Hangout: Adam Ferrier on crap creative, Aussie success and presenting at Cannes
Mumbrella held a video hangout with Cummins & Partners strategy director Adam Ferrier at the Cannes Lions festival in France.
Ferrier gave a talk on day one of the festival called Stop Creating Crap Creatives talking about the flaws in current creative agency processes in creating campaigns, and the role behavioural science should be given in the process.
In this interview with Mumbrella editor Alex Hayes he talks about that problem, how agencies need to tackle it, why he believes Cannes is still the best place in the world to learn about creativity, and how he gave his first Cannes Lions talk in a nappy.
Training Creativity…hmm
Behavioural science? So that’ll be the process of noticing stuff that others don’t then? Seeing patterns in human behaviour that aren’t immediately obvious and applying them to a concept to enhance it into an effective campaign. Essentially this is what a creative does…without a textbook. You can’t train people to think out of the box and great ideas cannot be farmed. If they could, all the CD’s would be robots…
Sure you can give them a set of rules, some inspirational stuff to look at and a structured approach with some science to back it up but to be truly creative you have to be a window-gazing, dreaming weirdo and have the courage to take the flak for that. You can’t train someone to be that.
A workshop about running a workshop? Hmm…saw you coming mate.
Well what did that tell us? Sloppy interview, and waffle about gastroenteritis and adult nappies, which turned out to be obliquely relevant.
Smaller sand pit? No. The bigger the sand pit the better. Not enough time? Make time, it is important. Philosophy is important, so is fashion, lifestyle, markets etc. Most important is creative imagination and an understanding of the controlled use of reckless abandon. The creative process has not changed enough to indicate any real development in the last 80 years. In some corners of creativity there has been no real change in over 300 years.
Smarty pants industry gurus have come and gone, who could point to a blackboard, later a white one, and later still a video, to show where idea A or idea B had made a difference in market share, or lifted the sales of fly spray. They haven’t changed much either.
We can all be clever after the event, nobody has a crystal ball. This is why we can’t move to small sand pits, they restrict movement based upon what is only believed to be correct in the first place.
It has slowed down and even stalled occasionally, but nobody has ever broken or vastly improved the creative process. It doesn’t actually create anything, it provides a bottomless pool, from which we creatives can, if we are careful, fish the required components for the job.
It takes time, playfulness, patience, deep feeling, the ability to listen and absorb, and above all the ability to see a diamond, not only as a single sparkling stone, but also as a mixture of individual facets and dividing lines, with a texture of varying translucency and opacity.
Still we can win awards for so called creative excellence, yet fail to sell soap or lift market share.
Hi Everyone please can I apologise for the content of this Hangout. What makes for a relatively funny conversation in more intimate environments doesn’t translate well to the internet. In fact it comes across as rather gross.
Alex and I were sharing gastro experiences before the taping began and it felt contextually relevant to continue the conversation – if it wasn’t being recorded!
Again apologies.
Adam