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.

Go along to the site and grab them now.

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.

This isn’t a joke. I’m working with The Drum to conduct a little experiment. And we need some advertising creatives happy to be tested upon.

We’re calling this The Newt/Judge Experiment (work it out yourself). And it will go like this:

• We’ll have two teams (each made up of one senior creative team, one middleweight team and some students).
• Everyone will be given the same creative brief.
• One team will consume lots of free booze while they work. The other team will be tea-total.
• At the end of the night, everyone submits their work.
• The work is then judged by top creative directors (to be announced soon)
• Our findings are announced.

The whole thing will be covered by The Drum (who will also be picking up the bar tab!)

We’ll be conducting the experiment in 3 or 4 weeks. Think of it as practice for the Christmas party season.

All we need now are the creatives!

If you’re interested – or you know others that would be – send an introductory email to newt.judge@gmail.com

Spread the word!

And during that time it’s become clearer and clearer to me that most organisations are actually set up to destroy ideas. Every part of the process leads to compromise, adequacy and the destruction of anything truly fresh.

That has led me to starting work on another potential book about how organisations destroy creativity; and what they can do to help it flourish.

So I decided to do my Silicon Beach talk about these very issues. But – to make it more interesting – I decided to do it from the opposite point of view. This talk is an instructional guide on how to murder ideas before they can have any effect on a business.

I’ve recorded a voiceover so you can hear most of what I spoke about. It’s less than 10 minutes. Enjoy!

I’ll shortly be posting an abbreviated version of the talk I did at Silicon Beach last week. And in advance of that, I thought I should share a short article I wrote for the event booklet. It’s kind of the prequel to the talk.

—

What every business needs

London didn’t have much sun this year. But on one of the few days that it did, I was sitting in a large, darkened auditorium with several hundred businesspeople looking to augment their knowledge. Or possibly just people who wanted to get out of the office for a day.

I was due onstage in 10 minutes to talk about my new book. And in the meantime was listening to a lady who runs a large division of a London Council. (Her talk was a lot more interesting than you’d imagine.)

She asked the attendees what they saw as the most important thing their organisation needed.

More budget? A few palms went up.

Stronger leadership? A scattering of fists were raised.

Creativity? More than half the room raised their hands.

I nearly spat out a mouthful of cold tea in surprise.

These weren’t advertising people. They were businesspeople. And they wanted more creativity in their organisation?

That was brilliant news.

And it set the audience up perfectly for my talk on understanding creativity!

So was this just an anomaly?

After a day of missing out on my precious vitamin D, I decided to do a bit of research to find out if this desire for creativity was normal.

A quick Google search took me to an IBM study from 2010. They’d conducted interviews with over 1,500 CEOs and business leaders from all around the world. The intention was to discover how they planned to respond to changes in the business environment.

Again, the number one quality they were seeking was creativity.

What do they mean by ‘creativity’?

The word ‘creativity’ is a troublesome one.

Many people see it as an ability that some individuals have and others don’t. Parents coo over their child nibbling on the end of a Crayola and proudly boast that they’re ‘creative’. It’s a blessing or a talent or a gift that’s bestowed on the lucky few.

Complete piffle!

Other people see creativity as a big negative. They attach it to the word ‘accounting’ to mean unreliable, fictitious or dishonest. It just can’t be trusted.

Utter tosh!

Lots of people see it as a glamorous job title. They want the word ‘creative’ in amongst their ‘assistant artworker’ title to impress the hipsters they meet at Shoreditch house parties.

Total balderdash!

So when it comes to the businesspeople in question, what are they getting at with the word ‘creativity’?

For them I think it just means ‘fresh thinking’. They’re looking for something non-specifically different; a new approach to their established market.

But why are these organisations looking for  fresh thinking in the first place?

I have a theory:

Nothing else has worked

Over decades the world of business settled into an established way of working. Things hadn’t changed that much in corporate land. It was all about refining your process and structure until it was as efficient as it could be.

Then Sir Tim Berners-Lee came along and spoiled everything.

By connecting people with other people, information, tools and businesses – the consumer started evolving at a terrific rate.

Using the classic SWOT terminology, the strengths of traditional companies became their weaknesses. And newer, nimbler businesses started up to take advantage of the opportunities that established businesses saw as threats.

Big business was facing a whole new set of issues. They had to take action.

Accountants did what accountants do; cutting costs to become more competitive.

Holding companies bought, sold and merged in an effort to streamline their business.

Lawyers got busy trying to protect companies’ rights.

Marketers threw money at every new media channel that appeared.

And none of it has had the desired effect.

Something else needs to be done.

Fresh thinking is required.

So under these circumstances the business leaders are right; they need creativity.

But will creativity work?

Here comes the uncomfortable truth:

No.

No, it won’t.

Not with organisations the way they are.

Because organisations are set-up to resist new ideas. They’re set up to maintain the status quo. They demand proof before they’ll implement something different.

I’ve even seen this happen in advertising agencies. And they’re supposed to be the pinnacle of creative business.

Many agencies – especially the larger ones – are hamstrung by their own structure and processes. The leadership are perpetuating an old model that’s becoming less relevant by the day. And the adjustments they’re trying to make are all about minimum disruption rather than maximum impact.

So if these bastions of creativity are doing such a bad job of thinking differently, what chances do their clients have?

Where do we go from here?

We can agree that creativity in business is a must. And also that businesses aren’t set-up to handle creativity.

So how do we get out of this sticky wicket?

That’s a problem I’m working on right now.

Recently I’ve been trying to discover exactly what it is that hampers creativity in business – as well as what makes it thrive.

The more of this we understand, the better chance we have of making creativity work for business.

Some of it is psychology, some of it is ignorance, some of it is organisational structure and some of it is process.

At the moment it’s just a bunch of notes for a possible follow-up book.

My first epistle was about how to boost creativity, so it seems apt that the next one should be about how to kill it.

That’s what I’ll be sharing with you at Silicon Beach.

And I’ll also be bringing my Speedos.

Just in case.