Over the course of my ten or so years in this business I've worked on numerous package designs, FSIs and coupons for things like cheese, candy bars and hamburgers. In each case, every creative execution had a bar code; a series of numbers and bars that identified each product. I must have sent hundreds over to my clients for speedy approval and supervised countless more as Account Coordinators who worked under me did the same.
Bar codes are ugly and we see them everywhere. And they were always considered a "must do." Like putting a stamp on an envelope. And never once did I stop and ask myself, "does it always have to look so damn ugly?" I didn't know we could do this:
A surfer on a bar code? Apparently, yes! (I don't believe this got the public recognition it deserved when it launched.) If I would have just stopped for a moment and said, "could this be a block of cheese? A smile? Could it look like piano keys?" Anything. If I would have just stopped and asked these questions, maybe one of my clients could have been first to do this. But I didn't stop and ask, and my clients weren't first.
The surfer bar code took home a Titanium Lion award at the Canne Film Festival, and rightly so.
In advertising (and in all business) we need to structure our companies in such ways that we give our employees time to stop and imagine. And then we need to reward those ideas.
We also need to challenge ourselves to look at things that seem, "normal" and ask questions about how we can be different.
My best advice to do this: take a given situation, problem or object and ask, "What's the craziest, most un-doable idea here?" That answer will be a lousy and mostly un-doable idea. BUT... Now take that lousy idea, trim the fat, play with it a bit, involve others, and odds are, you'll get to something really cool and new. The trick is putting your ego aside to volunteer a bad idea (sometimes publically), and then finding the time to stop the action and play with the idea.
Comments