I’ve spent most of my life writing for advertising. So I’m very aware of the fact that advertising creatives have to be good at producing and don’t get a lot of time to reflect on what they do. What’s more, creatives are not expected to do that.

Maybe that’s why oceans of print are written about creative strategy without addressing the most basic questions. What is an idea? What is creativity? Is advertising an art? And what is a story? Almost nobody really understands how to tell a story, and what kind of idea you need to do it successfully.

So let’s start with the first question. The best definition of a communication idea I’ve ever come across is a very old on. It was written by Alexander Pope in 1711:  “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed”.  You might be familiar with the phrase, which has become a quotation book standard. Pope was not attempting to define an idea. He was writing about something he called ‘wit’. We still talk about wit, but the eighteenth century usage was slightly different to the modern meaning. ‘Wit’ was the ability to express a thought in a memorable way.
Pope’s neat definition therefore works very well for advertising and communication ideas. One of the things I really like about it is the understanding that nothing is new. It addresses the great fallacy in the word ‘creative’.

And equally, the people advertising address are not blank canvasses. Their minds are already full of ideas, and if you are merely advertising something, they won’t care about yours. That’s why it’s so important to understand what Pope was talking about. The trick is to find something relevant to your message that your audience is already thinking, and then give them a better way to think it. You have to say something they always did think and then express it better. ‘Should’ve gone to Specsavers’ is a good example of this. Oi mate, you need an eye test, is what everyone says when they don’t agree with the ref. Oi ref, you should’ve gone to Specsavers just puts it better. Better? Pope’s much quoted line is followed by these less well known ones:
Something, whose truth convinced at sight we find
That gives us back the image of our mind.

And that is what we want in a message we remember. It gives us back the image of our mind but, to push the sight analogy, in much sharper focus. That’s what an idea is. And if this sounds obscure, refer back to Should’ve again. It merely asks ‘Need an eye test?’ in a classically witty way.

That’s why I always say that if you want to talk to people, the most important thing to do is to talk to people. Because the people you are talking to will know the answer. They will carry it around in their heads. All you have to do is recognise it, and put it better. Simple. EVERYONE HAS TO have creative ideas.  They are what make us human. But we don’t always recognise them, and we often don’t express them well. That is what ‘creatives’ are employed to do.

So the most important thing any creative person can do is discover, but recognising what you have discovered yourself is difficult. This is why, when you start out, the best way to work is to generate as many ideas as you can and let someone more experienced decide what is actually good. But a blank sheet of paper is notoriously the hardest thing to look at. It is also the worst thing to look at. It really helps to have a starting point. A little knowledge is not necessarily a harmful thing. So here is a little of my knowledge.Advertising ideas almost all relate to storytelling. Consequently, there are two categories of advertising ideas. There are the big brand story ideas, and there are the ideas that play with the nature and structure of the story.

The big advertising ideas are related to the three most important tools of story making. These are language, character and plot. The three most-used brand ideas are derived directly from these. Invent a word, make an animal or object talk, or use a reversal. It is easy to think of dozens, if not hundreds of brands that use one of these ideas, because almost all memorable brands do.

They are not the only ideas that are available of course. There are many others, but all of them relate to these three basic aspects of storytelling. Puns and wordplay are related to language. Using borrowed fame and celebrities is an easy if dangerous fallback if you need to find a memorable character. Repetition and in particular the rule of three relate to plot structure. Comparison is also essentially an easy plotting device, although it is now highly restricted. And the used of a ‘test’ narrative (which pretends to be an entirely different, scientific kind of story structure) is also a great way to demonstrate a benefit, if you are lucky enough to be advertising a product or service that has a believable one. You can see how all these secondary ideas relate to the three big ones. 

From this brief account, you might conclude that coming up with a working idea is not a difficult thing. And it is not. The difficult thing is contained in the second part of Pope’s sentence. Stories are in everyone’s head. Your job is not just to understand them, but to tell them better, and then to know you have done it. And the only way to understand that is to measure yourself against stories that have been remembered already.