When I was about eight, my Cub Scout pack held a Halloween costume design contest. I created a big yellow daisy costume with petals around my face, green crepe paper wrapped around my body, and big green leaves on my arms and legs. I enlisted my five-year-old brother to wear a checked shirt, a bandana and a little straw hat, and carry an empty watering can. As we all paraded around the school gymnasium for the judges, I would stop walking every couple of minutes and "wilt."

My brother's job was to "water" me, so I could stand up straight and walk again. And he did his job, until that one time when I wilted and waited and waited and waited. He had lost interest and walked off. So I ran over and pinched him. Hard. Right on the arm. Where it hurts. A lot. He watered me, and the show went on.

It turned out that I won the prize, a model plane kit and some candy, for having the "Most Creative Costume." In time my little brother's bruise healed, and I ended up in advertising.

In my life as an ad guy, a teacher, a father, and a grandfather, I have seen children, students, mothers, business owners, and senior citizens brighten to the possibilities, the passion that can come from thinking creatively. I have watched Tibetan monks create intricate sand mandalas and call themselves at peace. I have seen inner-city public school children in New Orleans paint brightly colored circles and squares on old kitchen chairs and call themselves "Ya-Ya." I've seen an old woman make a strange-tasting saltine pie and, beaming, call me to the table. I have seen creativity take many forms from many types of people, and always the pride is the same. I imagine we have all had our "creative" moments, those times when someone, probably Mom, went on and on about how creative we were. Many of us kept believing it, and that's how we ended up in this business.

Is Creativity Enough?

Well, no, but I'll get to that.

Bookstores stock many, many books on creativity and creative thinking. You will find most of them in the Psychology: Self-help section. In the early nineteen-nineties Julia Cameron wrote a book called The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, a best seller for years. Amazon.com is still pushing it hard, along with its companion publications; The Artist's Way Workbook and The Artist's Way Morning Pages Journal.

Every-morning journaling is one of Cameron's ways to creativity. She also recommends that we each take ourselves on an "artist's date," once a week or once a month, by ourselves, to some place we want to be, perhaps a movie, a park, or a spa. And yes, I did that for a while. But I am a cheap date, and I ran out of parks to take myself to.

A recent mailer from Penguin Books listed three new books on creativity: Higher Creativity: Liberating the Unconscious for Breakthrough Insights; or if you are uncomfortable with the unconscious, there's Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity; and for the entrepreneur, The Creative Economy: How People Make Money From Ideas.

Lately, I've been reading some books that are written for us, the people who make a living from creative thinking and finding concepts that work. How do we do that? Daniel Pink writes in A Whole New Mind about whole mind thinking, not categorizing thinking into right-brain and left-brain. While creative thinking is becoming much more valuable in business, people with both an eye for design and an understanding of story will rule in what he calls "this Conceptual Age." We all know that our right brain is creative and our left brain is critical. We learned that in Everything 101. Creative thinking is the fun stuff, the idea stuff. Critical thinking is the meaning and analysis stuff, the argument, and maybe some "devil's advocating." Pink says the right and left have to work together.

Creative thinking + critical thinking = conceptual thinking.

For what it's worth, and in this case I think it has worth, Wikipedia's entry for conceptual thinking is "a cognitive process that does not accept received wisdom, the status quo, or inertia as necessary determinants. Conceptual thinking requires openness to new ways of seeing the world and a willingness to explore."

At another website, squidoo.com, Daniel Moxon says conceptual thinking is the ability to perceive and imagine, predict and hypothesize, conclude and reflect. Then comes the line I like, the one that makes me stop and think: "Conceptual thinking is what creates society." Kind of makes me proud and worried at the same time.

So, here's my advice: When you get home from that right-brained artist's date, you'd better be ready to jump into bed with your left-brained critical self.

I Get Paid To Wonder. 

I saw a DVD presentation by DDBWorldwide, on behalf of the American Association of Advertising Agencies, aimed at encouraging college graduates to enter the advertising business. A young account planner said, "You take a big funnel and put in all the research, all the information, and your personal background, and you stir it all up. And out of the bottom of that funnel, you want one drop. That drop is your idea. You get to see connections between stuff that's totally disconnected. I get paid to wonder."

I think this kind of wondering is much more involving with a much bigger payoff than most people can imagine. For several years now, I have had my students read an article by Marty Neume titled "Rebellion" (Critique, Autumn 1996). He wrote that there are lots of "creatives" out there. A plethora. Uniqueness evaporates. Clients become immune to the "killer creative," or the "out of the box" sales pitch. And I know we are still hearing (perhaps saying) that ten years later.

In Juicing the Orange: How to Turn Creativity Into a Powerful Business Advantage, Pat Fallon and Fred Senn write, "in the world of marketing communications, creative typically means self-indulgent, the kind of art for art's sake work that wins awards but does little for the client's bottom line. In business, creativity can be an even more pejorative word. Innovation is prized, but creativity conjures images of an improv group brought in for a team-building exercise, or empty exhortations to think outside the box."

I have believed for some time that the inside or outside the box euphemisms really box us in. They are no longer the intriguing or clever packages we once thought they were. Virtually every ad agency, design studio, interactive firm, and support group in the marketing communications industry claims to be creative. Creative leaders doing killer creative. These terms have lost their meaning to clients who hear the same boasts from everyone.

So, Neume asks, with that plethora of creatives out there all selling the same words and the same whizzy computer executions, "Where is the wealth? Where is the power? It's in concepts." Neume's definition? "A concept is an idea so bold and so clear that nothing can knock it off its course. It not only hits the target, it obliterates it."

A concept also has so much charisma and so much cachet that it takes a while for the competition to counterattack. One way to measure a great concept, unfortunately, is to see how quickly knock-offs and imitations show up in other market segments. You remember how long the idea of using frogs to sell beer remained a unique and powerful, even dominant concept. But eventually the entire zoo and pet store population began hawking products and services, and that idea as a concept expired. And that includes the duck.

Nike set the standard for everything in sports marketing. Gatorade's neon-glowing sweat became something people actually wanted to be able to do. Think small. Think Priceless. Think Got Milk? Watch the Brawny Man serial on the Internet. See how many ways Cingular can mimic the bars in their ads. Watch for the newest iConcept tomorrow. Apple cannot get it wrong.

And now the competition in guerilla execution concepts has grown so huge that the genre itself has gone viral. An email received today as I write this was titled "Very Imaginative Advertisements" and contained twelve jpegs. It seems like everybody is tuned in and watching what we will do next!

The Power Is In Concepts

Can creativity be a point of difference? Yes, but not as a stand-alone benefit. Remember, the power is in concepts. We cannot create for the sake of creativity. It sure isn't simple, is it?

Ad agency Benton and Bowles published its philosophy of what was known in the 80's as the advertising business in an ad with a giant headline, "It's not creative unless it sells." We've all heard that, and we agree. It's the advertising business part that we are dealing with now. The advertising business isn't easily defined anymore. It has evolved into something we are calling the integrated marketing communications business. Whatever...!

No, not "whatever." This business is getting more and more complicated. Our concepts must be better, and they must be bigger. Broader. Here's why.

Joseph Jaffe, in Life After the :30-Second Spot, writes about integrated marketing communications (IMC) and the vast new array of marketing media selections available to reach customers and consumers. He offers what he calls "lifelines" to the advertising industry, lifelines we must work into our innovative plans if we are going to be truly innovative and successful: Internet
Gaming
On-demand viewing
Long-form content
Experiential marketing
Communal (social) marketing
Consumer-generated content
Search (behavioral) marketing
Music and mobile
Branded entertainment

Simply, we must be increasingly and broadly results-driven in contemporary and evolving media, and that will take innovative thinking. It will take more than creative ideas. It will take concepts with legs and more legs to be breakthrough-innovative in this evolving era of IMC.

Thinkers, Idea Engineers, and Innovation Gurus in The ATL

From the "Stories we all know" file, and also the "In the beginning" file: Joey Reiman told his board of directors in 1994 that he had decided to close his successful ad agency and open an "ideas company." In June of 1995 he opened the doors of Brighthouse, the "world's first ideation firm," right here in Atlanta, and he decreed Atlanta to be "the idea capital of America." After reading his book, "Thinking for a Living," a few times and watching what is going on in this city, I believe he was right and still is.

CA Magazine, Jan/Feb 2007, published an article by Dave Smith titled, "What Luke Sullivan, Ron Huey, and Lynyrd Skynyrd Taught Me About Advertising." It's not what he wrote that impresses me. It's the fact that Dave Smith, Luke Sullivan, Ron Huey, Ronnie Van Zandt, and so many others have lived and worked among us, right here in The ATL. Thanks, Dave. More industry-wide publicity cannot hurt at all, and there are many more stories about us to be told. There is indeed a lot going on in Atlanta. The Atlanta Ad Club has had a couple of guest speakers recently who echo my point of view on conceptual thinking. Patrick Hanlon, founder of Thinktopia - Idea Engineers in Minneapolis, says things like, "Success is for people at the precipice," "Become cosmonauts of change," and "Life is a continual uncovering." His book and his approach to ideation are called Primal Branding, and his active client engagements are "Primal Digs." Hanlon writes that brands are a belief system, and believing is belonging. Primal brands become a meaningful and necessary part of the culture.

There's that "conceptual thinking is what creates society" idea again. I love that.

I think Reiman loves it too, because in his book he writes, "We live at a time when creative people can transform cultures in ways that used to be unimaginable."

Fred Senn brought the Fallon Worldwide view to the Atlanta Ad Club with highlights from their book Juicing the Orange, and he talked about the future of creative leverage. "You can't buy creativity, but you can unlock it, and along with imagination and innovation, creativity is the "last remaining legal means to get an edge on the competition."

This is creativity unfolding as imaginative and innovative thinking as ideation.

Right-Brain, Left-Brain. Ideas, Concepts. Can You Go It Alone?

No, you're going to need everybody.

One of my favorite ideation consultants and facilitators, Doug Hall, has operated the Eureka Ranch in Cincinnati for several years. He says the classic answer to an innovation challenge has been a sequential approach, where "right brain" creatives invent ideas and hand them off to "left brain" account planners and execs to implement and manage. This sets up a "tug of war" of dreams versus details, vision vs. feasibility. The result is often compromised innovation that lacks inspiration and dramatic difference. Hall says the only solution is deep collaboration.

Fallon and Senn claim that just 20% of your success is from your own mind. You must listen hard to clients/customers/consumers, then listen some more. It's all about being in the same room with your clients, their customers, and the consumer. We must collaborate or perish.

Brian Hankin, one of three principals at (r)evolution partners in Atlanta, agrees that innovation has moved beyond the classic approaches and into a highly structured collaborative mode. Hankin believes that innovation is a process, not a flash of brilliance, requiring careful orchestration between creative and analytic thinking. The process includes: Strategic assessment of areas in which to innovate; Carefully structured ideation with creative and subject matter experts in a stimulating environment; Strict prioritization and validation criteria for the ideas; and Qualitative and quantitative concept validations that assess the likelihood of creating a sustainable competitive advantage.

Hankin and his partners speak of collaborative innovation and the voice of the consumer. Get your company in a room with your customers to address unmet needs and common strategic priorities. Magic seems to happen. Involve your consumers in the dialogue. Pull together an ongoing panel to ideate with the brand and research teams. Again, breakthrough insights happen.

So, now you have your company, the client, the customer, and the consumer working together in a room looking forward to great big ideas.

How You Can Increase Your Innovative Power

You may need somebody with a "watering can."

I imagine all of us have been either on the giving end or, worse, the receiving end of a statement like, "Yeah, it looks nice. I really want to like it. But where's the concept?"

Many companies and people are frustrated with their idea-generating activities or processes. They may or may not know what to do and how to do it. Managers and employees know that innovation, breakthrough thinking, is an absolute requirement, but they have trouble knocking down the barriers of commonality, knowing too much about each other, their products, and their usual thinking processes.

Ideation techniques have grown far beyond the commonly known brainstorming and free thinking creative sessions. Leaders used to think you had to have fun to have ideas. With enough music, some beanbag chairs, a few Nerf rocket launchers, practical jokes, and cool T-shirts, you could brainstorm your way to the best ideas ever. Brainstorming has long been associated with the notion that creative thinking must be crazy or off-the-wall to be productive. Lynda Curtin, an ideation leader with deBono Thinking Systems, says that many who want to hold idea generating sessions still rely on traditional brainstorming, "but that is an incomplete and frustrating tool."

We have learned over the years that we cannot simply laugh our way into innovation. But neither does conceptual development have to be painfully serious. It's open collaboration, diversity of participants, a safe environment, and effective stimuli that incubate big ideas and innovative concepts. There is a vast selection of conceptual thinking techniques that can be selected and customized to specific groups and problems-at-hand.

Using these techniques productively requires some expertise, at least some knowledge and practice. Yes, it is still about surrounding yourselves with great music, an inspiring environment and some good food, but it sure helps to have an experienced and effective leader. Developing in-house capabilities and utilizing outside facilitators are both good solutions. Ideation facilitation is an emerging art and an immensely valuable business tool. A facilitator can help target the group's thinking, expand it in productive ways, and guide the group to a plan of action.

Think about this: All of your big ideas so far have come from creative thinking. All of your big ideas so far have come from people . . . your peers, your customers and clients, your own people, and even yourself. What do you do to inspire those big ideas? Do they happen by accident? Do they happen whenever you take the time? Are you missing a boatload of opportunities? When you do take the time, can you and your people generate hundreds of ideas to sift through to find the golden egg?

Ideation facilitation generates concepts that can create product portfolio innovation, integrated marketing development, brand development, line extensions, new products/improvements, new services/improvements, market repositioning, advertising and promotion ideas, and demographic-targeted and ethnographic-targeted marketing. It can change ways of thinking that positively affect service level strategies, organizational enhancement, and team building.

Ideation facilitation can benefit business owners, brand strategists, marketing managers, and product development teams. It can benefit corporate clients and the creative organizations that serve them: ad agencies, public relations firms, design firms, interactive firms, sales promotion firms, branding consultancies, and marketing communication organizations.

Aside from the ideation itself, here's what else you can get:

For fifteen years, I have been collecting information on conceptual thinking and ideation techniques. I have led ideation sessions in consumer products, retailing, hospitality, corporate communications, and higher education, as well as worked directly with hundreds of college students in recent years. I have seen thousands of ideas thrown out on the table. I have seen some of those ideas refined into very powerful and worthy concepts. And I have seen breakthrough innovation. Ideation facilitation is a vital business tool. It is productive. It is necessary. Most of all, I find it exciting and rewarding to help people wonder.