the lens of creative exploration first, outcome and output second?
What’s one thing you’ve always wanted to produce creatively
Ready for more?
Read this next: Fast Lane, Slow Lane
This article goes hand in hand with my last Deep Dive. In it, you can explore how I use a mental model to balance the competing demands of creative projects and it just so happens to be a way to bring a creative publishing strategy to life.
Front Row by Futureative is for independent creatives who want to start, finish & launch their best projects yet. Come explore the future of creativity with us.
We’re also publishing on: Instagram | YouTube | TikTok | LinkedIn | Threads
I've reached the same conclusion, after like oh 20 years of marketing lol. My hits are always organically from the depths of my chest and often break the "rules", and the moment I start opTIMiZing it gets boring and beige. So... no more of that!