Latest CREATIVITY articles

Cheers to the real ones

If there was a sensible topic to close out the year, it’s the one regarding scam or ghost ads. You know the ones, those ads that aren’t ads, which often reaped their lot of awards, and which have taken up, I say it with regret, a certain space in the “creative ” sections of industry publications and websites.

Howard Draft: Introducing The Gunn Report 2009

Howard Draft, Executive Chairman of Draftfcb, served as Guest Editor of the 2009 Gunn Report. The fine folks at the Gunn Report were kind enough to share some of Howard’s thoughts on the most awarded ads and campaigns of the previous year or so. Howard pulls no punches; just because an ad won enough gold to outshine Fort Knox doesn’t mean he necessarily loved it, and he doesn’t shy away from telling you so.

How to Train Ideas to Come When They’re Called: Notes and Advice for Young People in Advertising PART THREE

What happens if you do something unexpected with your product or your medium or an everyday object? Many years ago, Volkswagen found a way to make the shape of their car say something about thrift in tough economic times (agency: Doyle Dane Bernbach, New York):

How to Train Ideas to Come When They’re Called: Notes and Advice for Young People in Advertising PART TWO

Let’s talk about another process for idea generation. This process isn’t specific to advertising, but it can work very well for what we do. It’s called SCAMPER, and it is attributed to a writer named Bob Eberle. SCAMPER is an acronym in which each letter suggests at least one exercise we should try when facing any creative challenge.

How to Train Ideas to Come When They’re Called: Notes and Advice for Young People in Advertising PART ONE

In this article, I’m hoping to impart some useful information about advertising ideas and how one arrives at them. I’m hoping this information will bring comfort and peace and a touch more confidence. Not to you, of course, because I know that you personally have no particular anxiety about your ability to produce great ideas on demand. [...]

Making the most out of The Idea Book

When I first heard about The Idea Book, I was sceptical. How does it work? Why would people buy, read and carry it around? Most importantly – where could I find it? I searched all the mainstream stores in Singapore to no avail. Knowing friends smirked and revealed their own well-thumbed, heavily scribbled copies but refused to loan them to me. “Get your own copy!” was the oft-heard refrain. This drove me nuts. A bestseller book on creativity found only online? Sure.

Email Etiquette for Creative Directors

For some reason creative directors have a habit, a bad habit, of not responding to emails. I’m not a creative director but I do run a company and I know tons of creative directors, many of them which run worldwide shops and I can vouch for them in the fact that they get many emails, too many emails, including hundreds from everything from photographers, filmmakers, producers, [...]

Malcolm Gladwell On Reinventing Innovation: Lesson One

Recently, we at ihaveanidea were invited to attend a day-long conference on “reinventing innovation.” The event was hosted by Infopresse, a Quebec based publication geared towards advertising and marketing professionals. The speakers at the event included Anita Sands, VP and Chief of Innovation at Citi in New York, Lauent Simon, professor at HEC Montreal and [...]

Genuine Ingenuity

I honestly believe that in the field of advertising there are a million creative geniuses. Unfortunately, only a handful of them are real.
What in the world do I mean? I say that because far too many creative talents are pitching ideas that are skinned off of current trends or peeled from forecasts made by “experts” [...]

Houdini Solution Excerpt

Note: The following excerpt is from Chapter 6, “Creativity And The Straitjacket Of Money”, from his upcoming book “The Houdini Solution”]
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Lack of money is no obstacle.
Lack of an idea is an obstacle.
–Ken Hakuta, toy inventor

If I were to [...]