An Ad Executive Wrote the Best Guide to Great Ideas in 1939. It Still Explains How Creativity Works
AI can gather 100 ideas in seconds. It still can’t give you the one that’s actually yours.
EXPERT OPINION BY PAM DIDNER, B2B MARKETING CONSULTANT AND AI STRATEGIST
Before AI, my ideas usually came from doing something completely unrelated to work. A solution for a client’s challenge would show up while I was doing yoga, taking a shower, standing in line at Starbucks, or, better yet, talking to someone in the hallway.
Now we brainstorm with AI instead. We ask it for 20 fresh ideas for a product launch campaign. Do you like what AI comes up with? Do you like ideating with AI?
Recently, I re-read an 80-year-old book I first
Recently, I re-read an 80-year-old book I first read 10 years ago, by a mostly forgotten ad man named James Webb Young.
He wrote copy, built J. Walter Thompson’s international network (a big ad agency back then), taught advertising at the University of Chicago, and turned the War Advertising Council into the Ad Council.
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His little book, A Technique for Producing Ideas, lays out a five-step process for having ideas. It describes, almost step for step, the messy, nonlinear way I wrote my first two books and more than 500 blog posts. He wrote the process in 1939, and it still applies to how human ideas get generated.
His five-step process is rather simple:
- Gather raw material
- Digest raw material mentally
- Process it unconsciously
- Experience the aha moment
- Test ideas against reality
His definition of an idea: “An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements.”
Source: www.inc.com
