Opinion

A very honest guide to coming up with ideas, featuring David Hume

After an entire year of struggle, copywriter Clare Barry has finally figured out how to write her seminal 'how to generate ideas' article. This is that article.

The tagline on my website says: “I write down ideas for money”.

I’m a copywriter, so this is true — generating ideas is my actual job. People pay me because I basically make something out of nothing. If you haven’t got a name, I’ll give you one. If you haven’t got a brand, I’ll build you one. If you haven’t got an advert — I’ll think of one.

Due to this tagline (I think) — I get one question more than any other:

“How do you go about coming up with ideas?”

or worse

“What’s your idea generation process?”

It usually comes from copywriters/creatives who are trying to learn — but the question can honestly come from anywhere, and it makes me stumble every time.

Last year my agency asked me to write an entire article about how to “generate an idea” and I just stared at the title blankly for a month before giving up, wondering how the hell anybody could put it into words:

“I don’t…errr… know how… I just do?”

Luckily, I’ve had a year since then to think about it — and watch other people fuck it up — which gave me an idea. Naturally.

1. What not to do.

Stop copying other people. If it’s been done before — and you’re not adding anything new to it — scrap it. Now.

I spend an awful lot of time on Twitter.

In comparison to other platforms, I’ve found it’s where the funny people tend to congregate — like the kitchen at a house party, or the beer garden at a pub.

There is never a day that passes where Twitter fails to make me laugh and it’s usually due to someone’s pure, quippy wit — rather than, you know, a video of a dog wearing shoes, or people snorting lines of cinnamon and happy-slapping their Nan (God bless you Facebook, you tacky son of a bitch).

That said, there’s also never a day that passes where Twitter doesn’t threaten to give me an aneurysm — and that aneurysm is caused by one thing:

Continually rehashed marketing drivel-shite, parading itself around as ‘valuable insight’.

The creative industry prides itself on generating ‘ideas’… but we spend an awful lot of time and money not doing that.

In fact, we spend an awful lot of time and money copying each other — producing the same ‘content’ over and over again, begging people to waste their time reading marketing ‘listicles’ that will contribute approximately sweet fuck all to their lives.

Some will try and justify it by saying they’re “joining the conversation” (whatever the hell that means)—but they’re not. Usually, they’re just lazily and spinelessly rewording somebody else’s idea for clicks. Partly because they don’t have an idea — and partly because they’re too scared to make a point.

The process is basically the same every time. Someone, somewhere, will come up with a sexy new buzzword, pulled straight from their arsehole— ‘storytelling’, ‘growth hacking’, ‘bitcoin-vertising’, ‘innovation donkeygobbling’ and within a matter of months, no matter how ridiculous and far-fetched that word is, every advertising organisation, marketing publication, or self-proclaimed LinkedIn guru will offer a very important ‘viewpoint’ on it… each as benign as the rest.

The topic will then dribble-down to individuals, freelancers and small-to-medium sized business owners, who will all jump on to offer their own ‘viewpoint’. All of a sudden, my usually witty Twitter feed will read like a really wankey networking event for people with LinkedIn Premium, until the buzzword hysteria dies off and everyone remembers they have wives, husbands and kids.

This repetition circus isn’t limited to ‘insights’ and ‘content’, though — this is just an example. It happens with everything. We all jump on a trend and beat it to death. Advertising trends I’m sick of seeing, to illustrate my point:

  1. Nostalgia adverts featuring retro cartoon characters — Flintstones, Top Cat, He-Man.
  2. People making pink versions of their products to ‘subvert the patriarchy’.
  3. Adverts that address fake tweets: “Julie tweeted that our chicken was probably 55% horse meat, so we took her on a tour of our local produce farm where Jim, our wholesome middle-aged white farmer, grows our kosher chickens in fresh soil and endless sunlight. How about those apples, Julie?” / “My name is Katie and I tweeted a tampon company that no one would ever wear white jeans on their period and now they’ve challenged me to do just that! While trampolining!”

Now, don’t get me wrong, I understand the ‘everything has been done before’ argument — I do — and I understand that some clients just want to play it safe, and there’s no changing their minds.

However the idea generation part should be the fun part. It should be the bit where you get to play mad scientist and come up with the weirdest, wackiest shit — half of it scrapped immediately.

It shouldn’t be the part where you go: “what’s trending at the minute, and how do I senselessly make it apply to this brand/my brand/this article?”

Or the part where you go: “Donkey dick is trending! Campaign are writing about it! Better write a thought-leading article on how people can use the popularity of donkey dick in their content strategy to maximise their growth-hacking!”

2. Understanding ideas.

The best ideas will come from the least likely of places.

One man made me understand creativity and ideas better than any other. He died hundreds of years ago, and had absolutely nothing to do with advertising.

I read David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) at university for my dissertation. I wasn’t pleased about it and it wasn’t voluntary. I started the book with the sole intention of looting the punchy bits for references and citations. As is what usually happens with books — I reluctantly learnt something along the way.

AY! DAVE!

Hume was a philosopher — and now that I look back, hilarious. Historically, he was documented as a really chilled out guy, but in context — actually strikes me as an 18th century hybrid of Steve Jobs and Frankie Boyle.

First of all, he’s Scottish. Second of all, he’s called David. You may have heard of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emmanuel Kant, René Descartes etc., but not many philosophers in the 18th century wandered around answering to: “Ay!… Ay DAVE! AY! DAVE! DAAAVE!” with “AYE, WADDIYE WANT YE WEE PRICK?”

More to the point, he appeared to give absolutely no fucks.

Hume attended the University of Edinburgh and despite being fervently academic, didn’t graduate, stating: “there is nothing to be learnt from a Professor, which is not to be met with in Books.”

Instead, Dave chose to spend his time indulging in the important stuff (port, cheese and getting a bit fat) while devising a measured destruction of traditional philosophy.

Hume wrote his treatise during a social movement called The Enlightenment, an ideological tornado where society began to make the distinction between Science and Religion — removing ‘God’ as the divine, magical solution to all mystery. This was a risky business.

Up until The Enlightenment, philosophy was heavily riddled with religious teachings, and anybody who dared to contemplate the words ‘how’ or ‘why’, without concern for the Bible were considered sceptics, heretics, and dangerous rebels.

Dave didn’t give a toss (obviously, it’s Dave) and “managed to imperil empiricist philosophy, by unflinchingly following it to its logical conclusion.”

Not giving a shit about God allowed Hume to think ‘outside the box’, becoming the first person to tackle human thought in a rational way — breaking ‘consciousness’ down to two components, a ricochet between “impressions” and “ideas”.

This is where it gets interesting.

Impressions, according to our Dave, are “lively and vivid perceptions”. They are instant, uncontrollable, tidbits of information feeding into both our conscious and unconscious mind at all times.

The colour red, for example, is an impression. So is anger. A bell ringing. Warmth. An itch. Darkness… etc. We are not in control of what we perceive, thus we are not in control of what is ‘impressed’ upon us. Impressions are what we hear, see, feel, love, hate, desire or wish to happen. They’re primal, instinctive, and could be considered the “atoms” of the thought process. The very smallest particles, that add up to create —

Ideas. The thoughts that reflect on impressions, and the beliefs and memories constructed from them. Ideas are internal creations, completely subjective — and do not exist for anyone to witness externally. Though everyone can see the colour red, or feel anger, hear a bell ringing — no one else can see what those impressions elicit in our individual brains. For example, it’s 12PM and a bell is ringing. For some, that means “danger!” or “fire!”… yet for others, merely means “lunch!”

Ideas therefore, according to Hume, are the conclusions we draw from a series of impressions, which continually collide together to create a bigger picture. Ideas aren’t some divine intervention or a spasm of genius— they are entirely dependent on what you’ve experienced.

Reading about Hume taught me three things about ideas.

Reject the ‘usual’ way of doing things. If you pander to what everyone else thinks or does, you’ll never create anything new, or anything better than what already exists. Stop doing what you’re told. See what happens.

All the ideas we ‘create’ are actually a mishmash of our ‘impressions’ — the things we have experienced and absorbed, as people. The more you experience (therefore the more that is impressed upon you), the more ammunition you have to create with.

Believe me, you might think you’re “learning” while reading Adweek articles at your desk but you’re not. If you’re sourcing all your inspiration from other people’s work — the latest design trends, the latest copy, the latest Superbowl ads… you’re quantifiably less likely than ever to come up with something original. By all means look at it — but don’t rely on it. Don’t let it be the only thing you look at all week.

If you have a decent idea — don’t water it down, don’t stop half-way, and don’t back off. Be ready for people to call you a heretic and follow it unflinchingly to its logical conclusion — because if you don’t, somebody else will. The world is full of mediocre ideas and mediocre creatives.

If Hume can stick his fingers up to the church in the 18th century and deal with it, you can do something different in advertising, and get away with it.

3. Coming up with the bloody idea.

A very honest guide.

  1. Stop googling how to come up with an idea. Never google this again.
  2. Get a note pad, and a pen. Do not use your computer. Write out the brief by hand.
  3. On the same page, write down every single word the brief has made you think of. Competitors, unrelated embarrassing memories, rhyming words. Anything and everything gets jotted on that page. Do not hold back.
  4. Close your note pad. Google all the information about the product available. If it already exists, look at what real people are saying about it on Twitter — look for hooks.
  5. Stop when you feel dizzy, or you get angry. Whatever comes first. Go outside. It doesn’t matter if it’s cold.
  6. Walk about a bit. Forget the brief.
  7. Work on something different when you come back because you can no longer stand to look at the original brief.
  8. Go back to the brief at the end of the day. Repeat steps 2–4.
  9. Go home. Look at stuff completely unrelated to the brief. Get arse-deep in conspiracy theory subreddits, watch three episodes of Real Housewives, have an unusually long shower. Paint your walls. Anything but think about the fucking brief.
  10. Go to bed.
  11. Get to work. Open your notepad. Repeat steps 2–11, except with more frantic, nervous energy. Have three more coffees than usual.
  12. Stress out because there’s now one day left until the deadline.
  13. Stare at note pad aimlessly from 9AM — 10AM.
  14. Go outside. Pace about.
  15. Go back inside.
  16. Stare at notepad from 10.05AM — 11.00AM. Begin to feel very uncomfortable.
  17. Acknowledge panic internally — and start desperately watching Youtube reviews of product.
  18. Aimlessly write down words from Youtube reviews, as if those random words will mean anything or magically create a whole concept by themselves.
  19. Go outside again.
  20. Randomly conceive idea while receiving your change from the cashier in Starbucks.
  21. Go back to work — write it all down. Wonder what in tarnation you were worried about.
  22. … And there you have it.
  23. How to come up with an idea. Use your powers wisely.

Clare Barry (www.copyclare.com) is a senior conceptual copywriter at Liquid. This article first appeared here.

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