EUREKA!

Every creative person knows the feeling — the moment when the clouds part and the beam of light descends presenting “the big idea.” A former mentor of mine, Alex Kroll, who went on to head Young & Rubicam, described it as “the sudden cessation of stupidity.”

Every creative person also knows the other feeling — the chill, frustration and ultimate panic of not being able to come up with the big idea. The “stupidity.” The harder we try to find it, the more elusive it becomes. So why do we work so hard to come up with the big idea? Why not just settle for the first thought that comes along?

David Ogilvy, another mentor, founder of Ogilvy & Mather and author of Ogilvy on Advertising, may have said it best, “Unless your advertising contains a big idea, it will pass like a ship in the night.”

So, where do big ideas come from? Are there techniques that improve our ability to dig out ideas? I have techniques that, while not 100 percent guaranteed, have a higher than random success rate. What about other people? Here are some secrets from people who come up with ideas for a living.

Do Your Homework

Almost every creative person I interviewed said that the first step is to do your homework. Study your product or service, your organization, your market, your competition and the world around you. This knowledge is the ore from which new ideas are smelted.

Steve Martin, associate creative director at Spiro & Waites, says, “My first step in the creative process is gathering data. My most crucial step is to make sure I’m pointed in the right direction.” David Ogilvy agrees. He says, “Big ideas come from the unconscious. But your unconscious must be well informed or your idea will be irrelevant.” Robert Grede, a Milwaukee-based creative consultant and columnist reaffirms the need for research. In his book, Naked Marketing, he states, “To come up with a good creative marketing idea, immerse yourself in information.”

Information alone, however, isn’t enough. You need the inspiration of the muse or you can end up butting your head against the same old ideas over and over again.

Work While You Sleep

Reid Holmes, Vice President and Associate Creative Director at Campbell Mithun in Minneapolis, and creator of the St. Paul Insurance Company campaign featuring the little girl and the charging rhinoceros, describes a technique that often works for him. He says that ideas bubble up when he is falling asleep. I use this technique too.

David Day, Director of Marketing at Kansas Technology Enterprise Corporation in Topeka, Kansas describes his technique as, “I tilt my chair back as far as it will go, put my feet up on my desk and stare at the ceiling. When I wake up I usually have a good idea.” Behind Day's humor is a valid concept: the time during which you are falling asleep can be very productive.

Picture your brain as a phonograph record. For the younger readers, a phonograph record stores sound by engraving grooves on a disk. As a stylus follows the groove, it transmits vibrations to a membrane that creates sound through a speaker.

The problem is that the stylus always follows the groove. It always comes up with the same thing. We do a similar thing in our heads. It is essential for survival, allowing instant reaction to threats that do not give us time to “think.” But as long as that imaginative stylus stays in the same mental groove, coming up with a fresh idea is almost impossible.

While falling asleep, however, the grooves tend to flatten out. The stylus skips across the surface of the record and forms free associations. Eureka! New ideas emerge.

Look for New Relationships

Variations on this technique also are productive for other creative people I talked with. The unifying principle seems to be scrubbing the brain clean of preconceptions. Peter O’Malley, a freelance PR writer in Canada uses the Web. “Using the search engines, I find I can put in just about any two terms, any two concepts, and quite amazing relationship will often come back,” he says.

Hugh Gigante, New York PR specialist says, “For me, ideas come from free association. I usually get the gems when in a totally different place, doing completely disconnected things.” Michael Stewart, a PR person in Falls Church, Virginia also relies on free association. He adds that “unstructured time” for creative thinking is essential, citing a college instructor who advised “give yourself a half hour a day to just let the writing flow down your arm and out of your fingers.”

Blur Your Vision

Locally, Kit Traverso of Traverso & Associates, likes to “get away,” literally. If time allows, he zips off to Key West or some other place where new patterns of thought emerge. When distant travel is not possible, Kit suggests a bottle of claret to grease the wheels of creativity. Lance Beswick, communications director, Health Canada, describes a similar technique while taking a hot bath, “I draw the curtain around the bath tub and lie back, sipping on a glass of red wine. Jed Nitzberg, director, strategic integration for WebMD in Atlanta, prefers a six pack, preferably of stout or ale.

Michael Mark, president/creative director of Matthews/ Mark in San Diego claims that movement unlocks his muse. When in Boston, he would ride the MTA. “I get my best ideas when something is going, the momentum is started and I suck on the energy,” he says. I can echo that sentiment. An alternate method I used when working in New York was to let the motion of the commuter train and the blurring images that flew by the window open up my mind.

Risk Stupidity

“Brainstorming,” or the application of free association by a group of people is a formalized way of generating new ideas. Critical to its success is the willingness to abandon judgments until all possible ideas have been stirred up and recorded. It is the freedom to reach beyond the “sensible” into the ridiculous, without fear of humiliation or embarrassment, that stimulates fresh thinking. A so-called stupid thought may trigger someone else to come up with something brilliant.

On a smaller scale, collaboration by a creative team, usually an art director and a copywriter, with each hitch-hiking on the last idea generated by the other, can drive the team to brilliance. The final idea must be one that both team members endorse and can take credit for. When teams used to come to me as a creative director to referee whose idea was best, I sent them back to come up with one idea both could buy into.

Submerge Yourself in the Great Ideas of Others

Finally, one of the resources that stimulates fresh ideas is to immerse yourself in examples of excellence. Listen to Mozart. Read a great book. Visit a museum. When all else fails, read the advertising awards annuals, where the best advertising ideas are singled out and concentrated in one place. You will raise the bar for your own performance and find a wealth of ideas that, without plagiarizing, can be twisted, bent, broken, shaken, shattered and put back together in combinations that work for you.

Don’t give up. You are not the first, nor will you be the last, to walk through the desert of dead ideas. Author Ed DeBono described the process as akin to digging holes. We dig a hole looking for something. When it doesn’t occur, we dig deeper. And deeper. But all we get is deeper in the hole. DeBono says we should abandon dry holes and keep digging new holes until we find the idea. The idea you are looking for is out there somewhere. It’s just not where you are looking right now.

William Ernest Waites is the former chairman and co-creative director of Spiro & Waites Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations. In a previous life, he held senior creative and management positions with Young & Rubicam and Ogilvy & Mather.