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Creativity

Darwinian symmetry

By content, Creativity, Uncategorized

Darwin’s vision of man and ape as separated only by a few millennia meant that essentially we were on the same footing as animals. This implicity challenged relationships such as father son and holy spirit. It’s hard to be a creative thinker without upsetting people because when you spot new symmetries you disturb existing ones.

Car and cow. Ford’s symmetry.

By content, Creativity

Henry Ford famously used the paradigm of meat packing to find a better way of building a car. Essentially it inverted the notion that mechanics walked around a single car, gradually constructing it over a period of months. Under Ford’s system, it was the converse; cars proceeded like cow carcasses from one specialised process to the next. Where cows were disassembled, cars were being assembled. By seeing a car as a relatively low value object he could transform its production, and produce the world’s first high volume automobile.

Ideas mean new symmetries

By Communications craft, content, Creativity

The pregnant man visual (top right) was part of an Health Education Council to reduce unwanted pregnancies. The headline ran “Would you be more careful if it was you that got pregnant?” Copywriter Jeremy Sinclair, (Saatchi’s). By exploiting the symmetry of an imaginary situation, there’s an unarguable case for being more careful with contraception.
Below, bottom left, mushroom as jet engine. This visual idea was used both by British Airways to sell its food services, and also by HSBC to discuss organic fuel sources in the future. The BA idea ran “Before we fuel the aircraft, we fuel the passenger”. The HSBC campaign creatively recycled it, with the line “In future, we will all fly organic.” Anyway, the point is that strong ideas discover and exploit meaningful symmetry. See conceptual symmetries and Darwin

See also Ideas

Doing it without words

By Creativity, Funny, Uncategorized

Sex is can be done without lots of dialogue, why shouldn’t an ad work that way too?
One of the smart things about this spot is that it communicates the joy of sex with a condom rather than the dangers without one. By being positive it’s more memorable. And because most of us would rather see bunnies than genitalia in an ad, it’s hugely enjoyable to watch.

Symmetry with an opposite

By Creativity, Uncategorized

This neat little idea comes from building a symmetry between the transient text of a text message and the really permanent text of a blue plaque. The net result is a neat comment on just how annoying the wrong predictions are.