The Creative Insinct

I'm a big believer in the creative instinct.

That invisible element that underlies our talent, or lack thereof.

The creative instinct is only found in the good creatives. And if it doesn't exist in someone, all the writing and art directing skills in the world amount to piss in the wind. The creative instinct, in my view, is the element that separates artists from admen.

It's that thing that makes you say "trust me, it will work".

I'd back the instinct of one brilliant creative to beat all the research, learnings, graphs and charts in the world.

This instinct is often hated, because you can't learn it. You've got it or you haven't. That annoys ambitious people who don't have it. So they try to kill it and ridicule it to level the playing field. they create their false gods of planning and formulas etc.

That doesn't change the fact that it remains the killer element that gives an agency a competitive edge. ATL example: Cabral at Fallon.

You can see the creative instinct at work wherever you look. One of my favourite examples is the product name "I can't believe it's not butter." I can picture someone coming up with that idea, and every other person saying that it was a shit idea and that the product should be called "Fat-lo" or something like it. I can also imagine the response: "Look, I know it sounds weird, but trust me, I just think it will stick in people's minds and resonate with them."

Good non-marketing examples are Noel Edmunds and Paul McCartney. A pair of cunts, I grant you, but that's beside the point. They have the creative instinct in abundance.

Imagine Noel Edmunds sitting at the dinner table with Mrs Edmunds.

Noel - "I've had a brilliant, idea, darling"
Mrs Edmunds - "Another one, darling?"
Noel - "Yes, darling. Tell me what you think....It's a great big blobby man. Covered in big pink blobs. All he ever says is "blobby blobby blobby". And his name is Mr Blobby! Good eh?"
Mrs Edmunds - "Darling, I'm phoning the nurse now...."
Noel - "I'm telling you, they'll love it. He'll even get a Christmas number 1."

Old Tidy Beard knew what he was doing. Same with Paul McCartney when he wrote Mull of Kintyre and We All Stand Together. Both charted at number 1....WTF?

These were all, ostensibly, shite ideas. But the creators knew their market. They understood their audience. They knew that what seemed risky was actually the safest thing in the world.

The problem we face in creative departments is that people want certainty, not hunches. And people who don't have hunches don't trust them. They want graphs and plans and damage limitation. They want to be as important as you. More so, even. They don't trust your instinct like you do.

But the creative instinct isn't a shot in the dark. It's developed through years of exploration and sensitivity. It's developed through conversations with old men in pubs. Talking to the woman behind the counter in Tesco. Making jokes at bus shelters. Summers spent working on building sites. It's developed through nights in prison. Getting beaten up. Getting your heart broken. Breaking someone else's....

The creative instinct is real. The problem is that we never took notes when we were developing it. So no-one trusts it.

It's like Einstein arriving at a conference and saying "E=MC2" and expecting everyone to understand it. "But it's the theory of relativity" he'd say. "It's one of the greatest scientific discoveries of all time."

He would have been told, point blank, to fuck right off.

It's only when he showed the workings that people believed him. But the fact that he showed the workings to people didn't make E=MC2 less true. It just justified it.

There is no justification for the creative instinct. We're just right. We forgot to take notes when perfecting our understanding of humanity.

Trust us.

Or get rid.