“The Key - Quick Conversations on Creativity” Martin Troughton (Chair of Marketing Skills Trust)

🎬📚✈️ "Expense the cinema. Expense books. Get paid double to take longer holidays" 🎬 📚 ✈️

That was not a perk. That was their creative strategy.

🌟 What is “The Key 🔑” to Great Creativity? 🌟

❝ Curiosity. ❞

Martin Troughton Former Agency Founder, Marketing Director & Chair of Marketing Skills Trust

🎤 As part of my "Quick Conversations 🎤" series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Martin Troughton, whose career has spanned agency leadership, client-side marketing, and now consultancy and industry education.

When asked what truly sits at the heart of great creativity, Martin did not hesitate:

🤔 Curiosity. 🤔

Not surface-level curiosity. Deep, restless, knowledge-hungry curiosity.

Here are the key points Martin explains in the full film:

1️⃣ Hire interesting people, not obvious ones

Deliberately build teams filled with people who were curious about the world. Books, films, theatre, travel. All of it fed the work. Creativity does not come from staying inside the industry bubble.

2️⃣ Create a culture that rewards learning

At Martin’s agency Harrison Troughton Wunderman , curiosity was actively encouraged. Going to the cinema or theatre was expensable. Long holidays were paid double so people could go further, experience more, and come back with fresher thinking.

3️⃣ Great creativity is “relevant abruption”

Creative work must stop people. But stopping people alone is easy. What matters is relevance.

Martin Troughton shared a brilliant example for Vodafone: Instead of sending voicemail instructions, customers received a till receipt from an amazing party with a handwritten note on the back: “Tried to leave you a message but couldn’t. You missed a great do.”

Abrupt. Unexpected. But completely on brief.

4️⃣ Curiosity fuels relevance

Relevant abruption only works when you deeply understand what people think now and what you want them to think next. That understanding only comes from being endlessly curious.

💥 “Stopping people is easy. Making it relevant is the hard part.”

🙏 Thank you, Martin Troughton, for such a clear and generous articulation of why curiosity still matters more than ever in creativity.