What If There Were A Noah's Ark For Ideas.
When I was a kid, we lived next door to a family of hoarders.
Everybody in the neighborhood hated those people. And who could blame them? The place was overflowing with every imaginable kind of junk. Old magazines. Hubcaps. Rusty birdcages. Rags. Plastic flowers. Little green army men. Plumbing fixtures. A ukulele. A Boston Red Sox hat with beer stains all over it.
I tell you, if the show Hoarders had been around back then, our neighbors would have surely won an Emmy or something for their episode. That’s how godawful horrific their house was.
It wasn’t until I got into advertising that I came to see that, in fact, not all hoarding was bad. On the contrary, hoarding ideas was one of the smartest ways to create great work.
There are reasons for this.
For one thing, we hate being bored. And the younger we are, the more we can’t deal with even short stretches of time with nothing to do. But it’s during those unencumbered stretches that ideas are more likely to come bubbling up out of nowhere.
Our creative diurnal rhythm is messed up, too. The fact is that creativity loves the night. Which makes sense: There’s a lot less noise at night. Fewer distractions. By all rights, agency business hours ought to be from dusk to dawn. Calling all vampire creative teams!
Bottom line: big ideas don’t always show up when you need them to.
Which is why if you’re smart, you become an idea collector. You pluck them out of whatever creative tree you happen to find them in. Museums. Concerts. Movies. An overheard conversation on the subway. Novels. Comic books. A hike in the woods. High school reunions. Funerals. YouTube. Instagram. Cat videos. Midjourney.
And you drop them all into The Idea Vault.
Could be a digital folder. An old shoebox. A back room in your mind. Doesn’t matter. Inside The Idea Vault lie thoughts, maybes, what ifs, why nots and how comes. Orphans without a home, each and every one, but that might one day bail you out of a jam when you really need them.
Maybe you’ve heard about Oreo’s Doomsday Vault. It was a brilliant marketing stunt by Nabisco, the maker of Oreos. Unlike the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, a kind of Noah’s Ark for seeds that might one day be needed to replenish the world’s food supply, Oreo’s vault was built to preserve the recipe and flavor of Oreo cookies for future generations.
Jim Weedon was Ridley Scott’s editor on Hennessy’s “The Seven Worlds” film, which visualized the seven tasting notes in Hennessy X.O.
“What I love most when working with the maestro,” Weedon says, “is [that] his references can come from anywhere, such as a historical work of art or an unexpected piece of music from the 15th century; in fact, his unyielding data bank of references helped shape the wood golem. A painting by William Blake called The Ghost of a Flea, currently hanging in the Tate Britain, was his reference to help visualize this strange woodland entity to the post house.”
I can only imagine what other wonders in Ridley’s personal idea vault might have found their way into Alien or Blade Runner or Raised by Wolves.
Seinfeld. Season two, episode eight. While watching a crappy science fiction movie, The Flaming Globes of Sigmund, Jerry falls asleep. He wakes up from a dream in the middle of the night. Half awake, he scrawls down a joke for his stand-up comedy act. But the next day, he can’t for the life of him read what he wrote down. And neither can anyone else. Should have locked it in the idea vault when he had the chance.
Like Jerry Seinfeld, James Cameron had a dream one night, too. In 1981, in a hotel in Rome, Cameron dreamt of a chrome skeleton emerging from a fire. Unlike Jerry, Cameron woke up wide awake and wrote about the skeleton. If anything, he remembered that thing walking out of the flames even more clearly. Into The Idea Vault it went, only to be pulled out and turned into The Terminator a few years later.
Wieden+Kennedy’s “Cog” spot for Honda is regarded as one of the most groundbreaking and influential commercials of all time, thanks in no small part, say Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss, to a film they created, “The Way Things Go.”
Never mind that the inspiration for the spot could have just as easily come from Mouse Trap, the kids’ board game; Caractacus Pott’s breakfast-making machine in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang; or any number of Rube Goldberg’s chain-reaction master-pieces. Did “Cog” begin life as a result of something in someone’s Idea Vault? Possibly.
Not everyone subscribes to the idea of The Idea Vault. It’s our job, some will tell you, to come up with ideas on demand, that it’s this ability to conjure up greatness at the snap of a finger that makes us what we are. How could some random idea that has nothing to do with selling a tennis shoe or a week in the Maldives or an electric pickup truck have any relevance at all?
But if one day the snap of a finger should fail us, if the clock is ticking down and brilliance eludes us, we might discover just how brilliant being a hoarder can be. Not of hubcaps and rusty birdcages, of course.
Then again…
The 20 Most Creative Companies In The World. What’s Your Number One?
GQ is out with its 20 most creative companies on the planet. Among them are some old guard names that I was surprised to see had made the list. Some I barely knew. One in particular, Mischief, that didn’t surprise me at all. From the beginning, Greg Hahn and his partners have been showing us what human creativity is and always will be capable of. So, take a look. See what you think. Then come back here to the comments section and tell us where you shake out on number one and why.