HOW TO GENERATE IDEAS - part 01

All advertising ideas fall into one of these three categories. They will either show :
1. What happens with the product
2. What happens without the product
3. What happens with and without the product - in the same ad.

Getting those ideas doesn't always have to be a mystical process, as some of the world's most respected creative leaders can prove. And while the creative process itself can be deconstructed into four stages - preparation, incubation, illumination and verification - the way we interrelate, overlap and repeat the various stages will stamp our ideas with our own creative DNA.

I. Start with the end first
"If you don't know where you're going, all roads will take you there. So I always start at the end and work my way back," explains Horton. "Say I want to draw a straight line between here and point X. If I start here I could end up anywhere. It's better if I go to point X and just work back. My endings will invariably be the truth: the line with the symbol born out of that truth. It opens the way for the most fantastic creativity. All you have to do is finish at X; so you can excite us with where you start, how you start. A lot of creative people in my experience have had an idea, but couldn't quite finish it. But if they had known where they were finishing, they could have started anywhere ..."

Dawson also starts with the end line, or at least a rough line, first. "I would always try to start by summing up something different about the product or service, and they work back. If you can't get the line, you probably start attacking if from the wrong end, which means having an idea from something that can be related to the product. The problem is, you are likely to end up with something that isn't absolutely relevant. " If it's just a funny, or a different, or a curious idea, he warns, it will usually require manipulation to marry it with the key thought. Dawson needs information; without it, trying to conjure ideas out of nothing means that the blank sheet of paper will stay blank a lot longer. He goes swimming at lunchtime to find ideas; he counts the tiles in the pool and things slip into place. He works alone. "I don't believe Picasso came up with an idea for a picture with somebody else, or that Mozart came up with an idea for a symphony with somebody else. Ideas can only come into one person's brain at a time."

Delbridge starts with a line. "And I'll hone and hone that line until I've got something really sharp, and then I'll spring off that into a myriad of possible visual interpretations. I rarely have a visual idea first. The line encapsulates the positioning I want; it forces me intellectually to see it so singly, so clearly, but the line itself may not even appear in the final commercial."

Newman says great lines are now more important than ever. "the 'slogan' was actually a Highland war cry. A great slogan can do more than neatly distil essence of an organisation; We try harder. It can do more than get a product into the vernacular. A diamond is forever. If it's potent enough, a great slogan can actually drive the culture of an entire company. Just do it. Our client, Toyota Australia, has the value of their slogan - Oh what a feeling - listed on their balance sheet for many millions. Interestingly, Toyota is probably Australia's most creatively awarded campaign of the last ten years." Newman points to his campaign them for the NRMA, a road service and insurance organisation. "Claiming the high ground generic of 'help' was strategically important, but it didn't come alive for me until I turned it into the simple branding mnemonic of the letters H-E-L-P always being spelt out after the name N-R-M-A." Getting into the vernacular, becoming part of popular culture, is what every campaign should aim for, says Newman. "I think 'Make it famous' should be a mandatory on every creative brief." Newman's discipline is that the idea should be reducible to a poster. "A sentence and a visual idea. Of course, the commercial might develop that visual idea into a multi-layered story, but if the thought can be reduced to a handful of nut hard words and a single unmoving visual, then at least you know you've got a real idea and not just an execution or not just a joke."

II. Find a moment
"I've never tried to solve a problem the same way twice," expains McBride. "Sometimes, by accident, the structure or the logic could be similiar to other campaigns I've worked on, but the truth is always about boiling things down, trying to make them simple, and finding yourself inside of a moment."

III. Is there an idea in the strategy ?
"Distil the strategy and treat it like a poster" is Whybin's advice. "In many ways, it's no different to the print medium. You've got to put down, in a square, the most succinct distillation of the proposition. And the greatest way you can do it is without any words, just a picture. The picture should distil the strategy and the proposition. I start that way, doing a poster first." Once you distil the strategy, Whybin says the ad will just drop into place. "Pull your ideas from within the brands." It helps, Whybin says if you can visualise the product in your mind and see the idea coming out of it. That way, you can sense whether the idea belongs inherently to the brand, or is just an unrelated or generic graft. "A lot of people try to grab at creative ideas, they're battling all the time, but actually I think there's quite a logical order to it. In many ways, it's not creative at all, it's quite rational. You keep working until the left side of the brain and the right side of the brain click together, and then you start to build emotion into that." Once he gets the idea, Whybin can see the whole commercial straightaway. He then works on the compression of the argument.

IV. Be a sponge
"Be a sponge," says Fink. "Go and soak up as much information as you can. Read books, read magazines, go to the theatre, go to the cinema, go swimming, go walking, read a book about bringing up a dog, find out about glassblowing. There's a magazine in Britain called Loot, where people put in all their secondhand stuff they want to get rid of; there's everything in there from wardrobes to cars to exhaust kinds of things out there. The internet is like the greatest encyclopedia in the world. There are too many advertising people just stare each other for three weeks. The worst things they can do is look in the award books. All that stuff's been done." The best creative people are engaged in a constant process of observing, storing and connecting. Even a simple walk to work can yield interesting dividends. "I was watching the way everyone else was walking and everyone seemed to be waddling a bit more than usual. I think it was because I was just really concentrating hard on what happens to people''s head whey then walk. They do go up and down. There's a Truffaut movie called Shoot the Pianist. In it, the main character falls in love with this girl and every time he walks with her, they walk absolutely perfectly together so their heads would move up and down together. And then there's a point where they argue, and suddenly their heads are no longer together."

--- to be continued