Mick Dean was a really successful advertising photographer.
He gave it up because he wanted to be an artist.
Now he spends all his time painting.
He loves painting scenes of erosion, around London.
In London of course, a lot of the erosion is due to water.
So naturally, Mick spends a lot of his time painting around The Thames.
When he’s painting, he hates the rubbish strewn everywhere.
Plastic bags, plastic bottles, beer cans, condoms, burger wrappers, shopping carts, bikes, tampons.
All left on the banks, or in the mud, or just floating by.
So Mick joined a group called Thames 21.
Volunteers who meet up to help clear up as much rubbish as they can.
I asked Mick how it worked.
He said, “You turn up with your rubber gloves and wellington boots, and off you go.”
So these are quite dedicated people.
While he was picking up rubbish one day, he got talking to a woman who was also helping.
It turned out she was an estate agent.
He asked her how business was.
She said not so good.
She had lots of empty properties people weren’t even looking at.
She asked Mick how his business was.
He said not so good.
He had lots of paintings but nowhere to exhibit them.
They carried on picking up rubbish.
Suddenly a lightbulb went ‘ping’ in Mick’s head.
He said, “How about if I could get a lot of people to visit one of your properties? Somewhere you think is really nice, but you’re having trouble getting anyone interested at present.”
She said, great, but how would you do that?
He said, “Well, I need a place to hold an exhibition of my work. If I held it in one of your properties, lots of people would turn up.
A fair proportion of art lovers are well-off and well-connected.
So you’ll be getting a lot more people looking over your client’s property. Maybe thinking about it, maybe spreading the word, you never know.
Meanwhile you’ll be showing it off in its best light, because the property would look really busy and attractive.
Instead of just be sitting there vacant, looking undesirable and empty.”
And that’s what they agreed on.
Mick got a really nice gallery space in a large shop, next to the Thames in Limehouse.
He also uses it as a studio.
Which means Mick can do several jobs at once.
Supervise the gallery, chat to the visitors, and paint.
People come to look at the pictures, and stay to watch Mick paint.
And to talk to him about his technique, his life, and his paintings
So far Mick’s sold five paintings.
Meanwhile the exhibition has created an aura of desirability around the otherwise empty property.
Plus the activity lifted the mood and energy level in the area for the local residents.
The café nearby want Mick as a permanent feature, because of all the extra business they’re getting.
Everyone wins and not a penny has changed hands.
He didn’t wait for a brief.
He didn’t complain there was no budget.
He didn’t grumble about the client.
He made it happen.
There’s a very nice walk along the Thames right by Mick’s exhibition.
He wanted to put posters up along it, telling people about the show.
He asked the owners of one of the wharves, but they said no.
He asked the owners of the other wharf, and they said no.
So that’s the end of it right?
Not quite.
Mick investigated ownership of the water front.
He found a tiny strip between the two wharves that neither owned.
So he put a poster up there.
Between the two people who said no.
I went to visit Mick’s exhibition yesterday.
A very nice Scandinavian lady and her friend came in.
She said they’d seen Mick’s poster as they were walking by the Thames.
She watched Mick paint and chatted for quite a while with him.
She said she put on art exhibitions, and she’d like to do one of his work.
She gave him her card and it said Baroness somebody.
Now if Mick had let all those excuses stop him, none of that would have happened.
That’s real creativity.
Creating from nothing.
RSS Feed
Twitter
Email
That is simply Brilliant.
I might just have to nick that whole idea Dave!
Dave, that’s a lovely story.
But I worry that it’s more ‘creative’ in hindsight.
After all, you didn’t hear the stories of all the people similar to Mike who didn’t happen to bump into estate agents whilst volunteering.
It’s like the stories of entrepreneurs like Branson, Sugar, Buffet and Trump. They took risks and they worked. They were in the right place at the right time. But you don’t hear about the people who took risks and failed. Who didn’t sit next to the right person on the plane.
It all looks like a strategy for success in hindsight. Because human beings have a tremendous talent for ascribing causality to things. Y followed X, therefore X must have caused Y.
I’m sure your friend Mike is very creative and, that, to an extent, he’s made some of his own luck.
But reading the story didn’t make me think he was creative. More lucky and tenacious. If anyone tried to learn something from Mike’s example, would “Be more creative” be genuinely useful? Or would “Be more tenacious” be more practical?
Hi Rick,
I think it depends on what you see as ‘creative’.
The dictionary says it’s ‘causing or bringing into being something that didn’t previously exist’.
So that way Mick created something.
Ergo he’s creative.
For me ‘tenacious and pragmatic’ is a great definition of creative.
You fail, and you keep on failing, until you succeed.
It doesn’t matter how you make it happen, you make it happen.
Ergo you’re creative.
I was always impressed by what George Lois said, “Don’t show me your drawerfuls of great roughs. If it don’t run it ain’t advertising.”
They say luck is when preparation meets opportunity.
I’ll go along with that.
Also Armand Hammer said, “People say I’ve been lucky. But it seems the harder I work the luckier I get.”
For me ‘tenacious and pragmatic’ are totally creative.
Paul Arden didn’t sit next to the right guy on a plane.
He went round every book fair, every publisher, getting rejected again and again.
He kept going until he didn’t get rejected, which is why his book sold a quarter of a million copies.
This is an idea I use a lot in shopping centres (or malls as the internet drives us all American).
Anytime we have an empty unit, we try to fit in at least one exhibition for local artists. This is done on a no charge, no fixed term basis.
The unit gets good promotion (free).
The artist gets to show his/her work (free).
The surrounding shops benefit from the “Feelgood” factor that the occupied, usually vibrant shop brings to the area, so we all look good for…free.
Win, win, win in my book.
Great idea, but it sounds like the estate agent is getting taken for a ride, obviously, i don’t know if this has been going on for long, but if the building hasn’t been sold then surely it’s only a good deal for your mate who’s getting prime real estate for nothing.
Ben,
“it’s only a good deal for your mate who’s getting prime real estate for nothing.”
Assuming any product is saleable, barriers to purchase may be price, distribution, salience, or brand.
As always, the client controls the distribution (in this case location)and the price.
That leaves salience and brand as two problems advertising can fix.
I reckon both of those are things the estate agent gets out of this deal, for free.
Mick gets a better deal because he’s putting in more work.
If I was the estate agent, I’d make it work hard for me too.
I’d promote the exhibition to my list of prospective clients, maybe via space in art and culture magazines.
In fact, as Pat says in the comment above, I’d do it across all my prime properties.
That’s advertising, we can’t fix all the problems but we can fix salience and brand.
Great inspiring piece, Dave. Was wondering - your ‘how to get your first job’ brochure’s great. Still, as they say, what’s harder than getting into advertising is staying in. How about something for those who are already in? Was looking at old D&ADs.
There seems to be a trend: unless you own an agency or are Web(ster), a CD’s lifespan’s quite limited. Kind of sad that MaWhinney, Wlech, Godfrey, Keeble, Cracknell, Marshalls, Awdry, Nokes, Henry (Susie, not the other S) etc
So, if the key to a longer advertising career is to have the name on the shingle, maybe you could gove tips on forming your own shop.
I used to want to but never found the partners. I remember asking David Abbott who said, “it’s like having a kid. You just do it and learn along the way”.
Yes, and no. I mean, there’s been Ashton (Circus), Marshalls (Bean MC), Brignull (le Bar), Patterson (can’t remember the name of his shop)
So, it’s a lot harder. With your experience, it could mean the diffrence between the child becoming a Chirchill or a Chamberlain. Thanks.
Maybe you never found the right partners because you stopped looking?
@Jim Powell
Who says I stopped looking?
Most suits prefer to be gamehunters turn poachers - they join clients - than start own agency. And I suppose if creative people also had a similar ‘escape’ route, perhaps we’d be less inclined to start own agencies. I remain astounded why clients hesitate to hire creative people as marketing managers/directors while they are so WILLING to hire suits. Of course, some would argue that no decent creative person would want to join the clients.
Completely take your point Dave.
We’ve all heard how it’s 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration (but is it? or is that just a nice bit of word play? what if it’s actually 30% inspiration?). But I think ‘perspiration’ is the simple bit. Simple in the way that running is simple and gymnastics isn’t. “Just do it”, in marketing speak. You can get that from watching Rocky: just try harder, just punch harder, work on your right, just get up. But was Rocky creative?
The 1% that’s ‘magic’ - why do people avoid analysing that? How can you learn to become more creative, rather than discipline yourself to become more tenacious and pragmatic?
Everyone and anyone can have a good idea, but creativity is surely the learned skill of having good ideas consistently and on demand? CDs don’t just look for hard workers, do they?
Is everyone a great idea generator innately, but the difference is in how hard they work? Or - out of lots of hard workers - can some people train themselves to have better ideas?
I thought your case study of Mike was quite inspirational. I like his idea and I can see how it was powerful and appropriate. But I’m not sure his example teaches us how to develop creativity. That’s what I was trying to get at. Mike is an artist - you’ve primed us to believe he’s creative already - and when he tries hard and the conditions are right, guess what?, he has a great idea.
I guess the point I’ve been trying to make is that you yourself, Dave, are the case study we can learn more about creativity from. What’s your take on abductive reasoning? Is NLP useful? I wonder if we might tempt you to tell us a little about how you’ve trained your mind to be more creative over your very impressive career, perhaps in a forthcoming blog post?
Hi Rick,
It’s interesting, maybe it could make a blog post.
But, I might need a bit more grit to get started.
Like your questions about NLP or abductive reasoning.
If you have any questions that you think need answering, that’s always really helpful for me.
The more the better.
@Ben,
“it’s only a good deal for your mate who’s getting prime real estate for nothing.”
think of it as car advertising. its main purpose is to fill the car-salon/dealership or what’s the word (sorry). the rest is on the sales personnel.
Hi Dave,
Do you train your creatives at all, beyond ‘on the job’ training? Have you designed any exercises to develop creative thought processes? And if so, could you give an example and some of your thinking behind it?
When I was a copywriter I trained up a couple of junior writers and art directors, but I was relying mostly on old briefs and hunches. I didn’t have much theory until maybe six years in, when I started reading people like Stephen Pinker and Susan Greenfield. The idea of the mind as software running on the brain’s hardware, and the idea that education, culture, experience and memes can ‘reprogramme’ the mind linked quite neatly with many of the tools I was using as a writer to persuade audiences.
So I wonder what your take on minds, creativity and training is? Pinker et al are academics, while you’re actually at the front line of this stuff - so I think your perspective would be incredibly interesting.
The truth is you are only limited by your imagination.
A few years ago I did an exhibition at my nephew’s Insurance company,
strapped for cash like most people were at that particular time, after doing the
‘I’m an artisit get me out of here’ bit, I asked myself Dave’s famous three questions:
1. What is the product?
2. Who are you talking to?
3. What are you trying to say?
The answers came easy:
1. It’s a present for Christmas.
2. Cash-strapped staff.
3. YOU really CAN afford an original piece of art.
I knocked-out about 20 butterfly watercolours every night for a month.
Every single one sold, I enjoyed doing it, my painting improved,
and they all got an original for the price of a cheap print.
A few months ago I did an oil painting using a comb in 20 minutes.
A couple of people came up to me and told me I should change the name of the painting.
I asked them what to…they said it reminded them of mount Kilimanjaro. I told them they could call it waht they like, I don’t mind….Haircomb Number 1? so what?
They bought it.
Filling a house with paintings is going to be a job and a half !!!
Nice one there is hope out their, good to hear someone worked hard and with a little outside of the box thinking.
Will do more of this for myself Thanks VERY UP LIFTING
Dave
Would you say the filtration system in advertising kills too many good ideas?
Like everything John, it depends who’s doing the filtering.
If it’s Webster, Saatchi, or Lowe, then no.
If it’s planners and groups of housewives in Slough, or layers of junior clients, then yes.
Dave, I think I’ve ended up with Flotsam and Jetsam too many times thanks to the latter.
Necessity breeds innovation. Innovation is a better word for creativity.
yo-yo,
Absolutely agree.
If necessity is the mother of invention, who’s the daddy?
“Success has many parents. failure is an orphan,” someone once said, John W. Easy to blame junior suits and housewives from Slough but I think a weak CD is just as much to blame.
An intern came up with a real crap TV idea for a pitch once. All the writers/art directors thought was crap but we didn’t want to be the bad guy. So we let intern present to CD.
What do you know, CD loved the idea. We actually won the pitch on that idea.
Guess take from that was, “if you think it’s crap, say so, or end up with crap all over”.
John W, I’d like to think of the mother of true innovation in a similar way to the virgin Mary.
Great Story!!!