Tag: Creative Direction

Assorted Cleverness

Floods in Bartlesville, Oklahoma complete this billboard.

I really appreciate the kind of thought that goes into creating an experience like this. A great use of surprise and delight.

This is K-Mart’s error page for gamers. If you don’t “get” this instruction, don’t worry. You just have to know that it fits perfectly with their audience. Inside jokes like this work really well to create a sense of community.


Click to view full-size.

The ad on the left was placed in Cosmo, and the ad on the right was placed in assorted men’s magazines (eg: Maxim). The men’s explains that the women’s ad is creating a subliminally positive image of men that drink Molson Canadian. If they only ran the men’s ad, would it have made any difference?

Why We Crave Creativity but Reject Creative Ideas

As someone who makes a living out of pitching creative ideas, I read this article on the paradox of creative ideas with keen interest. People fear creative ideas. A good, creative idea is unsettling, and feels risky, even though it may not be at all. This dislike of creative ideas is so consistent, that I got really good at predicting which concept out of two or three a client would like best during a pitch. It’s always the least creative one. And every time the “safe” idea lost out to the better, more creative concept, it was a letdown.

This article on Science Daily is a great read that gets into why this happens. The real meat of the article is the summary of the studies’ findings:

Creative ideas are by definition novel, and novelty can trigger feelings of uncertainty that make most people uncomfortable.

People dismiss creative ideas in favor of ideas that are purely practical — tried and true.

Objective evidence shoring up the validity of a creative proposal does not motivate people to accept it.

Anti-creativity bias is so subtle that people are unaware of it, which can interfere with their ability to recognize a creative idea.

Clever creatives, however, can always reframe their daring concepts as the safe choice. Seth Godin has been preaching since at least 2002 that Safe is Risky.