Memorable Quotations from last night's Creative Social

Attended a Creative Social event at LBi London last night entitled "Creative Looting", all about where ideas come from, and where the line between inspiration and stealing lies.

Some memorable phrases from the night, some very much paraphrased:

"Bet he could top cosmic boy!" - a perhaps unintentionally homoerotic frame from one of Tom  Eslinger's childhood comics.

"Put ideas into the client's head so they think that they thought of it" - Liz Sivell gets underhand inspiration from Derren Brown.

"[The] PC is the LSD of the 90s" - Timothy Leary, via Andy Sandoz.

"Keep digging" - Dave Bedwood on finding ideas. Which made Tool's "Stinkfist" run through my head for most of the rest of the evening.

I'll keep digging 'til I feel something...
Elbow deep inside the borderline
Show me that you love me and that we belong together


"The Apprentice is the ultimate MacGuffin" - me, while listening to Nathan Cooper go through the 7 types of story (tragedy, comedy, monster, voyage, quest, rags-to-riches, and rebirth). Think about it - no-one remotely gives a shit who gets to work with Lord Sugar, that's just a device on which to hang their grotesque personalities and ego struggles.

Last word for Dave Bedwood, I think.

"You just have to be good".

Thanks to LBi for the free beer!

Collective inspiration with Steve Henry

Another week over, and I need to get my Friday blog out of the way. As is my wont, I have a couple of blog posts lined up, but I wanted to talk about the energy I felt this afternoon.

No point boring anyone with the exact details, but essentially, it was Steve Henry (creator of the Tango ads and the finest Pot Noodle ad ever), Marc the SCA 2.0 Dean, and a collection of advertising students talking about photography, washing powder, and banking. And the rate at which valuable ideas and thoughts were spilling from everyone's lips was like no conversation I'd been in before.

I came out of it thinking we could have seriously revolutionised banking. Maybe we haven't. Or maybe what we thought up could work, but no-one will be brave enough to hear us out and give it a go. But that isn't necessarily the point.

The point is that we were using our brains. We were feeding off each other - each idea was never one we'd stored in our heads and waiting to say, it was an expansion of the previous idea, or a lateral thought that took it somewhere new.

Because for all the talk of how creativity can be nurtured, and situations deliberately created to make it happen, I've remained just a little sceptical - especially as my best ideas have tended to be moments of solo inspiration. But today, for the first time, I really saw how it can work.