It's Not So Much What You See...

You really do have to know why you’re here – in Ad Land, I mean.

For me, there’s much excitement in the creative process, especially the moment the idea unlocks.

It starts as a pinhole of light – barely perceptible, but there nonetheless. Slowly, as the minutes and hours tick by, it begins to materialise, finally moving centre stage bit by bit.

It was nice to hear an intern say: “Let’s just do what we do best, and write some lines.” What a great way for a young writer to get his head around the brief.

So off they went to start cracking out headlines, platform lines, and discovering copy bits that might not have fit into either of the above, but still made great body copy points.

And from there, with a bit of pushing, a bit of itchy-scalp-syndrome and a good measure of procrastination, the idea for the campaign simply unlocks.

Sometimes it’s like that nagging feeling you have just after leaving the house that you forgot something, but you’re not going back anyway because you’re not sure what it was in the first place.

I’ve seen it hit like a tsunami, and you just know you’re there. You jump up at your desk and exclaim something highly irrelevant to everyone around you, and no doubt they all think you’re crazy. But you don’t care.

Other times, it’s mostly there and staring you right in the face, but for whatever reason you don’t fully see it. Until it rears its head again in another form and makes itself painfully clear. You probably slap the table and chuckle quietly to yourself, and here again your sanity is called into question.

Some call it ‘The Eureka Moment’.

Then you just lay out all the thoughts that work best for that idea, tweak the ones that can be saved, and happily exclude the ones that don’t fit into the group.

Getting there, though, sometimes seems a chore. You have to know where to look, and I think that simply comes from experience propelled by persistence.

So you let it go… but then it comes back, and finally you start to see the bits and pieces of information on a wall in front of you. And slowly, slowly, your subconscious connects the dots until a clear picture is revealed.

I heard a story many years ago from a senior creative I have always admired. He said he went to India and decided to buy one of those little hand-carved elephants used as an ornament or paperweight.

So everyone he asked said that one particular old man’s famous ‘elephants’ were the best you could get. He found the man and bought one. And it was true; it was a remarkably perfect wooden elephant.

Amazed, he asked the old man: “How do you make your elephants so perfect?”

The old man replied: “I take a block of wood. I take my knife. Then I remove everything that isn’t the shape of an elephant.”

And then that’s it. You know you’ve found it. All that’s left is to build it and push it forward and really make it come to life for others to see.

I like the sentiment that the some ads almost write themselves. This thought suggests that we, as thinkers, are merely architects of the ad, and the content for it has always been there anyway – all we are doing is putting it together in a fresh or meaningful way.

The answers are there, all around us, I believe, it’s just a matter of finding a way to see them.

Anyway, this job isn’t just about answers, it’s also about how you get there.

Alex enjoys the process, even if it is occasionally painful.