My Thinking

"Does it have to be a light bulb?" It’s the punchline to an old joke about the number of art directors it takes to change a light bulb. It usually gets a laugh and a nod from other ad folks – art directors wonder why it’s funny – thinking outside the bulb is what we do. It’s why you love us and at times hate us.

It’s really our nature, we’re compelled to keep pushing ideas – radical ideas – through controlled experimentation, controlled by the understanding we are not free to follow an arbitrary or solitary path to an end rather to dive deep into understanding our brands, our clients and especially our consumers.

Big ideas are manifest through the connections among the many areas of knowledge we conspire with – these ideas at first, can appear radically different, impossible, and even absurd at times – mostly because they don’t follow a linear path – it’s an iterative process and requires childlike curiosity, high energy, a willingness to be wrong, ridiculously wrong and an openness to listen to others and see the connections they see. The big idea is never one idea, its many ideas brought together.

Creative pushed to brilliance can only be achieved through collaboration, everyone we collaborate with is obligated to push us, challenging our work over and over until it achieves the goal that it was set out to accomplish. Each discipline along this journey has an impact not only the creative ones – insights from strategic, account, brand, planning, media, consumers all matter and contribute to an idea that isn’t cool for the sake of being cool but one that illuminates a way forward.

And yes, sometimes it does have to be a light bulb, but can we change the color, make it fluorescent – how about one of those new old style Edison bulbs and do we have any say about the fixture?