By Rayomand J Patell
Welcome back to the third in the series of these Sunday sessions. I was going to write one about how to write a great brief, taking off from last week’s column about the Suits. I’ll get around to it, but just not in this episode.
This one is for cub creatives. For those who are entering advertising in 2024. And it’s about how to find inspiration.
There is this conceit the left brained have, that the right brained among them cannot do what they do. This is true and for good reason. Why would we ever want to open Excel sheets? However, we keep these opinions politely to ourselves for the large part.
But then, they pull an Uno Reverse. You can’t do what I do, but I can do what you do! After all, “everyone, is creative!”
This is the ad agency equivalent of those participation trophies that started getting handed out to everyone on a sports field around the turn of the millennium.
Get real. If you were creative, you’d be in creative. For all your career. And after. Doing what you do because you can’t not do it. Doing what you do because if you don’t do it, the torrent of endless ideas storming about in your brain will drive you insane without an outlet. Money is the last thing we’re doing this for. We like it because it buys us things that help sustain our creativity. Lee Clow famously had a glass home at the edge of a cliff in LA. He was the only Creative Director Steve Jobs listened to. Between them, they created the ‘Think Different’ campaign. But, I digress. We do this, because it is who and what we are.
Creative people are wired differently at birth. We suffer greatly for our art, we go through an uncaring education system as lateral minds, enduring the demands of the linear world. Make no mistake, each of us have felt like the proverbial fish being evaluated on our ability to climb trees.
So this hubris around ‘anyone can be creative’ is best laid to rest by what either Warhol or Picasso said that, “while everyone can paint, not everyone should exhibit.” There’s a difference between the faux or the quasi and the real McCoy.
So here you are, the young person who thinks different, the creative lamb in the agency in an era that’s exciting technologically but in danger of losing its mojo.
How, do you find inspiration?
Please don’t go through award sites and the insta handles of the Top 50 Creative Directors in the world. You’ll quickly find your work being extremely derivative. It will simply not be your work, your idea, your perspective on the world. And you’ll hate it.
Go through all of that to see what the industry is doing, what the movers and shakers in it are saying and thinking. But, do not drink from those fountains hoping to quench your thirst for inspiration.
Instead, choose life. It’s what will infuse your work with originality. With the breath of fresh air. A summer breeze that makes anyone who sees your work, yes even the most jaded and cynical sorts, sit up and smile. And that, is the magic of the truly original.
After all, you are the product of an infinite statistical combination of ancestors to be born who you are. Quite simply, there’s never been anyone like you and there never will be. It’s your perspective on the world that will inspire you. All creativity boils down to seeing the same thing differently or combining two things in a way they haven’t been combined before.
Life is where the stories are. Life is where you’ll find the deepest insights. Life is all around you and all you have to do is simply observe. It’s like taking candy from a kid really. Keep your third eye open. Absorb it all.
It’s no secret that the Beatles are my creative superheroes. While they may not be as known to you as Taylor Swift, I urge you to learn about how the Beatles approached their songwriting craft. They drew from absolutely everywhere.
John Lennon famously spotted a circus poster in an antique shop and made an entire song out of it. Paul McCartney had a dream in which he got the melody for what would become ‘Yesterday’, which he composed using the words ‘scrambled eggs’ as placeholders for what would become one of the 20th century’s greatest songs. George Harrison travelled to India with the rest of them and met Pandit Ravi Shankar, whose sitar blew his mind. In the Taj Palace in Mumbai, East and West finally met, the Teacher and the Student spent days that turned into weeks of lessons – and the result was the sitar in about eleven Beatle songs making the world take notice of this great fusion. I could go on endlessly.
The point however is, if a rockstar can get a Number One song out of a circus poster, you can definitely get a script out of the story your cabbie tells you. Be open. Be receptive. Be a sponge.
An old rum campaign tag line was ‘Life is calling, where are you?” Relentlessly be a student of this thing called life and your work is going to take you places. When you’re watching a film in the theatre, watch the audience not the film. You’ll be amazed at what actually makes people tear up or laugh.
If you get the time, do watch the Peter Jackson trilogy of the Get Back sessions. Even if you don’t know who the Beatles are, just consider them as four creative guys on a deadline, hunting for inspiration, putting in the hard work, practising their craft endlessly and putting it out there for the world to be enthralled by. To have a camera at the birth of some of those songs is an overwhelming experience for a fan; even if you’re not one, you’d be hard pressed not to be amazed by their creative process pulling in inspiration from absolutely all around them. The Beatles, never bothered with their contemporaries and neither, should you.
Rayomand J Patell is an advertising veteran and InspiRAYtion is a weekend column on everything about advertising and marketing.