Look at that!
I’m the first person to ever be on the front cover of The Drum magazine twice. Although, it’s just not as flattering this time!
It’s all because there’s a feature in there describing the results from the Newt/Judge Experiment to see if alcohol makes you more creative.
You can also enjoy the piece right here on The Drum’s website.
Thanks to Julian Hanford for the great shot!
Over the last few years I’ve felt that creativity has been increasingly ghettoised until it’s little more than a stylistic flourish at the end of some pretty ropey thinking. Which is one of the reasons that I decided to step out of advertising creative departments.
I’m more interested in using creative thinking to solve problems. And that means that you need to apply creative thought far earlier in the marketing process. Preferably right at the very beginning.
I was talking about this very thing to Mike Nutley, the former Editor of the NMA, a couple of months ago. He’s currently editing Adobe’s CMO.com site, so he asked me if I’d write about it.
And I did.
You can see my thoughts right here.
Last week, I conducted an experiment on behalf of The Drum magazine to see if alcohol does, in fact, make you more creative. Those of us old enough to remember the three-pint lunch have a sneaking suspicion that it can play a positive role. As long as it doesn’t turn into the six-pint-and-a-chaser lunch, of course.
So I’ve written a little piece in The Drum about it – which you can read on their website.
And, thanks to the film-making skills of Tom Baker, I can also share with you this lovely little teaser video:
We’re just about to put the ideas into testing to see if creatives work better with or without alcohol.
Once we know, you’ll be able to read about it in the magazine – and enjoy a full-length documentary video of the shenanigans.
Cheers!
Last night I did a Google Hangout show with the fantastic Doug Zanger and Newbear from Advertising Week.
They’re the main men behind the brilliant Advertising Week Social Club (or AWSC, for short).
They wanted to talk about creativity. So they put some questions out to their audience before giving me a grilling.
The four posers for the evening were:
• What do you think makes creative people creative?
• What’s your most important ingredient for creativity?
• Can you teach/create creativity – or is it an naturally-occurring talent/gift?
• Do you feel as though you *understand* creativity? Why or why not?
And here’s what we had to say:
You can also see what they had to say about the shenanigans right here.
I forgot to blog about this!
It went up yesterday and is currently the most viewed article on the site!
Some people tell me they hate it. Others tell me they love it.
Go and read it on The Drum. And leave a comment to tell me what you think.
I’m doing some talky stuff again in a couple of weeks at The Drum’s 4 Minute Warning event.
I’ll be talking about innovation and how to make it work in business.
And as much as I’m delighted to be at the top of the speakers’ list, I know that I only made it to that lofty position because of an alphabetical quirk.
So here are some of the other people who’ll be outshining me on stage:
- Laura Jordan Bambach – ECD of Dare and one of my favourite people in the industry
- Rory Sutherland – Vice Chairman of Ogilvy, TED talker and tip-top raconteur
- Russell Buckely – one of the founders of AdMob
- Justin Cooke – Chair of BIMA and founder of Fortune Cookie
- George Prest – ECD at R/GA
- Ken Robertson – Head of Mischief at Paddy Power
- lots more incredible people
If you’ve not got your tickets yet, it’s not too late.
A couple of weeks ago I was having a transatlantic chinwag with my chum Doug Zanger at Advertising Week. I’m helping them out with something exciting that I’ll be announcing soon – but in the meantime Doug asked me to write a piece for their blog. And because I sounded so excited about the time I spend at the School of Communication Arts, he wanted me to write about it.
So I did.
And you can read what I wrote right here.
