CHAPTER 1

DO YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO BE A CREATIVE?

Some say the best creatives are sponges—obsessively soaking up whatever’s going on in the world. Then again, it’s also said that the best creatives have tunnel vision—they’re mollusk-like creatures with obstinately thick shells who ignore outside influences, determined to define their own territory.

WHAT KIND OF PERSON MAKES A GOOD CREATIVE?

Some see a creative as an extrovert, fizzing with a profusion of ideas, sparking off the energy of his colleagues. Alternatively he’s a loner, who will retreat into the woods—or Starbucks—and spend hours or days without human contact, until a single monolithic creative idea looms out of his subconscious.

So no one really knows, and the reason no one knows is that there isn’t such a thing as a creative type. The most obvious divide is that between typically word-loving copywriters and visually biased art directors (most advertising is produced by creative teams, consisting of one copywriter and one art director—more on this later).

But in general, in an advertising agency creative department you will find the most diverse group of people imaginable. That’s half the appeal.

There is, of course, a stereotype of the advertising creative. Watch any movie about advertising and you’ll see that we’re all crazy. In How to Get Ahead in Advertising, Richard E. Grant suffers a psychotic breakdown so serious he believes he has grown a second head; in Crazy People (the clue is in the title) Dudley Moore spends the majority of the film as an inmate in a mental hospital, and molds his fellow psychiatric patients into a creative department.

In reality, many of us look perfectly normal. No nation, race, sex, or religion has a monopoly on creative ability. Nor does any particular personality type dominate.

This was brought home to me when my agency sent eight young creative directors on a training course, part of which involved taking the Myers-Briggs personality test.

All eight of us scored completely differently.

Some were introverted, some extroverted. Some  were “thinking” types, some “feeling” types.... Some were spontaneous people, others more considered.

The only area we all had in common was a strong bias toward making decisions based on our intuition, rather than seeking to assemble the evidence.

INTUITION

The psychologist in charge of the program confirmed that in over 20 years of testing creative professionals, she was yet to come across one without this strongly developed sense of intuition.

The best creative director I have ever worked under had truly outstanding instincts. My art director and I used to liken him to a dog, with an incredible ability simply to “smell” a good idea. He never read research reports, but he always knew what consumers thought. He never enquired into how a product was made or what it contained, but he had an instinctive understanding of what its appeal would be. He never spent more than 1.5 seconds looking at a concept we showed him, and never ever changed his mind once he decided he liked something, or didn’t like it. And, incredibly, 99 percent of the time, he was right. Few of us have such an extreme bias toward intuition.

But it is fair to say that if you’re a person who never has hunches, never trusts your instincts, and never judges a situation until you have all the proper facts… you won’t make it as a creative.

DESIRE

Other than intuition, the most important factor in determining whether you will make it as a creative is simply how much you want it.

It is not easy to get a job in advertising—aspiring creatives can spend anything from two months to two years doing “placements,” before securing a permanent job. Quite a few give up.

And once you’ve got a job, it isn’t easy to keep it. Your work is highly visible; it could hardly be more so—it’s up on giant billboards in the street or played every night on TV. So if you’re no good, there’s nowhere to hide. You’ll get found out.

Plus, it’s a competitive field. More people want the jobs than there are jobs available. And plenty of people are prepared to work incredibly hard to get these jobs, and keep them. Advertising is full of passionate and committed people. If you don’t have the same desire they do, you won’t do as well as them.

As with all competitive fields, those that do well are those with drive and persistence, as well as talent.

A STRONG INTEREST IN ADVERTISING

As a child, I used to sing advertising jingles in the playground. My dad sold advertising space for The Sunday Times, which in the 1980s was running a fantastic poster campaign through Leo Burnett, and I used to beg him to bring the posters home for me. I put them up on the wall.

It’s unlikely that your story is as sad as mine. Nevertheless, a strong interest in advertising is another key predictor of success.

I remember when I was first trying to find a creative partner, I discussed teaming up with a guy who said he wanted to be an art director, but he was also in a band, which rehearsed several times a week.

He never made it as an art director. I don’t know if the band was successful either. I suppose focus is helpful for any line of work.

HUSTLE

Initiative is not essential, but over the years I’ve found it’s a quality that many good creatives possess. When I first came into advertising, I thought that juicy briefs would be passed around my workplace on a silver tray, like grapes at a Roman orgy.

That doesn’t happen. A lot of this book is about how to make things happen. It’s a bit like pinball. If you only flip the flippers, you will never get the high score. You have to learn how to nudge the machine as well. I’m not talking about lying or cheating here. You don’t want to “tilt” the machine. But a bit of nudging is to be encouraged.

Especially in the early stages of your career, you should be making things happen for yourself: rooting out good briefs; shooting little bits of film yourself; and making friends in unusual places. All that kind of stuff will help you, and we’ll be talking a lot more about it.

THICK SKIN

Before I worked in advertising, I was a journalist. Newspapers have a lot of pages to fill, and I found that 95 percent of what I wrote ended up in the paper.

But in our business, it’s the opposite — 99 percent or even 99.5 percent of what you write ends up in the bin.

If there’s one thing that characterizes a creative’s daily experience, it’s rejection.

You are allowed to go into a short period of mourning when an idea that you really love gets killed. But the most successful creatives learn to recover quickly from these setbacks, and “get straight back on the horse.”

Even when an idea does get approved, you still need to show toughness—to stand up to the people who start trying to ruin it.

DIFFERENT

In all probability, there’s something strange about you.

Something weird.

It might be something that everyone who knows you makes comments about, and jokes about, or it might be something only you know about.

It might be your sense of humor, your hobbies, or even just your hair.

But there’s definitely something different about you. It’s one of the reasons you are attracted to a creative job, rather than a boring one.

Be proud.

The more different you are, the better. Because to create work that is different and unusual, our industry needs people who are different—dreamers, weirdos, obsessives, folks who are “wrongly wired.”

If that sounds a bit like you, then you’ve come to the right place.