About being creative

Left brain thinkers often ask me ‘where does creativity come from?’.

It genuinely baffles them. Of course to those of us who play in the right sides of our brains it’s a very difficult thing to explain. We do it all the time. Without thinking...

I’ve learnt a few things over the years.

When I was starting out I was the only one who could have good ideas. Others had cliches or tired, old regurgitations. I was original, dangerous even. There had been no-one like me. Except of course there had been. Loads of them.

Ideas are everywhere. And everyone (even you) has them all the time.

When we pitch I like to talk to lots of people about what the pitch is about (I’m very lonely...). Not in detail but just the flavour of the problem. And every time someone will come out with a comment or an observation that gets me thinking down a different road to the one I may have been traveling.

Many seasons ago we were pitching for a product used for depression. In particular anxiety. We’d had our blue sky sessions and the walls were covered in words, images and brief highlights. At the time the vogue was for happy, smiling images and positive outcomes. And indeed we had many happy, smiling faces looking down at us.

In my studio we like to live with the ideas for a while. We see which ones become tired, quickly. They get taken down. Then we have the ‘clay pigeon’ shoot. If it doesn’t meet the brief it comes down. And we’re usually left with a selection of ideas to whittle down. On this occasion we’d whittled down to nothing (which makes presenting the work hard!).

Nothing we’d done felt right. Oh, we could have presented a couple of the thoughts at a push, but I don’t like doing that. So we had a problem. The pitch was in two days and we were dry. Every team had had a look but it was just not happening.

Then one of the lads from the studio came in humming a song. I couldn’t get the song out of my head so I called him back and asked what it was. He said it was a Bryan Ferry number that popped into his head when he’d been reading the brief notes stuck on my wall. He wanted to know why we were focussing on happy people when depressed people with anxiety are incredibly cut off from everyone else. Shouldn’t we be giving the GP someone to associate the condition with so that when that patient walks through his door he knows about our product?

The song was ‘Dance away’ and the lyric he was focussing on was ‘loneliness is a crowded room’.

Within 12 hours we had four approaches created around this premise, including one that was a shot of a restaurant, all movement blurred, with one person sitting at a table on his own perfectly focussed. The Headline was simply ‘Loneliness is a crowded room’.

We won the pitch.