Too Creative to Ignore

In this episode of the Art Marketing Podcast, Patrick explores the concept of making your creative work 'too creative to ignore.' He delves into the origins of this idea, shares examples of wildly successful artists like Andrew Scott, Dave Pollitt, and Alejandro Cartagena, and discusses how to leverage artificial intelligence to enhance your social media posts. Learn practical, tactical advice on using AI to create engaging carousel posts on Instagram that will stop the scroll, capture attention, and drive engagement. Join us to discover actionable steps you can take today to make your creative work stand out on social media.

Podcast Transcribe

[Music] Patrick Shanahan: Coming up on today's edition of the Art Marketing Podcast, we're talking about being "too creative to ignore." Specifically, the origin of this title, some examples to contemplate, and then finally, how to leverage AI to make your social posts too creative to ignore. So, it's going to end with some tactical advice.

Patrick Shanahan: And I know you're saying, "So, what exactly does that mean, Patrick? What does it mean to be too creative to ignore? Is it a motto or a mantra or a slogan?" Well, actually, yes, it's all of the above. Is it a bumper sticker? Quite frankly, it should be, and I need to get on that. Should you constantly repeat it to yourself, contemplate how to be that way, and ask yourself, "Is what I am about to put out too creative to ignore?" Arguments can be made. None of that is where it started though. For me, it started as a label or a tag or as an observation that I would slap on artists that I saw broke out of the normal art marketing world and made it mainstream. And I guess you could sort of say that like they went viral, but viral is such a loaded nonsense term. But they broke out of the traditional art marketing world, right? The normies started sharing it. And like, I created this tag in my head as like how to describe it, and you know, I realized it like they came up with something that was just so damn creative that they could not be ignored.

And you know how this normally manifests itself for me is, you know, the work would get shared in all of the venues. So somehow this work by this particular artist just so moved, inspired, entertained, or thrilled by the art of it and really the creativity of it that people just shared it everywhere. That they were too creative to ignore, right? And I see these folks pop up everywhere across all of the social media sites, whether it's an art-sharing site or not, right? Like I'll see it on Facebook, I'll see it on Instagram, I'll see it on Twitter, I'll see it on TikTok, LinkedIn. You see it all of the places, and I see these folks everywhere. And sometimes articles are written about them, the whole thing. And you know, so when I see these folks, I've been slapping the label on them, and I've sort of been making a list, and I have like a long list. And you know, while it's great, it's an amazing thing, I can't wait to share these artists with you. I bet I don't have to because I know you've seen them too. All right, you've seen them too because they've literally been everywhere.

And so I picked out quickly three of them. Have you ever heard the name Andrew Scott? Maybe you've heard his name, maybe you haven't, right? And for each of these three that I pick, the three examples, I'm going to read the bio that I took off their website. So this is Andrew Scott's: "Andrew Scott is renowned for his viral frame experiments which have amassed more than 1 billion views on social media. He's been featured on prominent outlets such as Good Morning America, Yahoo News, as well as ABC News, and has collaborated with the claim brands including Manchester City FC. Andrew's work can be found in collections around the world with commissions hanging in the walls of celebrities such as Joanna Gaines, Kelly Cuoco, and many more." I have no idea who those people are. How you would know him though, he draws and paints kids inside of frames and then either breaks the glass on, you know, that's inside the frame, or he cuts the frame sort of to enhance the piece. And you know, the famous ones, there's a picture of a kid shooting a slingshot, and then where the slingshot would eventually go, like the trajectory of it, boom, he breaks the glass by hand. Or a kid is about to fall out of the piece, and he's painted hanging from the bottom of the frame, so his arms are like hanging on the frame. Or a picture of a kid dumping out a bucket of paint that is falling outside onto the frame, like out of the canvas itself, right? And don't worry if my words are not painting the picture, see what I did there, I'll include a link to his Instagram. I think he has 1.4 million followers, and he's been super interesting to follow because I've been following him for years, and he keeps going viral, keeps showing up. And I watched him from like being a selling direct artist to now, like I think you can only get stuff at a gallery. So I'll include that in there, but at the end of the day, Andrew is too creative to ignore.

What about Dave Pollot? I hope I'm pronouncing his name right. Again, perhaps not my name, but I'm sure you've seen this guy too. From his bio: "Dave Pollot is a New York-based artist who is known for his altered thrift art paintings. He finds unwanted artwork and adds his own touch, most often pop culture parodies, and in doing so, bridges the divide between classic and pop art. His artwork has been displayed and found in homes and galleries and businesses and private collections in all 50 states and over 40 countries around the globe. His work has attracted attention from the media both in the US and abroad, including Business Insider, Instagram, the Sci-Fi Channel, and his corporate clients include Sony, Instagram, McDonald's, among others. When he's not painting, he could be found spending time with his wife and two dogs." Okay, great. This guy is so creative too. It's like he goes and buys paintings, old paintings at thrift stores or garage sales. We've all seen tons of those, and then he'll paint on top of them. And you know, sometimes he'll take a landscape and then put like one of those Star Wars AT-ATs, so it's like that giant robotic thing with the legs shooting, and he'll do like shooting inside of the painting. Or he'll get a painting of a street and paint Forrest Gump running down it. Or he's got this classic one of it's like an 18th-century pirate ship, clipper ship, three-mast ship, and he's tagged all of the sails on the ship in graffiti so it looks like train cars or freeway overpasses. Amazing. Dave is too creative to ignore.

Right now, what about a photographer named Alejandro Cartagena? Okay, he has this series called "The Carpoolers." And let me get his bio first because I want to be consistent. "Lives and works in Monterrey, Mexico. His projects employ landscape picture as a means to examine social, urban, and environmental issues. Cartagena's work has been exhibited internationally in more than 50 group and individual exhibitions and spaces, including the Foundation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris, the CCCB in Barcelona, and his work is in collections of several museums, including the San Francisco MOMA, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, the MFAH in Houston, the Portland Museum of Art West Coast Collection, the C Collection, the FZA Collection, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the George Eastman House, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art."

Now, in terms of Alejandro's case, while his work is perhaps not air quotes as viral as the other two, at least not in the US, he's a Mexican-based photographer. I just love this series so much. It is so doggone creative. He's a photographer. He got his camera, and in Monterrey, Mexico, where he lives, he went to a freeway overpass. And in Mexico, it's still legal to ride around in the back of a pickup truck. And so he would go either like at the beginning, you know, very early in the morning or at the end of the day, and get his camera, set it up aiming down, and just take photos of all these Mexican workers going to work in the back of a pickup truck. And some of them are sleeping, and sometimes there's three of them, and sometimes there's seven of them, and sometimes they're making a meal. And it is just so creative and visually stimulating, it's unbelievable. And I would say Alejandro is too creative to ignore. These guys keep showing up on social. They're just, they have built massive businesses by being too creative to ignore.

Now, I want to delve into this concept, and I want to delve into how we as individual creatives can start thinking that way. And I think AI is going to make a huge impact on this. And the future of AI, at least as much as it concerns us trying to grow our businesses, okay? Let's say that we can project out two years ahead of time. Even projecting out two years is a fever because all of this technology is moving so fast. So I would say the future of AI for the next two years for creatives, i.e., trying to grow their art businesses, it's not about any one model. It's not about ChatGPT or Claude or Llama or Grok 3, which is about to come out from X and Twitter, or even DeepSeek, which is the Chinese one that dropped this week. And also, I should mention that like if you just heard me say all those names and you thought I was speaking a foreign language, that's totally okay too.

Over the last few weeks, I sort of made it a personal practice, as well as I literally on a call this morning recently challenged my whole team to do this too. But I digress. I go about my day, and I interact with whoever I interact with, and I'm constantly asking these folks if they use AI, and if so, what apps and for what purpose. Now, your mileage might vary in your day-to-day life, but in my experience, like okay, let's just say the last 24 hours, the last 24 hours I had a doctor's appointment. There was the doctor and the two assistants in the room when I was in the room. I asked all three of them. All three of them said no. I got the bagel shot that I love. Shout out to Carlos. Boiling Big Place is epic. I asked Carlos. Carlos, do you use it? No, I don't use it. I don't want to use it. I don't like it. Right? Lastly, I was on the phone with a friend who's actually an artist. I hadn't talked to him in six months. Have you used it at all? He's like, no, I've not used it. And I generally wonder what the percentage is with creatives of all stripes that have used it, and if they have used it, are continuing to use AI to help them in everything that they're doing, yes, in their art businesses, but just in daily life, period.

And why do I bring all that up? I bring it up because it's a solid reminder for me to ground myself in the facts that it's still early days, which means it's still early days for you too. And really, what it makes me think about is there's this like two famous contrasting photos. Okay, and the first photo is taken, I think it was like 1900, on the streets in New York. It's Fifth Avenue in New York City, and in this photo, there's like a thousand horses on the street, and there's like three cars. Okay, and that photo was taken from 1900. Then there's another one that was taken like 10 or so years later, and there's three horses and thousands of cars. Okay, and it is such a staggering photo, and everyone always uses that photo to sort of highlight how transformative the car was. And it was all like Ford Model T's back then, but how transformative and how fast that happened, right? And you know, the first photo is there was a couple of early adopters, and they realized how amazing the car is, and then bit by bit, year by year, the horses started disappearing. The horses started disappearing, and then the next thing you know, everybody was in a car because it was just so transformative. And that is what AI is going to do, you guys. Everybody that's still on a horse just hasn't been for a ride in the car yet. Just hasn't realized how much more efficient, how much more stuff you can carry, the fact that the car doesn't leave a giant pile of dung everywhere. It's so much better. It's so much more efficient. It is fundamentally and profoundly society-changing. Okay, society-changing.

So for me, for today's purpose, one, I realize I want to continue to be an advocate for this technology because I believe that will make every single solitary one of you better. I just want to increase the overall output of your creative business. Your art is going to get seen by more eyeballs. Your life is fundamentally going to get better. So in short, I want to make sure you're in a car and not on a horse. So, back to the future, see what I did there? Doc Brown in "The Time Machine," all-time classic. But the future of AI for creatives is going to go to the AI experiences that understand the nuances of this creative business. Okay, it doesn't even matter what all the various different ones that are out there. It matters about the individual recipes that you guys can start using and getting practice with that are going to improve your business right now. So it's less about the technology, it's less about all those models that I mentioned before that maybe you've heard of or not, and it's all just about what are these individual recipes that work for a creative business right now.

And so I realize how fun these next few days, weeks, months, and years are going to be when we talk about these recipes and how they individually work and how you can individually put them to work immediately and start cooking with them. So with that in mind, let's get into one right now. Pitter-patter, let's get at her. So if we start with the question, how can you make your work too creative to ignore? The motto, the bumper sticker, right? And while it's a great question period, it's a question I should often be asking myself, my marketing team, as we put out our marketing, as we're trying to get attention, how can we make this too creative to ignore? But I'm not sitting here and recommending that you completely change up your entire body of work, okay? And not put it out unless you can answer the question, "Is what I'm creating too creative to ignore?" You know, now it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to start that way, but that's a big task, right? And that's a daunting longer conversation and could take months and weeks and years. I want something that we can do today, something that we can execute on today to improve our creative businesses. That's the whole point of this podcast.

And so let's break "too creative to ignore" down to a smaller task, okay? Something that we can ship today. How can we make your next social media post too creative to ignore? Just about all of you guys are struggling for more eyeballs and more attention on the social media sites for creative ways to get your art noticed. Now, most of you guys, okay, you just rely on your art and perhaps a short description, perhaps the title and the medium and what sizes it's available on, right? "Go check it out, my store link in the bio," or whatever platform it's on. Is that too creative to ignore? It could be if your artwork was really good, right? You know, the three examples I used earlier, those guys aren't doing anything fancy with their posts because their work is too creative to ignore. So how are we going to take your work, which is maybe too creative to ignore or not, and create a social media post that's too creative to ignore? And how are we going to do that with the power of creativity and a little help from AI?

So that is what I want to cover tactically here and teach you guys how to do this. And you can literally take this recipe the minute you're done listening to this, and it will take you 15 to 20 minutes tops. For the extremely tech-challenged, maybe it takes you 30 minutes, okay, to get this entire thing done, posted on the socials, and the feedback coming back in. So I want to cover why this works and how to do it. Everything that I'm teaching you guys to do, there's quite a bit of strategy behind it. And so why this works is a couple of different reasons. One, I want you to create a carousel post on Instagram. Why do carousel posts work? Because most people don't do carousel posts. They do individual posts. And so just based on that fact alone, carousels get more reach. In addition to that, Instagram, on your behalf, does some A/B testing with Instagram carousels, i.e., it shows slide number one to some group of people, slide number three to some group of people, slide number four to some group of people, and so that helps. But I want you to do a carousel post. That's why this works, number one.

Number two, in today's day and age, the algorithm judges all social media posts based on the amount of time spent on the post itself, okay? And if it's a video, that pertains to video views, but if it's a carousel post, it's how much time did they spend and engage with a post, and then obviously the engagement, which you know is likes, is comments, is bookmarks, and the most important, shares. So knowing that, let's design one together from scratch that is both courageous and creative but is designed to maximize the time spent with the post and ideally get liked, commented, bookmarked, and shared.

So here I am, okay, it's me. I am in my comfy blue leather chair, and I'm taking a few minutes of downtime, and I open up Instagram and start scrolling. Your primary job in that situation as a content creator on Instagram is to stop me thumb-scrolling and get me to spend some more time on your post and then, of course, like, comment, and share it. So let's deploy some marketing to do that. And what we're going to do in this scenario is we are going to combine what's called a hook to stop the scroll, some artwork (that's where you come in), an additional image, and then a seriously creative caption. That is where the AI comes in. And so we combine all of that, especially the caption, which is going to take some time to read, and will ideally leave the reader either entertained or laughing or crying, whatever the case may be.

So I want to start with some hook ideas. So when I say hook, this is just a text, just a headline, so to speak, that you're going to create as your first carousel image. And I'm going to put all the ones that I'm using here in the show notes. All you have to do, wherever you're listening to this or if you're watching it on YouTube, just go to the little caption or the show notes or whatever it is below the video and copy them, steal them, for bait them. You don't have to come up with anything. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. But let me give you the contrast. Like, you know, let's say I'm in my aforementioned blue leather chair, and I'm scrolling, and what you've posted is just a regular image of your art, which is what you would regularly do, which is what all artists and photographers are doing all day long, right? So it's just that image. Is that going to stop my scroll? Or what if the first image was a headline that said, "You will not believe who critiqued my art." "You will not believe who critiqued my art." Or what if it's just a photo of your art versus, "When [insert a famous person's name here] critiqued my art, this happened." Or it's a static image, a video of your art versus, "What surprising person said about my art will leave you speechless." Or an image of your art on the wall versus, "Someone shocking gave me art feedback, and it was brutal." All of those are scroll-stopping headlines. They don't even play with me. Even you just hearing them, I have likely peaked your curiosity despite the fact that this is just audio and a podcast and not a social media post at all, right? So already, with those headlines, we're cooking. We have stopped the scroll. It is completely different than art. It is a simple text headline aimed to stop traffic.

So that is slide number one of our carousel post. Slide number two, your artwork. It could be a single shot or a few shots or maybe a couple of the work in progress and then the finished work or the image on the wall and framed, whatever it is. Or it could be an entire body of work as long as it's like, you know, the same series. So you could do one image, two images, three images, four images. Slide number three, you pick the person who has critiqued your work, and you just get an image of them. Go online, Google their name, get the image, put that up on Instagram. So slide number one, our hook. Slide number two, three, four, five, or just two, your work. Slide number three is the face of the person who critiqued your work. Okay, and you guys, I have so much fun doing this. When I do this, the results are so good, I can't even begin to tell you.

So let's put it all together. Let's put it all together, and I'll give you the examples right now. Again, to do this, you need an AI. I'll tell you about ours if you're using another AI. You have to know how to prompt it. You probably already know how to do that. But if you want to go and try ArtHelper for this, it's ArtHelper.ai. I'll put a link in the show notes, or you can just Google it, ArtHelper.ai. By the way, when you sign up, it's totally free to sign up. You don't have to put a credit card down, nothing. Use the code "POD" for podcast or for print on demand, "POD," when you create the account, and that'll give you 30 days with like the crazy pro version so you can try everything out with no limitations.

Okay, so let's put it all together. Our "too creative to ignore" social post. So image one is our headline. You can use any of those ones that I created, but I'll just stick with this one: "You will not believe who critiqued my art." Image number two is the work. In this case, I used a landscape painting someone created. It's of a river, fall colors, and there's a few white birds flying overhead. So far, this is what you picture: the first slide, "You will not believe who critiqued my art." Slide two, a single image of this landscape painting of the river and the two birds. Slide three is a picture of the comedian Dave Chappelle. Okay, and I asked the AI to write a caption for this in the voice of Dave Chappelle. And the first time, this is what it spit out. Okay, and I quote:

"Alright, let's break this down. You've got a painting that's trying to be all serene and nature-y, but let's be real, this is like the autumn version of a motivational poster. You know, the kind that says 'Hang in there' with a cat. Here we've got a lone evergreen flexing its muscles against a backdrop of fiery orange foliage. It's like saying, 'Look at me, I'm the star of the show.' And those two birds, they're just gliding around like they own the place, probably thinking, 'We're the real reason people stop to look at this.' Meanwhile, the water's just sitting there, reflecting all those warm hues like it's trying to get in on the action too. It's a nice scene, but it's also a little too perfect, like it's been filtered through a social media app. But hey, if you're into that kind of vibe, this piece could totally bring a slice of outdoors into your space. It's perfect for those moments when you want to feel calm but also a little bit like you're in a Hallmark movie. So if you're looking to add a touch of nature to your walls, this just might do the trick."

I can hear it in his voice right now. Now, you have to admit, that's a pretty solid social media post. "You will not believe who critiqued my art," a text headline, your image of the art, then an image of Dave Chappelle, then that entire caption. And you saw how long it took me to read that entire thing, right? All of that is time that is spent on the post, which is sending the signal back to Instagram: "This is a really good post. Go and show this post to other people." And when you have a hook like that that stops traffic, and then you have a famous, in this case, comedian that everybody knows, and then a caption like that, literally everyone is going to read the entire caption because that is just really creative. That is just a creative combination that includes your art in a really, really good description that, left to your own devices, would be extremely difficult to do, right? And so, you know, I'm getting incredible results doing this. I'm pushing and prompting my customers to do it. They're getting incredible results. And people laugh, and they comment, and they love it, and they share it, and they send you messages: "How did you come up with this? It's too creative to ignore." You guys, and better still, the whole thing takes mere minutes to complete. Mere minutes.

Let me give you some more creative examples. Number one, you can do this so many different ways with so many different people in just about any way imaginable, and you are limited literally only to your creativity. Some examples: for nature photos, I love using Sir David Attenborough, right? And you know, I'll have him critique the piece. If it's a painting of a famous person, I'll use the famous person to critique it. I was on a live yesterday, and somebody used, what is his name? He is married to Blake Lively, Ryan Reynolds. And it was someone did a painting of Ryan Reynolds, and I was like, "Critique this piece as if you're Ryan Reynolds," and it was hilarious, laugh-out-loud. It can be old people from history. It could be a famous Roman or a famous Greek or a famous poet or a philosopher or historian or a chemist or a psychologist. It could be Freud. It could be anyone you want. It can be someone contemporary. It can be someone historical. It can be someone in entertainment. It could be someone in news. It could literally be anybody, right? So you don't need to sell out. Like, you know, a lot of people are super into Taylor Swift right now, so ask the AI to rip your piece to shreds in the tone of Taylor Swift as if it was a song she had written. That totally works.

So you have the opportunity to do this, you know. You don't have to pick some person that you don't like or you feel like doesn't detail with your work. Pick someone you're inspired by. Pick someone you really like. Pick someone that you'd like to get a beer with. Like, you are only limited by your creativity. You can be funny. You can be entertaining. You can be self-deprecating and tell them to just rip this thing to pieces. You could say it's such and such, be flowy in your language, and say, "This is the best piece in the history of mankind." It doesn't matter. It's all just creative, and it's really, really good. You know, with a little bit of help of creativity from AI, that mathematically speaking, if you do something like this, the odds of your social media post reaching new eyeballs goes up by a factor of like 10 to 50. It just does. It just does.

And you know, in terms of the prompt, if you go into ArtHelper, ArtHelper has this little button that says "Product Description." All you do is you upload your image, you say, "Write a product description," and then you go in and you give it extra instructions, and you say, "Please write this product description in the voice of [insert name of whoever]." Okay, and then tell them, tell it, you know, "Write this description as if you're Dave Chappelle and rip this piece to shreds. You don't like it." Or, "Write this in such and such voice," however you want to do it. It all works. I have done this hundreds of times in hundreds of different scenarios, and almost all the time, assuming it's somebody that's famous that has enough of a body of work that the AI would know what they sound like, like you can literally use anyone. And for the tech-challenged among you, don't worry, I will put in the show notes videos where I walk through doing this step by step. They're very short videos because this literally only takes a minute. And you could do this once a week, twice a week, three times a week. You could do this for entire series. You could use the same person over and over again. You know, "Dave Chappelle insults my work, number three." You know, if you don't like Dave Chappelle and you prefer Don Rickles, your old-school, use Don Rickles, one of the greatest insult comics of all time, by the way, God rest his soul. So it's all about just getting creative, okay? You could do it any which way you want.

So you need to try this. You need to do this. Watch what will happen when you create a social media post that's too creative to ignore. Okay, all of a sudden, it's not so hard on Instagram anymore. All of a sudden, you have some momentum going in your social media feed. All of a sudden, you grew 50 followers last week instead of two, right? Especially when you do these carousels. So again, if you want to use ArtHelper, it's either the links in the show notes or just Google ArtHelper.ai, put in my code "POD" so that you get a free month of all the bells and whistles. Free to use anyway, but you'll get all the stuff unlocked. For one post, at least, if you invest 20 minutes in this, you're going to be too creative to ignore. That's the game. Thanks for listening, and as always, have a great day.

Ah, before I forget, lastly, thanks to all after the last episode that left me likes and comments on Spotify. I saw a couple of those comments. Somebody even liked it. I appreciate the feedback. It helps me out. It keeps me going. If you're on Apple Podcasts, it takes you two seconds to like one of these episodes. Just give me a like. I'm dying for these things. I'm trying to grow this. It's seriously, the feedback is awesome. I appreciate all of you that are leaving it, and yeah, have a great rest of your day.