What would you say is the single most important characteristic of an advertising person? Or advertising agency? Or 
advertising campaign? Most people would answer all these questions with the same, single word answer: CREATIVITY.
There is no denying that creativity is important in advertising. It is considered so important that one of the major departments within an advertising agency is named after it. But is it really THAT important? Or could it be that we have taken the reverence of creativity one step too far?
To address this question properly we first need to discuss the roles of creativity in advertising, and as Goose (Anthony Edwards) says in the movie Top Gun – “the list is long and distinguished”:
Continue reading ‘An Overdose of Creativity’
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Let’s face it, in most of our daily tasks we don’t need to be creative. All we need is to retrieve from memory ready-made templates and the problem is gone. 
There are however situations in life or work when the known routines don’t seem to work.
Sometimes we need to do something that simply seems impossible - we need to double the throughput of a production line within two weeks after several years in which all we were trying to do and managed to do was to increase the production by no more than 20 percent. (In one of my consulting projects we did exactly that…).
Often a problem seems very simple, but after several attempts to solve it, it turns out that the routine methods fail.
On yet other occasions, we do have a working solution, but for some reason we are not satisfied with it. We just don’t seem to find a better one.
In all these situations SIT can help us find a simple solution that for some good reason our brain could not produce.
SIT is based on the simple observation that many creative solutions in different domains fall into a relatively small number of distinctive categories. If we know these categories, we can use them to find new solutions.
“Out of the box” solutions, it is claimed, fall into their own boxes.
Continue reading ‘Your Problem might be the Solution’
Posted in Problem Solving categories |
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Have you ever wondered what someone born in the 1800’s would think if they saw what human life is like today? Do you think they would value all the new technology that pervades modern life? Or might they consider 21st century civilization, with all of its hustle and bustle and multi-tasking required, a sad place to be? Hold on, I have a text message, I’ll be back to finish this blog post in a minute…
In this day and age one can easily participate simultaneously in various conversations or activities (i.e talking on the phone while chatting on the web, talking on the phone while having a Skype video call, driving while talking on the phone). Multi-tasking is hard to avoid in a modern, technology-filled world. For those of us who have given in, and who willingly call ourselves “multitaskers”, have we lost something by being willing to multi task? Perhaps there is something we have gained- some sort of upper hand over those who still insist on focusing on one thing at a time.
Continue reading ‘Attention, Multitaskers, You Might Be Paying a Mental Price’
Posted in Insights categories |
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