Excrementary, my dear Watson

Creativity is a fickle friend, coming and going as she pleases. Arriving late, leaving early, forgetting to close the fridge and eating the last ice cream sandwich. The excuse? It was there. But creativity fuels advertising. Without it, there’d be no bucket challenges, challenge buckets, or lengthy buttons at the end of a mobile page reading, “for a chance to enter to win, please click here.” 

The old guard of the ad world knows where the finest ideas come from. They come up with them out of thin air - sort of. They aren’t swayed by shiny objects, despite their impressive sheen. They take the glistening orbs and toss them into their bottom desk drawer – that’s if they haven’t taken apart their desk piece-by-piece in anticipation of firewood season. What good is having a mantle without something to burn? What else can they do? Most of the lumberjacks have lost their sense of identity in the face of hirsute hipster migration. Many have put down the axe in favor of the stylus, learning graphic design as a direct challenge to their fuzzy foes. 

No, the finest creative minds of my generation engage in one shared practice, mining ideas like 48ers, before the anger and selfishness that would come a year later, after the onslaught of rushing gold. Simply put, they throw stuff against the wall. This isn’t a metaphor or a figure of speech. What stuff exactly? You can find it in every zoo in this city and in farms all over America. Industry leaders direct creative by first hurling actual excrement against the wall. This practice has really been put to the test with remote work now ascendant. Few people can afford the full time janitorial staff required to clean up the remains of ideas, smeared across a well-lit conference room.  

Ideas have to start somewhere. And in most Madison Avenue offices, this is where. Don’t get sidetracked by the smell or the immense power of an agency’s digressive tract. I’d like to see AI simulate this practice, digging through “ideation” piles at the circus, searching for that one creative breakthrough that'll get them on the cover of Adweek. Who knew that a Cannes Lion wasn’t that far from an actual lion’s cage?