Andy Warhol said it: “Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art.”

The iconic conceptual artist is also famous for coining the notion of fleeting fame for the masses when he said in 1968, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”

Annoyed with being constantly asked about that particular statement, Warhol dead-panned interviewers who continued to ask him about it, insisting variously that it was actually: ‘In the future 15 people will be famous’ and ‘in 15 minutes everybody will be famous’.

Warhol was famous for straddling the divide between creativity and business. Those learned in art will insist variously that the aesthetic was pretty much secondary, that he was more businessman than artist. That concept of fleeting notoriety, of vogue, of blink-and-you-will-miss- it applies as much to business as it does to art. In business, just like in fashion and art, trends come and go.

There are the latest fads, gadgets and buzzwords. The latest three- letter acronyms and motivational tools. The latest Theory-That-Will- Change-Your-Business. The latest from the talking heads about how to become a millionaire. We hear so often that design and creativity are the future of New Zealand business and export. Or some similarly worded statement. But what are the implications for the not-so-traditionally-creative: the accountants, banks, telcos, lawyers and public servants? Are they to be left out in the cold, left out of the cool-kids club? Are the be-suited and the be-spectacled of business to be excluded from the fun? How can they engage in the creative process in a genuine and inclusive way – not just ending up with something that is mutton dressed as lamb? How can we bridge the creative divide?

Their ‘Orcon + Iggy, Together Incredible’ campaign won Kiwi telco Orcon and independent advertising agency Special Group the advertising industry’s version of the Oscar: the Grand Prix award in the Cannes Lion International Advertising Festival in France.

Special Group also won eight of the 31 gold awards at the New Zealand AXIS awards, where Orcon also picked up the Creative Business of the Year award. Orcon Chief Executive Scott Bartlett says the idea for the ad was around a tangible demonstration of the eclectic nature of broadband, portrayed in a customer-centric, rather than technology-centric way.

“And you know, that’s the beauty about collaborative processes – to come up with creative ideas is that it’s not sort of design by committee, but ultimately you end up hiring a drugged-out rock star to pull together eight people via the internet to record music, a new music video, and then you put it on TV,” he says. The premise was simple: get Iggy Pop to record a collaborative new version of his song ‘The Passenger’ with New Zealand fans via webcams and broadband internet and in association with Orcon. Then they made the ensuing organised chaos into an ad. An open call for kiwis to get, as Campbell Live termed it, ‘jiggy with Iggy’ resulted in over 200 genuine audition videos being uploaded from Kiwis keen to record with Iggy.

Beyond just the individuals who were keen to make music with a rock legend, the videos received nearly 300,000 page views from interested bystanders, arguably the most successful Kiwi advertising campaign for a good few years.

It certainly achieved what it set out to do – raise Orcon’s awareness outside of their core base of highly- engaged customers, and it certainly did it in a creative way.

It’s a creative business model gaining traction overseas: ‘crowd- sourcing’ or ‘co-creation’. The process of using your customers’ creativity to inform company strategy. It is free creativity, effectively, but it is not all take and no give. Bartlett’s not shy about saying what you’re thinking: “it’s pretty unique for a company in our industry, because telcos are usually god-awful companies,” he says. In mass-market New Zealand, the Together Incredible campaign is significant for its relative novelty. It is a rare example of a company that has basically ceded control for the creative process to its customers.

A key aspect to the success of this kind of strategy is not just delegating, but practically outsourcing a brand, arguably a company’s biggest asset. You surrender your rights and your ability to control the process – your customers engage with the concept and drive the outcome of the experiment.

“I just sat back and went for the ride along with everyone else,” Bartlett says. “We gave Iggy no brief other than here are the videos, choose the people that you want to record the new version of the Passenger with and do your thing. I mean it wasn’t much more complex than that.”

Bartlett says increasingly the case studies of this kind of strategy are emerging, of companies realising they need to be genuinely interesting to get any kind of cut through the noise, especially because customers are never where you expect them to be nowadays. Using PR and advertising-space values, the worth of the media coverage the company received outstripped the cost of the entire campaign by a significant margin.

The coverage included a five minute piece on Campbell Live – the biggest single hit – and a bit of an anomaly: a current affairs show essentially covering the making of an ad. The front page of Wellington’s Dominion Post and the New Zealand Herald’s business section also came to the party. The success of the campaign would have been impossible without the rather-large head start Orcon spent years creating for themselves. The seeds were sewn, as it were, four or five years before.

“This didn’t happen in a vacuum either, this came from years of work leading up to this, of us understanding our customers and, as I say, building that really passionate base. We’ve had this whole facebook presence and twitter presence, been really engaging with customers on forums and blogs for years quite literally,” Bartlett says. “So we had this really strong follower/fan – whatever you want to call it – kind of base that was obviously a huge help in seeding the idea and getting the original excitement and interest going.”

Orcon’s Facebook fans quadrupled in a matter of weeks. International examples have shown the success of this kind of strategy is impossible without a strong social media foundation.

“It’s talking to people, there’s no other way to learn,” Barlett says of how they developed the knowledge of their customers that ensured the success of the Together Incredible campaign. “You can’t hire an analyst and plonk them at a desk and say ‘analyse our market would you please, and tell us who our customers are.’”

In addition to this, interest in the brand and the company was built by engaging customers in the eclectic and the irreverent – things that were of genuine interest to them. “You really only learn by engaging with your base. We’ve done some things that I think in many regards are more interesting than even the Iggy campaign.”

In 2009 they sponsored what they called the’ Great Blend’, evenings held once a quarter and open to all customers as well as the general public . They invited experts in topics as miscellaneous as women’s rights in eastern Europe, through to moon rocks, and then bought in both local and international experts and talent. Orcon Head of Brand and Communications Duncan Blair describes how it worked: “these amazing people, a little bit of music and a few drinks and everyone just sitting round.”

In a separate effort the company flew in eight digital artists from around the world, hired a house in Piha, locked them in it for a week, and charged them with the task of producing inspired digital art, which they then displayed on their website. “If we share, they might want to share back. So a lot of ideas that we get from our customer base do end up as products, do end up as hobbies that we invest in or infrastructure that we buy or build. It’s a great way to get creativity for free,” Bartlett says.

One of the most common instances that business people come in contact with creatives is around branding.

Jimi Hunt owns 12-month-old design and branding company The Creative Difference and has a fairly eclectic CV. It includes everything from building New Zealand’s biggest slip ‘n slide through to bringing in military technology from India to use in commercial operations in New Zealand, all while owning and operating a number of different Auckland bars.

Last summer his company worked on the biggest contract of his life: designing all the material – websites, brochures, identity cards etc – for the Rugby World Cup corporate hospitality. His job, he says, is “making things prettier. Because stuff is ugly, 90 per cent of stuff is.”

Hunt is currently in business with his father Paul, a traditional “suit” who, among other postings, was the Chief Executive of Tower Insurance for 15 years.

“The biggest thing that creatives hate in the entire business,” Hunt says, “is the business. I am here to draw pretty pictures, come up with crazy ideas. I am not here to do my taxes or anything like that.”

“So 29 years later we start working together. It works perfectly because he is that business balance to my creative chaos and I have learned a lot about business and he has learned a lot about creatives.”

Hunt says design is an increasingly widespread profession. He did not formally train in design and says it’s absolutely an advantage. “It seems to me design became very cool, like it is a cool job to have. It’s like ‘I don’t want to work in an office, I wanna be a designer and so everyone goes off to design school.”

Recently he needed to hire a designer so put up an ad. Coincidentally, he also needed a new duty manager for his Auckland inner-city bar. Both ads went up on Seek at the same time. Both jobs were for the same salary. In a week and a half he had 12 applicants for the duty manager’s job and in three days had 428 applicants for the designer’s job.

The ad Hunt wrote was funny and clever and creative. A creative ad for a creative job. He had four responses saying they liked the ad so much they would work for free. He had three responses from people who weren’t even designers saying they liked the ad so much they would take a job anywhere else in the company, making coffee or doing anything.

As for the rest of them, “the state of those 400 odd, the quality of the designers that are being produced at media design school is pretty fucking average,” he says. “They all produce the same style, the same stuff. One of the ones I opened up and this girl was like, ‘oh, I designed Ralph Hotere’s book about his life painting’. Then I opened up about 10 more of people who had designed Ralph Hotere’s book and it was a project at media design school. A class project so everyone had to design one. And the thing that made me the absolute angriest, not one them declared that it was a project and not an actual brief and produced book. That’s ethics 101.”

Out of 428 applications in three days, Hunt says he could count on the fingers of one hand the number of applicants who put in a creative application for a creative job.

“That seems like the saddest thing in the world to me for this industry,” he says.