The Pitch: Metaphysical poets had the right idea 350 years ago

By DENIS JOSEPH

Advertising's mad inventors often describe the search for the big idea as like seeking out the faint light at the end of a dark tunnel.

As the intrepid creative adventurer moves towards it, the light grows brighter until too late, it turns out to be the headlight of a bullet train - the Client Express, as one wag puts it.

Ask a creative director how he gets an idea and the silence will be deafening.

But given time to think about it, creative folk warm to the subject.

Ogilvy & Mather's legendary worldwide creative director, Neil French, says that after a briefing session, he usually waffles off to the nearest bar in pursuit of wanton distractions.

Saatchi's watering hole in Sydney is an Irish pub, "where much work was conceived or celebrated".

Yep, it's a great job, thinking and thinking and thinking, nursing a pint (although the other 95 per cent of a creative's time is spent in meetings, shoots, admin and hair-tearing).

But eventually, the formula or secret for the creative idea comes from a common well-spring.

Creative directors might have their own personal descriptions of the process, but what they're all talking about is the surprise.

Michael Newman in his book Creative Leaps sums it up: "Creativity is about instinctive but unexpected juxtaposition. Creative people search intuitively for surprising pairings of product and promise."

Strangely enough, what Newman says now was said almost verbatim 350 years ago.

In the words of Samuel Johnson: "The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons and allusions ... a kind of 'discordia concors', a combination of dissimilar images."

Johnson was describing the poetry of John Donne and others, and he used the word "metaphysical".

These wordsmiths, writing in the 17th century, used unexpected, almost startling imagery to describe human emotions.

Donne excels in the juxtaposition of the unexpected.

A passionate relationship is described as a pair of compasses; a blood-sucking flea is an analogy for ribald love. And stark imagery such as "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone", is set in the context of a grave being reopened!

And it's true that the more disparate the images being juxtaposed, the greater the spark, be it in advertising, a riveting good story or a real smart joke. And the new idea is always 100 per cent original, and therefore memorable.

The funny thing is that when two disparate images are yoked together, one of them is the product or brand.

Think about the great advertising ideas. Heineken and daffodils. Macintosh and George Orwell. Absolut and Andy Warhol.

And yet, when disparate images are yoked together to form an original idea, there always exists the streak of relevance - to the brief, the objective, the cause, the whatever.

After all, great ideas in advertising must sell stuff, or what's an Effie for?

* Email Dennis Joseph

* Denis Joseph, now based in Auckland, has worked in executive creative director roles for major agencies overseas.

* The Pitch is a forum for those working in advertising, marketing, public relations and communications. We welcome lively and topical 500-word contributions.
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