Blog 6 - Thoughts on Creativity

My own creativity has apparently brought me to where I am today. It was back in my undergrad as a marketing assistant for Rutgers Recreation that I realized I even had this capability. The first task where I felt especially creative was when we were assigned to promote a “cliff” dive off of one of the schools Olympic height diving boards. One of my co-workers and I spent a decent amount of time thinking about how we would get students excited about this when there were already a number of other videos showing people jumping from the top. There were multiple angles already taken. Some from below, some looking down to emphasize the height, different videos showing different emotions that people had from their first leap until they climbed out of the pool.

Then it hit me, we should jump off with them. Utilizing a go pro camera that our department had and final cut pro to cut out the two minutes of time where I was too scared to move from the top of the diving board we were able to give our audience a unique view of what was to expect. From the walk up the stairs to just before I hit the water. I may be bias, but I felt our video stood out. Advertising was fun.

I believe anyone can be creative. Not all in the same way though. My best friend from New Jersey studies art in London right now and through many years of growing up together I have noticed us be creative in different ways because of the way we see the world.  He has on a number of occasions surprised me with how he envisions things and makes connections. For example: once on a visit he pointed out that a shelf we near our stairs had a pair of pants resting on it and shoes pointing underneath. Nothing odd there. He proceeded to move my roommate’s targeting paper from a recent gun range visit and stick it above the shelf and turned the shoes around so they faced out. When looked at straight on, it made a person. A human torso followed by pants with shoes at the bottom. I was flabbergasted. I would never have made those connections in my head.

With this example I would believe a group of people in an organization would most definitely be able to be creative. Different people are different in their creative habit.  Get a group of people together with just the slightest amount of conditions and rules and amazing things can happen. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of bad ideas will come out because someone lays the golden egg. The important thing is to not shut down the creativity. It’s all about connections, when something is maliciously shot down then that kills a potentially game-changing connection down the line.

I know that feeling very well. I am currently in the advertising program’s creative sequence and let me tell you, you get shot down a lot. It sometimes makes you feel uncreative. I can say that I am in arguably one of the top 5 best creative advertising programs in the country if not world, but being told your idea is bad will cut that thought process down quickly. It’s about having a thick skin and knowing how to tell someone their idea is lacking. As Professor Walls said in class, say things like “No, I don’t think that works but maybe if we...” and take the previous idea from there it can either retain life or force the person who came up with it to focus on the next idea in the circle.

I am not sure if I can say I’ve only ever worked in creative environments.  It might just have been me trying to allow something creative to happen. I took a brief aside from life to be a reporter after school and took this as an opportunity to include myself in my writing. This is not a good thing in journalism. It should be objective through and through. Therefore, after a number of reminders of what I was at a newspaper for (to watch a dying industry perish up close of course) I just played with words and toyed around. I ended up finding a happy medium where the work was objective while I could know that the writing style was distinctly mine within the parameters set by my editors.

We should trust ourselves to a point. In my time here, I have come up with ad campaigns that I loved. I was so proud of myself for being the cleverest one in the room, or so I thought, only to have my idea flounder when put in front of an audience. A creative process should start without parameters but gradually get more focused. Too many parameters early on will not allow the creativity to flourish while too little later on will not allow it to mature into something. It’s a careful balance. That is the main thing in common that most creative processes have. Start big and get more specific as you go on. It’s like a funnel. From whatever idea you start with, let it start out with the potential for anything and then whittle away until the finished product lies before either literally or figuratively.

My creative process starts with research. If I have to create an ad for 409 cleaner you bet I will be online learning everything I can about it. Do I have any idea what Dude Wipes are? No, but I will soon if it is my product. I guess you could say my creative process is learning. I like to get the little details out and then find what is relatable to whomever my ad will be targeted at. Advertising, to me, is learning.