Just as a workman knows his tools, a musician must know his instrument. A great violinist can perform a solo concerto flawlessly, but she must also possess a keen sense for properly tuning her violin and how it works, from pegbox to chinrest. The investment of so much time and energy breeds an intimate familiarity; a sharpened skill set that separates the player from the virtuoso.
It makes sense that expertise is born of experience. Everything we do presents an opportunity to learn something and perhaps to better understand ourselves as well. This idea is particularly relevant to the day-to-day work of the creative professional. For creative directors, art directors and writers in advertising, the instrument is the mind. If it's your job to make ideas, it's important to understand as much as you can about how your brain works and how to properly tune it for optimal performance. With experience, advertising creatives gradually develop this understanding. They're always learning about how their own minds work. It's a constant revelation.
The funny thing is, most of them don't think about any of this very much. It's all just part of the job, they say.
We find it fascinating. So, we envisioned a different kind of research project several years ago, one that would explore the creative process of professionals in advertising and how they think and feel about that process. As we discussed in chapter one, previous studies, as well as our own research and classroom experiences, told us there was a great story in it. We've worked with so many talented students over the years and we've interacted with so many amazing creative pros (many of them our former students), and we know how smart and insightful they are.
We started asking questions of any creative director, art director or writer that would listen: What is your creative process? How do you get to an idea?
They had answers for us. Even though the questions might have taken them by surprise or required a bit of deliberation, the considerable self-awareness and intuition we knew would be there revealed itself.
One of the first insights we gained was a crucial one: The creative process is personal. Each person experiences it differently from another, even though we can identify parts of the process that are shared. We also learned that the process, for most, is somewhat predictable or can be expected to follow a familiar protocol. That's not to say, of course, that the pathway to a new idea is ever exactly the same. It's adaptable to the demands of any given situation.
“Generally speaking, I find my process to be a consistent one. It's the specifics that change and evolve. Regardless of the task at hand, I find myself doing the same activities to make it happen. The manner and order in which I do those activities is what changes.”
— Shaun Bruce, Art Director, Amalgamated (New York, New York)
The creative process is personal. Each person experiences it differently from another, even though we can identify parts of the process that are shared.
“The process is like driving a car. It can cruise along, race to a finish, roll up to a scenic overlook and will occasionally require a fill-up. You'll turn the car onto undiscovered roads and end up somewhere that's completely new and exciting. But even though it can go different places, you're still driving a car. The how is the same, but the where is always changing.”
— Maggi Machado, Freelance Art Director, Ogilvy & Mather (New York, New York)
“My process is always me thinking really hard about stuff on my own, mixing in a lot of research and talking with relevant people about how to solve the problem, then repeating that process over and over until the finished product is as polished as I can make it.”
— David Roth, Copywriter, Crispin Porter + Bogusky (Boulder, Colorado)
“I always immerse myself in the problem, ignore the problem, then address the problem. What does change all the time are the techniques I use when I'm actively engaged in the problem. And really, those techniques tend to change only when I find myself challenged or hitting a wall.”
— Ian Simpson, Copywriter, Grip Limited (Toronto, Canada)
“Back when I worked in the Midwest banging out advertising copy on an IBM Selectric, I worked for a guy who accused creative people of something he called ‘flight.’ ‘Flight,’ according to him, was something creative people did to avoid working. It included daydreaming, whining, chit-chatting, gossiping, drinking coffee, throwing a Frisbee in the parking lot, leafing through award show annuals, books and magazines, and breathing. Pretty much anything that didn't involve attacking the problem in a completely frontal way. Thirty years later, I'd say ‘flight’ is how I come up with ideas.”
— Joyce King Thomas, Executive Vice President/Chief Creative Officer, McCann Erickson (New York, New York)
It's easy to detect a theme here. Advertising creatives do recognize their own process for developing ideas and can describe it. Furthermore, they generally agree that process can change in response to the problem at hand or as circumstances change. And, importantly, they can articulate how they think. In other words, they know their instrument.
But how does this understanding of one's own cognitive abilities develop in the first place? How can it be used to enhance the creative process? Research in developmental psychology offered some important answers to these questions.
THINKING ABOUT THINKING: THE CONCEPT OF METACOGNITION
John Flavell (b. 1928), emeritus professor of developmental psychology at Stanford University, studied the ways people monitor their own cognitive activities and coined the term “metacognition” to describe how we leverage our own understanding of how we think and how we mentally supervise the achievement of a cognitive (read: thinking) goal.
His work in this area began with a study of preschool and elementary school children investigating their capacity to recognize their own cognitive abilities, such as memory and comprehension. In the study, he asked the children to examine a set of items until they felt confident they had memorized them. The older subjects, after studying the items for a while, said they had memorized the set and then recalled the items perfectly when tested. However, most of the younger students, believing that they were prepared after studying the same set, did not demonstrate perfect recall when tested.
In a 1979 essay describing this research, Flavell noted that pre-school-aged children seemed limited in awareness of their own cognitive ability and couldn't accurately evaluate it either. But the elementary school students, as he explained, did demonstrate this awareness and were better able to personally evaluate their cognitive ability. He attributed the difference between age groups to more socialization, more education and more experience with cognitive tasks.
Flavell's work suggests that we gradually become aware of our own cognitive abilities as children and continue to develop this metacognitive knowledge throughout our lives. It also seems intuitive that people who are regularly engaged in thinking tasks and build experience performing those tasks might become more metacognitively aware than those who aren't similarly focused in their day-to-day activities. Could this explain why creative directors, art directors and writers in advertising seem so in touch with how their minds work? Let's explore the theory in more detail.
Metacognition describes how we leverage our own understanding of how we think and how we mentally supervise the achievement of a cognitive goal.
Three Categories of Metacognitive Knowledge
According to Flavell, “metacognitive knowledge consists primarily of knowledge or beliefs about what factors or variables act and interact in what ways to affect the course and outcome of cognitive enterprises.” He identifies three categories within this concept: person, task and strategy. They represent the different ways that individuals can guide their own thinking to serve their goals.
The person category of metacognitive knowledge covers everything you believe about yourself as a thinker (or about others as thinkers, for that matter). Most of us, over time, can identify preferences for how we learn, what our cognitive strengths and weaknesses are, or how people around us compare in those areas. For example, the knowledge that you can't study for a test in a noisy room would fit in this category. If you believe you're not good at math, or that your best friend is better at math than you are, those are also person variables. This category of knowledge is perhaps the most strongly held of the three and is likely developed over the longest period of time.
When connecting the person category of metacognitive knowledge to our domain, the professional identities of “art director” and “writer” immediately spring to mind. The career track for advertising creatives is informed by how they look at the world and best express themselves. Writers love words and feel most capable using them to communicate, while art directors embrace the visual and can see all the possibilities there. Some in the industry feel comfortable in both worlds. Many creatives probably began to appreciate these preferences as children and ultimately found a career to complement them.
The task category of metacognitive knowledge incorporates your perception of the resources associated with a project. When presented with a task, we make evaluations of the kind of challenge it represents, the quality of available information related to it and what other resources may be required to complete it. For example, if the task presented is unlike any other you've dealt with in the past, you might decide that more time will be required to complete the task in order to accommodate additional study and preparation. If you've previously encountered a similar task and for some reason failed to complete it, you might use that experience to justify using or gathering resources in a different way in hopes of achieving a better outcome. This category of knowledge is applied in response to the unique characteristics of tasks each time they are presented.
Agency creative pros may juggle a variety of accounts representing many product categories. A writer can be working on ads for radial tires, tax preparation software and a fast-food chain all at the same time. But suppose this writer was hired just last year based on some award-winning work he did for Burger King. Will he draw upon that experience as he makes decisions about what he'll need in order to be successful with a new fast-food client? Probably so. He'll make evaluations about the new task based on his cognitive experiences with the previous task in hopes of developing even stronger ideas.
The strategy category of metacognitive knowledge is closely related to the task category, in the sense that it is devoted to the completion of the task. This category incorporates two subcategories of strategy: cognitive and metacognitive. Generally speaking, metacognitive strategies are thought to precede or follow cognitive strategies. They are more about the “big picture” than the moment at hand.
Metacognitive strategies are those we employ to ensure that a goal is achieved or a task is completed. You can think of them as “super strategies” that bolster cognitive strategies.
Notice in the example on the next page that the first (metacognitive) strategy (deciding to study in a quiet room) is employed to make sure the ultimate goal (success on the test) is achieved. The second (cognitive) strategy (reviewing the material) satisfies a more immediate, short-term goal (understanding the material). The third (metacognitive) strategy (asking a friend to quiz you) can be considered a check on the short-term, cognitive strategy and is also employed to make sure the ultimate goal (success on the test) is achieved.
Individuals acquire metacognitive strategies over time and can become more skillful users of them given regular opportunities for application.
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METACOGNITIVE STRATEGY |
COGNITIVE STRATEGY |
METACOGNITIVE STRATEGY |
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1. You decide to study for your math test in a quiet room because you know noise interferes with your studying. |
2. You review all of the material that will be on your math test. |
3. You ask a friend to quiz you on the math to assess your understanding prior to the test. |
For creative directors, art directors and writers, every new project presents the same fundamental challenge: deliver a great idea that solves the client's problem. This ultimate goal is ever present in a creative's mind, regardless of the details associated with the task. It doesn't really matter what's being sold; the idea is the destination. A typical cognitive strategy might involve making a list of all of a product's benefits to the consumer. Another might be to make a list of all the product's features. However, if the product is very simple (like bubble gum), an art director might decide to dispense with the list making and spend more time developing a personality for the brand. These “executive decisions” that serve as adjustments to the creative process are made all the time. They reflect creative professionals' familiarity with both the task and how their own minds work.
One of the main reasons it's difficult to study the creative process is that attempting to observe the process as it happens will inevitably change it somehow.
Metacognition offers a theoretical frame for the proposition that not only do creative professionals in advertising understand their own creative process, but they are sophisticated managers of that process as well. They are people who know their capabilities and can adapt their own ways of thinking to the unique demands of any project. We'd argue that metacognitive awareness is essential to the work that they do. And this theory goes a long way towards explaining why their big ideas seem to be in endless supply.
DESIGNING THE STUDY: DISCOVERING HOW BIG IDEAS ARE BORN
As we began to design our study of the creative process in advertising, we knew that our work should focus on the individual. This made sense for two reasons. First, there was a need to build upon previous work. Kover's 1995 study demonstrated advertising writers' ability to characterize their own process, so further investigation of the topic with art directors and creative directors awaited. We knew that these people had the ability to share their experiences; we just needed to listen to them. Second, our own exploratory conversations with creative pros revealed their tendency to manage their own thinking and adapt it to fit a given project. This apparent metacognitive expertise was remarkable and warranted further examination.
One of the main reasons it's difficult to study the creative process is that attempting to observe the process as it happens will inevitably change it somehow. We've seen this again and again. If the goal is to understand creativity in the workplace, we can't reasonably expect to re-create the same phenomenon in a laboratory setting. Furthermore, if people know they're being watched or studied, they tend to perform differently.
To date, scholars haven't figured out how to observe without being obtrusive.
Which raises the question: If our goal is to understand how a creative director, an art director or a writer develops ideas, should we be preoccupied with trying to observe the process as it happens in the context of solving a particular problem? Given the wide variety of clients and products these professionals encounter, could any isolated case study of their process be realistically characterized as “typical”?
This is why we've come to appreciate the value of retrospective accounts. As evidenced by the rich, detailed descriptions that Kover collected from writers, asking people to talk about their own experiences and then to reflect upon their meaning can yield valuable insights. When individuals are asked to describe the creative process in retrospect, their responses are likely to be informed by the full history of their work, offering a better sense of the phenomenon's most enduring characteristics. Of course, we don't mean to suggest that this method is without its own limitations. There's no way to verify that any personal narrative is completely accurate or comprehensive in describing a thought process. Therefore, to complement first-hand accounts, we decided it would be important to ask each creative professional to provide contact information for a colleague who could describe a study participant's process from an observational perspective. This additional information would enable us to better evaluate the personal narratives.
Because retrospective accounts — coupled with the view-points of a creative colleague — would permit us to avoid the significant pitfalls of direct observation techniques, we considered this methodological approach far more viable. The retrospective account constitutes a firsthand description of lived experience and how an individual makes sense of it. Personal perspectives, regardless of their proximity to absolute reality, are certainly valuable in their own right. They lend humanity to the subject matter.
When individuals are asked to describe the creative process in retrospect, their responses are likely to be informed by the full history of their work, offering a better sense of the phenomenon's most enduring characteristics.
Having decided that the collection of personal narratives about the creative process would constitute a primary methodology for our project, we then considered a couple of other issues. The success of our study would hinge upon the consent and participation of a very smart, talented (and insanely busy) group of professionals. We're realists: We understand that the prospect of participation in academic research isn't all that exciting. So, we needed a way to make this project more challenging and — dare we say it — fun. In true advertising fashion, we thought about our audience: people who sell things with artful combinations of words and visuals. There's an idea, we thought. What if we asked participants in our study to do more than just talk about their creative process? What if they were asked to illustrate it, too?
As it turns out, we weren't the first researchers to consider the potential value of this technique as a supplement to other methods. From the scholarship in art therapy, we learned that visual images are often used to explore human experiences that other forms of communication fail to capture. The “enduring visual product,” as described by Scottish researchers Margaret Temple and Chris McVittie, is defined as visual work developed by participants during a research project. These materials, according to Temple and McVittie, offer several important benefits to psychological research:
When study participants are encouraged to use visuals as a communication tool, they are given more freedom to respond than a researcher's questions might permit.
Visuals may incorporate important dimensions of experience (such as emotions) that aren't as easily or clearly expressed in words.
Visuals can provide more subject matter for verbal discussion and analysis.
By asking our study participants to produce a visualization of their own creative process, we could make the project more challenging and potentially enhance the quality of our data. But unlike retrospective accounts, we didn't have any existing evidence that asking people to draw their process would be as useful. Ultimately, we decided that the sheer novelty of the request was reason enough to make it part of our study. We had no idea what was in store.
When we tested this method with a few of our friends in the industry, the reaction was one of both surprise and fascination. The visual challenge, originally considered as a supplement to interviews, captured the imagination in ways we hadn't anticipated. We realized that the excitement generated by asking professionals to illustrate their process could greatly enhance participation in the study. So, we decided to run with it.
The Creative Process Illustrated— also known as “you know, that drawing-your-process-project we've been talking about” in the hallways of many ad agencies — was born.
Choosing the Study Participants
Admittedly, and from the very beginning, we were interested in studying a special “brand” of advertising creativity: the kind that yields very good work. There are a number of ways to define what's “very good” out there. We started by scouring the credit listings of work that appeared in leading industry award books (Communication Arts Advertising Annual, the Art Directors Club Annual, The One Show Annual, Lürzer's Archive). We thought about campaigns that were brave, innovative, socially responsible or otherwise notable for the right reasons, and scribbled down more names. We made a wish list of advertising's living legends and hoped that a few of them might play along. And, of course, as teachers, we thought about the next generation of creatives — the art directors and writers still in the early stages of their careers but already making their mark.
There's an idea, we thought. What if we asked participants in our study to do more than just talk about their creative process? What if they were asked to illustrate it, too?
The final list we compiled, approaching three hundred names, was compelling because it represented so many good people and so much brainpower. (Unfortunately, the list suffered in gender balance and racial/ethnic diversity — the industry must do better in those areas.) Our “sample” was certainly not randomly selected. Instead, we sought out the best and hoped for a good response, fingers crossed.
Creating the Problem
We developed, designed and mailed a study packet to all the creative pros on our list. Each packet contained a letter explaining the project, a poster-sized (17″ × 22″ [43cm × 56cm]) “Process Canvas” with a twin-tipped, black Sharpie marker to facilitate the participant's drawing of the creative process and a postage-paid return envelope. The back of the “Process Canvas” included a series of questions, a consent form and the following instructions:
Think about your own creative process. Think about the route you take to find ideas.
Experiment with illustrating that process on a scratch piece of paper. Can your visualization (with or without words) offer someone else an understanding of the process as you experience it?
When you are satisfied with your solution, use the Sharpie marker (provided) to transfer it to the Process Canvas on the reverse of this sheet.
Fold this sheet and mail it back to us in the postage-paid return envelope we've provided to you. Thanks for your participation!
About seventy-five drawings were returned to us over the course of a year. From that collection, a subset was chosen to appear in this book.
Reactions to the Project
Most of the recipients of our study packet expressed some surprise at what we asked them to do. Even though they use their creative process on a daily basis, many admitted that they had never really considered it objectively or imagined how it might look on paper. But the challenge to do so was intriguing to them. We heard from some folks who started, re-started and never finished. Many of those who completed and returned their drawings described the task as difficult but enjoyable at the same time. It helped them learn some things about themselves. The level of self-analysis and introspection represented in the drawings is remarkable. Plus, several contributors were curious to see what others' processes looked like and how they compared.
“It's pretty tough to visualize the process, but it's fun to actually think about.”
— Adrian Alexander, Writer, Third Culture Kidz, (Austin, Texas)
“It was fun and harder than I thought.”
— Ian Cohen, Co-Founder/Creative Director, Wexley School for Girls, (Seattle, Washington)
“This sat on my desk for several days, giving me vague anxiety — just like any creative assignment I really want to do well. And waiting is good: First ideas can be awfully literal and ugly. So what does thinking up good ideas look like? It's a really good question and I'm not sure I've exactly answered it.”
— Andy Hall, Freelance Writer/ Creative Director (New York, New York)
“Who says research can't be fun?”
— Mike Heid, Writer, Peter A. Mayer Advertising (New Orleans, Louisiana)
“I am very excited to get a peek at how great thinkers do their jobs.”
— David T. Jones, Chief Creative Officer, Third Street; Cartoonist, Adweek (Chicago, Illinois)
“This process has been both intimidating and inspiring — my favorite combination.”
— Nancy Rice, Founding Partner, Fallon McElligott Rice (Minneapolis, Minnesota)
As is true with most research, we didn't achieve 100 percent participation. We did a great deal of e-mail reminding, phone begging and the like in order to increase our numbers. There are still many creative stars out there whose drawings we'd love to see. If you're one of them and reading this, can't you see how cool this is? Call us and let's talk.
What a Collection!
Upon reviewing the process drawings and the personal and colleague narratives, we began to appreciate this “data” as a highly unique and enlightening archive. The responses we received surprised us in their variety, clarity and candor. While the drawings confirm the notion that no two individuals' minds work exactly the same way, we do find significant overlap in the nature of experiences. Art directors, writers and creative directors all share many of the same fears, agree about the most frustrating aspects of their jobs and even use some of the same strategies for doing good work.
Every contributor to our study helped us better understand the creative process in advertising as both an intensely personal and a surprisingly universal phenomenon. Big ideas, it seems, are the products of wonderfully diverse personalities and their one-of-a-kind brains. But across the spectrum, we can recognize shared truths, frustrations, priorities and other characteristics that are part of every process.
You really have to see it to believe it, as they say. Are you ready?