Ads, Honda, Nike, interestingness
I had a long and fascinating chat with David and Jeffre the other day. They wanted to talk about Cog for their interestingness project and knowing a conversation with them is always fascinating I asked if I could record it.
We rambled on and on. But it reminded me of one thing I always want to tell younger people getting into the creative industries.
We create this myth - it's a thing we sell to clients - that the process goes:
- Strategy
- Brief
- Creatives have ideas
Whereas the process normally goes:
- Strategy
- Brief
- Creatives see if any of the ideas they've already had/found will fit the brief
- Unearthing of brilliant, interesting idea which will also solve the client problem
- Tweaking of strategy and brief to enable presentation of pre-existing idea
THIS IS A GOOD THING. This is how most great creative ideas happen. They're not plucked from the air, they're strapped together from pre-existing parts. It's the juxtapositions and re-use that make them interesting.
It's especially true if you're optimising for interesting work - stuff people want to watch rather than pure message delivery. It's a lot easier to take an idea that's already interesting and redeploy it for your purposes than to take a 'message' and try and make it interesting.
