I’ll never forget the day as a creative director at a major north american agency, a job candidate presented his portfolio with a piece of my work in it.
I prodded with questions like: “when did you do that piece?”, “what agency?”, “who was the creative director?”.
The candidate answered all the questions without expression. I didn’t have the heart to just nut him right there and decided just to let him creep back into the sea of portfolios.
These days, when I work with agencies, one of the first things I do is look at their website. Taking notes I prepare a series of questions focused on not just the quality of the work but the authenticity. Are all the ads on the site real or are they “dream ads” produced without a client in order to show off the agency’s creativity.
Others I have discovered are freelancer’s contributions. Smaller agencies often showcase the work of their freelance teams to make up for their own lack of creativity.
My advice to my own clients and the agency world at large: BE REAL. Show only your own real work. Work that has been bought and paid for. It’s not really yours, unless you make it yours.

Strange to think that all that pent up creativity could spill out in one single day or a few hours for that matter. But that’s what we expect and so we should at three million a pop, plus production costs.

This years crop of “Big Game” Ads turned out to be a big disappointment. While the whole world was watching the creative guys seem to have taken their eye off the ball. In my years as a creative director I never had the kind of resources available to create a thirty second spot on the “The Big Game”, but  I never would have let most of this crap out of my trash bin.

Sure we love the E Trade baby stuff, but we’ve seen funnier. Ok, the Bud dog sitter was funny but totally forgettable. Doritos failed to even bump the bar let alone clear it. All the creative people involved should have listened to John F. Kennedy “A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on. “

Over my career I’ve worked for a number of Creative Directors from wild to mild. Some I thought needed professional help others lead by example. In any case, new research suggests that people who get mad get more creative.

In the latest Miller-McCune Tom Jacobs writes:

Writing in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, a research team led by University of Amsterdam psychologist Gerben Van Kleef describes an experiment involving 63 undergraduates. To begin, each filled out an 11-item “personal need for structure scale,” in which they rate the degree to which they agreed with such statements as “I become uncomfortable when the rules in a situation are not clear.”

“Individuals scoring on the low end of the scale are more inclined to search for and incorporate new information when making judgments,” the researchers write, “whereas people on the high end strive to maintain simple structures.” In psychological jargon, the first group exhibits high epistemic motivation, the second group low epistemic motivation.

Next, the participants performed two variations on a standard creativity test: They were given eight minutes to write down as many uses as they could come up with for a potato, and an unlimited time to think of as many ways as possible to use a brick. In between those two sessions, they viewed a video clip in which an actor read a list of instructions, telling them “the more ideas the better,” “the more unusual the idea the better” and “combine and improve your ideas.”

Half the participants saw a version of the video in which the actor was emotionless. The other half saw a version in which “he frowned a lot, spoke with an angry and irritable tone of voice, clenched his fists and looked stern.”

His palpable annoyance affected different people in different ways. The researchers found exposure to the angry man increased the creativity of participants with high epistemic motivation (those relatively open to new information), but decreased it for those with low epistemic motivation (those with a strong need for structure).

“Individuals with low epistemic motivation are less likely to consider the task-relevant implications of others’ anger,” the researchers note. “Rather, they develop negative reactions toward their co-worker, which leads to disengagement and lower performance.”

Further analysis found that “among individuals with high epistemic motivation, expressions of anger also increased relative originality — that is, the number of unique ideas relative to the total number of ideas generated. This indicates that expressions of anger do not just lead individuals to generate more ideas, but also to generate more original ideas.”

So, if you’re a supervisor trying to inspire creativity on the part of your staff, it would clearly help to understand each of their personalities before deciding who would benefit from your sharply expressed displeasure. And, the researchers add, it would also be wise to save your potentially inspiring irritation for the right moment.

“Given that variables such as time pressure or environmental noises have been found to decrease epistemic motivation,” they write, “these findings suggest that expressions of anger are unlikely to increase creativity under such conditions.”

If you have ever worked in advertising, this information may make you wonder about some of the creative people you worked with. Hopefully, in your case the anger was kept to a minimum perhaps except in the heart of your favorite Creative Director.

THERE are plenty of studies which show that dogs act as social catalysts, helping their owners forge intimate, long-term relationships with other people. But does that apply in the workplace? Christopher Honts and his colleagues at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant were surprised to find that there was not much research on this question, and decided to put that right. They wondered in particular if the mere presence of a canine in the office might make people collaborate more effectively. And, as they told a meeting of the International Society for Human Ethology in Madison, Wisconsin, on August 2nd, they found that it could.

To reach this conclusion, they carried out two experiments. In the first, they brought together 12 groups of four individuals and told each group to come up with a 15-second advertisement for a made-up product. Everyone was asked to contribute ideas for the ad, but ultimately the group had to decide on only one. Anyone familiar with the modern “collaborative” office environment will know that that is a challenge.

Some of the groups had a dog underfoot throughout, while the others had none. After the task, all the volunteers had to answer a questionnaire on how they felt about working with the other—human—members of the team. Mr Honts found that those who had had a dog to slobber and pounce on them ranked their team-mates more highly on measures of trust, team cohesion and intimacy than those who had not.

In the other experiment, which used 13 groups, the researchers explored how the presence of an animal altered players’ behaviour in a game known as the prisoner’s dilemma. In the version of this game played by the volunteers, all four members of each group had been “charged” with a crime. Individually, they could choose (without being able to talk to the others) either to snitch on their team-mates or to stand by them. Each individual’s decision affected the outcomes for the other three as well as for himself in a way that was explained in advance. The lightest putative sentence would be given to someone who chose to snitch while the other three did not; the heaviest penalty would be borne by a lone non-snitch. The second-best outcome came when all four decided not to snitch. And so on.

Having a dog around made volunteers 30% less likely to snitch than those who played without one.

So perhaps instead of hiring that next consultant (like me) or the next pile of entries to some obscure awards festival, spend the money on the heart and soul of your agency at the Humane Society.

I’ve been in the advertising business for a long time. Heck, long enough to remember the Mad Men era. I was just a kid in the creative department but the suits were the focus of the agency. They wore the expensive clothes, had the three hour martini lunches and provided extra special services to their clients on demand. The creative department was squeezed into tiny closets. Each had suffered from the constant turnover of people. It seemed when someone brought something into their office they never had any interest in taking it with them when they left.

Flash forward. Today the creative department is the engine of the agency. Creatives can be treated like gods. The paradigm has shifted. The other thing that has shifted is the fun side of the business. Suits now spend time on their computers reviewing stats instead of drinking manhattans. Creatives seem to have more interest in facebook and twitter than drawing and thinking.

It all makes me wonder how Ted Bates would feel about this transition.

Long a focus for many agencies and clients alike the dreaded Brainstorming has quite the folklore attached. Firstly, many feel the brainstorming is a way to harness the creative horsepower of an organization and focus it on a problem or challenge. The accepted paradigm is that this is a great way of involving people and getting the best idea on the table.

Professor Richad Wiseman writes in BBC Focus Magazine: “As you read this, people in offices around the globe will be having meetings trying to come up with good ideas. Researchers have gone to great trouble to test this technique….The results suggest that groups actually hinder creativity. Group brainstorming may fail because of a phenomenon known as ‘social loafing’ first noticed in the late 1880′s by French agricultural engineer Max Ringlemann. In one of the studies, people were asked to pull on a rope and life increasingly heavy weights. Wen working along, individuals lifted around 85 kilograms, but managed only 65 kilos when placed in a group, they are not as motivated to put in the time and energy. After all, they won’t receive personal praise if the group does well and can blame others if it performs badly. Group brainstorming seems to stifle, not stimulate, the creative juices”.

So next time the client or the account people start to make rumblings about a group creative session, have your ideas ready and make a dental appointment.

There has been no question that the Wieden Kennedy guys are a bunch of very smart cookies. Their offices echo creativity from the totem to the floors. To me, the only thing really surprising about their Old Spice campaign is that the industry seemed so surprised at the internet version of their thinking.
Once again they did the unimaginable for many agencies and went out on a limb. In my career, this seems to be the location of many great ideas. They took their Old Spice Guy viral in a WK kind of way. They got him tweeting and networking and best of all they got him a team of great creative writers. Not just headline guys..these fellows turned out to be the standup comics of internet highway. Their quick responses to selected targets engaged and entertained and that my friends, is one of the reasons people love their work.