Live Before You Write

Advertising people live in a circle of mirrors. Most creative people have an encyclopaedic knowledge of great ads of the past. They go through award annuals, creative magazines, advertising books that worship great work and of course now-a-days creative people spend a lot of time on websites with huge ad database. But it creates its own cage of conformity.

There is no doubt that a great deal can be learned from the greats. Case histories of all types are telling. But it’s sometimes hard going forward while you are staring constantly in the rear view mirror. You don’t find “originality” by looking at what has been done before. Standing on the shoulders of giants is well and good, but it may give you a false perspective and an inflated sense of your own starting point.

Advertising is always better when you try to mix things up. But you have to have some raw material of your own before you can create something “original”.

A true creative person wants to be a know-it-all. He wants to know about all kind of things: Greek mythology, Indian history, Astronomy, Carl Jung’s Theory of Psychoanalysis, Six Sigma tools, Hedge Funds, 4G telecom applications, gardening, sudoku, and so on. He never knows when these ideas might come together to form a new idea. It may happen now or many years down the road. Knowledge is the stuff from which new ideas are made. Nonetheless, knowledge alone won’t make a person creative.

Different ways of seeing things are equally important resource in advertising where we all feel like we have seen everything before. Our personal experiences make us look at thing in a strange way and it shows in our work. A person who has just had their heart broken sees the world differently to someone who never has and will express themselves differently. Just as a person who has been addicted to drugs sees the world differently to someone who has not. They just do. They are changed by their experience. So how do you make sure that you also gather rich experience about life and put it to a good use?

You must stop living in a shell. Look for new experiences. Real ones, preferably. If possible, don’t go straight from school to college to advertising. Explore our country first. Go on a world tour. Study different cultures. Learn a new language. Play a new sport. Everything we experience feeds us. Our friends and environment around us provide us with experiences which affect our personal ways of seeing things. Because our personal experiences are usually truths of some sort it’s hard to fake that. And the best work always seems to be based on some kind of truth.

Tarsem Singh, the well-known film director and the man behind Pepsi TV Commercial - We will rock you, Nakshatra Diamonds TV Commercial with Aishwariya Rai & many more, once said, “You don’t pay me for the film I shoot or the awards I’ve won. You pay me for every book I’ve read. My childhood. Every walk I’ve taken, every movie I’ve seen.”

Remember, you have to live before you write.