Let Creativity Run Free

Dear Creative,

Don’t spend all of your energy trying to find the right formula to create the perfect ad, it doesn’t exist. Ads are, like John Long said it perfectly here, “a big idea, grounded in a human truth, crafted beautifully”.

I mean, that’s pretty much it, right? It’s that simple, the formula is out there for everyone. It doesn’t belong to one creative, one agency, or one client.

It’s that simple, yet it’s that complicated.

You could certainly find blog posts that tell you many ways to get to that award-winning, ground-shaking, or mold-breaker idea. Or maybe you’ve already had that idea, presented it to your creative director, and it didn’t pass one of the (many) filters — that happens to all of us, at least once.

Guess what, nobody cares. That can’t be your excuse to not make it happen. Ideas are owned by those who make them real. So that’s the reason that I’ll take a good idea with bad execution over a good idea with no execution at all, any day. Why? Because it’s easy to talk about something, say how good you’re at something, or how you’d do things differently. It’s easy to be the judge and never be the maker.

But for me, a good idea, a great idea, those that piss you off because you know how smart, brave, funny, they are; those ideas that you could have done, but you didn’t; those game-changer ideas that change the way you perceive the world, those ideas have one thing in common: trust.

For me, trust is everything.

Trust your gut with that silly, stupid thought.

Trust your copywriter or your art director and stand along with his idea, because even if you didn’t come up with this one, It’s still your idea as well.

You, creative director, trust your senior creatives but also your juniors — and even your trainees, terrible ideas and amazing ideas are next to each other in this crazy roulette.

You, client, trust your agency because that’s why you’re paying them all that money.

You, creative, trust your account manager because she — or he — is the one that talks to the client and knows them better. Trust your planner because they should be bringing you relevant, information, powerful insights, today’s biggest social issues, and more — and that’s the root of a great campaign, that human truth that John Long talks about.

Let creativity run free.