Washington Olivetto, Chairman of WMcCann Brazil and Chief Creative Officer of McCann Latin America

How do you define creativity in advertising? Nowadays, when you think about creativity in advertising, is making the consumer like it again. The consumer must comment a film or any advertising activity with the same intensity as he talks about a movie or song that he likes the most.

 What does this mean for you? Advertising cannot transmit only what the advertiser wants to mean if the consumer does not want to listen. The advertising only has relevance when it becomes part of the popular culture.

What recent work from a brand do you believe is creatively brilliant ? The campaign of “Decodifique Jay-Z” is truly an outrageously job which brought up to the daily conversation a brand that didn’t use to be part of it.

Tom O’Keefe, Executive Creative Director, North America at Draft FCB has a simple enough answer for creativity in the context of advertising.

How do you define creativity in advertising? We define it as “simple enough” — the art of being simple enough to be understood, complex enough to be interesting.”

What does this mean for you? It means that we have to remember this is not just art for art’s sake, but art with a purpose – to compel and sell somebody.  We have to be cognizant that our audience isn’t seeking our message or particularly interested in it – so we have to be respectful of their time (and that attention span) and still reward them with something provocative, entertaining…maybe even make their day a little better.  I believe the best ideas are always the simplest in any expression, but especially in advertising.  The simplest ideas are fearless in what they stand for, what they are saying and in their lack of pretense.  “Here’s my idea… I hope you like it because there’s nothing else here to hide behind.”

There’s a boldness and a confidence in simplicity.  We often cite Hemingway’s six-word story as inspiration.  As the story goes, he was once challenged to write a story in six words and responded with “For Sale.  Babies Shoes. Never Worn.”  All the emotion, tension and story arc with a beginning, middle and end in six words.  We believe that advertising should subscribe to that same impactful brevity.

What recent work to you admire? The work that really caught my attention lately is the Will Farrell Old Milwaukee stuff.  Basically, it’s an ad campaign that parodies advertising in a way that makes it feel nothing like advertising as we know it.  If I had to give it a handle, I’d call it “Pirate Advertising” … and it’s brilliant in its naiveté.  Will Farrell knows nothing about advertising, but knows enough to make a viral campaign that a young target can’t get enough of — and I believe will sell a hell of a lot of beer.  It also speaks to the power of brand, when somebody like a Will Farrell puts his brand on the line for the ultimate test and elevates a tired, old brand like Old Milwaukee to pop culture relevance almost overnight.

Chris Schreiber leaders marketing at Sharethrough, a new type of video distribution company built from ground-up to deliver organic views and maximize sharing of branded content. We invited him to share his thoughts on creativity and how ads actually get shared. (Chris has worked in content and communication roles for Google, Late Night with Conan O’Brien and CBS Sportsline)

‘Ads Worth Sharing’ sums up some of the most important themes in advertising today: the power of creativity, the increasing role of choice and the socialization of media. Thanks to social media, anyone now has the power to help a brand’s content be seen and shared. This has not made advertising easier, quite the opposite, but it also means there are much greater rewards for truly creative brand content than there ever have been.

So why would someone share an ad? On-demand media channels and the viral power of social networks have democratized media and given much more control to consumers – doesn’t this mean that we should be skipping ads and avoiding unwanted commercials altogether? Yes. But the burgeoning role of social media in our lives also means that we increasingly define ourselves by what we share. And that’s where creative branded content comes in.

We share content with our personal networks to help express who we are. We share content to share the emotion that it gives us. We share content to inform. When an authentic, original, creative piece of content comes our way and moves us, we share it, regardless if it was produced by a brand. If the content was created by a brand we already like, all the better.

Great content is the currency of the sharing ecosystem. With each share we are constructing our identity to the outside world, giving us an insatiable appetite to discover new content that we love. Brands that create content that captures our imagination and helps us define who we are and want to be will reap rewards from this media environment. We will CHOOSE to share their creativity. We will CHOOSE to become a partner in spreading their message.

Brands that choose to only produce bland ads that single-mindedly tout their product features will see the power of choice in the opposite direction – brand messages that are ignored and irrelevant. While interruptive advertising models will still continue to put these ads in front of you, interruption has now reached a point of diminishing returns. More interruption no longer guarantees relevance – there are just too many media options to choose now.

More creativity is the only way to sustain a brand’s place in modern culture. What will you choose?

Dominic Basulto, Innovation Columnist for The Washington Post and Digital Strategist at Bond Strategy & Influence, boils it down to what advertising should be about: emotional connectivity.

How do you define creativity?
For me, creativity in advertising means conveying an important idea or theme
within an entertaining package in a way that has never been done before. That originality might be the result of a new storytelling technique that changes the narrative arc, new technology that empowers the audience, or simply framing the story from an entirely new vantage point. When you do this well, it means that people watching the ad will realize that there are real people behind a brand or company, and that these people care passionately about a particular cause or issue. The best brands are able to capture this passion and interpret it artistically.

What does this mean for you?
Technology has changed the way that people think about advertising. We live in a
digital world where advertising messages reach us in new ways 24/7. There’s no
doubt that this presents problems for an advertiser – to get a message out in a way
that will reach people and resonate with them. When people typically think about
clutter in advertising, they think about trying to break through all this clutter with
something highly entertaining. That’s only part of what “creativity in advertising” is
about – it’s also about embedding an important idea inside this highly entertaining
package that will inspire people to talk about it and share it with others. The hardest
part is figuring out what this idea should be and being able to describe it in a way
that is applicable for as many people as possible.

An “ad worth spreading” is an ad that registers at the emotional level and triggers
something that is deep and profound about the human condition. This can happen
even with products that we don’t think of as “profound” – like automobiles. If you
think about last year’s winner of the TED “Ads Worth Spreading” initiative, the
Chrysler Super Bowl ad campaign with Eminem (“Imported From Detroit”) was
brilliant on so many levels: by connecting automobiles with the story of Detroit, a
once-proud industrial city, Chrysler challenged people to think about the past and
future greatness of America. Using Eminem as the voice of this message connected it
to a much wider audience.

As a writer and journalist, I’m always on the look out for new ways to tell stories as
well as new voices that are unique in the way they construct a narrative and draw
in readers. I find that many of these highly creative individuals are influenced by
wide exposure to a number of different areas, many of which are only tangentially
related. By combining their knowledge and experiences in new ways, they are able
to create a fundamentally new approach to creativity.

What recent work from a brand do you believe is creatively brilliant?
One of the ads that I was impressed by recently was Chipotle’s “Back to the Start,”
a short film with music from Coldplay performed by Willie Nelson that emphasizes
the importance of developing a sustainable food system

The ad works on so many different levels: you can view it purely as entertainment,
in terms of the video animation and the music. Or, you can think about the deeper
issue at the core of Chipotle’s work, which is to celebrate the sustainable farming
movement. In terms of spreading this ad, Chipotle has created a “making of” video to
support “Back to the Support,” and has made it possible to download the soundtrack
to the video on iTunes, with a significant part of the final proceeds supporting The
Chipotle Cultivate Foundation.

My mom left for India this Sunday after a two-month long visit. When I tell my American friends this, they give me a look of surprise. Followed by one of awe. And then I go on to explain how it works differently with Indians. And my family. I tell them that if I was still in India and unmarried, I’d be living with my parents. And that if I moved back and lived in the same city as my in-laws, we would live together. This concept is so foreign to most Americans. They only see the width and breadth of my studio and think how can three people live in this space. They think about my social calendar and work obligations and wonder how I would entertain my Mother for so long. I don’t blame them. It’s a cultural thing.

Seldom does advertising move me the way this ad has. In fact, by the time the ad was over, I was weeping. Remembering all the times I have stood at the airport saying bye or leaving. In fact, I don’t even consider this advertising. This project aligns well with Coca-Cola’s Happiness Project and its brand idea, but I think it is every single brand’s responsibility to empower people. To celebrate them and bring them joy.

Big, big brownie points to Coca-Cola and McCann Manilla for looking beneath the underbelly of a nation and bringing it to the forefront.

Jinal

We asked Octavio Herrero, Creative Director, Young & Rubicam, Mexico City, Mexico three brief questions. His emphasis on the story reminds us that even a technically brilliant ad is meaningless without a story.

How do you define creativity in advertising ? Creativity in advertising is always a story. A great story. A relevant story. A memorable story. A story in which the main character is always a brand. A story capable of being told in any media. Print, TV, PR, Blog, Social Networks, Mail, you name it. Media is never the story.

What does this mean for you? This means that I will stop calling myself a Creative (which has been a confusing name since the beginning of times) and start calling myself a Storyteller. This would be a very creative act in itself. Don’t you think?

What recent work from a brand do you believe is creatively brilliant? Coca-Cola: The OFW Project

We asked Alessandra Lariu three quick questions. Here’s her brief but gem of a response. After spending over a decade in advertising (across three continents) Lariu recently quit to found her own company, Everybody Shout. She was also picked as #29 of Fast Company’s, “100 Most Creative People.”

Ale, how do you define creativity in advertising? Something I’m so excited about I want to tell all my friends – and my grandma.

What does this mean for you? It means making work the engages people, it means working in a new way where co-creation is at the center

What recent work from a brand do you believe is creatively brilliant ? Creatively brilliant work comes less and less from brands these days. It comes from social innovation, start-ups and from people. Tik Tok is an example of all three.

Defining creativity is impossible. It is subjective and in the eye of the beholder and the maker. Out of curiosity, we’ve asked our Guest Nominators to describe what creativity means to them and what sort of a role it plays in advertising. One of the first responses we’ve received is from Tim Nolan, Creative Director of BBH Labs.

Tim, how do you define creativity in advertising?

Advertising has long since been a one way conversation from a brand to a consumer that has been tailored and crafted by an advertising agency. After years of qualitative and quantitative testing advertising became formulaic, expected, and ultimately boring. The Internet came along and changed all of this. Advertising has become invisible to the consumer. A new model is required. Creativity in contemporary advertising breaks out of these expected pathways and is naturally embraced by the population. It’s an open channel, and encourages involvement. In short, advertising needs to be as unlike advertising as possible to succeed.

So, what does this mean for you?

For me it means that I need to look for the unexpected opportunity. It is easy to do something “cool” for a “cool” brand, but can you deliver breakthrough creative for a Pharma brand? Creativity in advertising is about understanding not only the brand and the consumer, but also having a handle on the platform and media landscape. Once you have those elements positioned you can map them against popular culture and truly create something that will be embraced by society.

Jinal’s Note: If you haven’t checked out, experience the Zyrtec Park’s Unleashed Pick-your-adventure style campaign Tim launched before he left JWT for BBH.

What work do you nominate?

TakeThisLollipop.com does a wonderful job of tapping into the sub-conversation that exists around social media and our dwindling privacy. If you have not experienced it for yourself, I strongly suggest you open a new tab and spend some quality time there now. The site is a statement on how we as a culture have shifted to an open source lifestyle.

Whether conscious of it or not, we as a collective of people have opened up so much of our lives up to the Internet. Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Instagram have all captured our daily lives down to the moment. Finding someone in the real world, through their digital footprint is no longer a challenge. A few days before the site went public, I got an instant message with a link from my friend Jason. He asked me if I could check it out, and what if any brand would I think like to sponsor, buy or be attached to this idea. After getting a bit freaked out, and after digesting what I saw, I could not come up with a brand, but more importantly I did not think it needed one. It was such a memorable experience, it totally stood on its own.

In the first 24 hours of the site being open to the public, more than 300,000 people have given it access to their Facebook accounts, to date the site has just over 10,325,054 “likes” on Facebook. With it’s wild success I am sure there could be be a sequel in the works.

It doesn’t quite fit our brief which is why it’s so exciting to me. If Creative Directors are using this as a benchmark to define creativity in our industry, than that’s saying a lot about where the pulse is and what we can perhaps expect in the future. Take this Lollipop has been master-minded by Jason Zada. The campaign has massive talk value and pass along appeal. The cinematic quality of the film draws viewers into a deep level of engagement and delivers on the promise of suspense and surprise.

-Jinal Shah

Have you ever stopped, your breath taken away, or skipped a heartbeat at an awe-inspiring moment in your life?  Have you ever read a book and had to almost physically shake yourself out of the world you entered? Have you watched a movie that you could never believe later you were not a part of? I am not going to try and define beauty or creative wonder. I will only try to suggest it through these short stories.

One day, one of India’s most celebrated dancers announced to the world that she would perform one of the most difficult scenes from the Mahabaratha—the scene where Krishna, the charioteer of Arjuna, turns into the almighty God, and in his divine glory, reveals important lessons of humanity.   The audience waited with bated breath as the flamboyant, gorgeous dancer took the stage.  They were curious to know how she would depict the divine, the ultimate glory.   Much to their surprise, she fell on her feet, assumed the position of Arjuna, and through her face and action, only communicated the awe of seeing the almighty.

I know someone whose son did not get to sleep for the first 8 years of his life because he had a medical condition that required him to be treated every two hours.  One day, a miracle starch was invented and administered to him.  For the first time in 8 years, he slept through the night.  His mother sat up all night and just watched, tears rolling down her face, as her son dreamt away.  She had shed no tears even at his birth.  I think that is beautiful.

My sister-in-law is a kindergarten teacher.  I asked her what is awe-inspiring and breathtaking to her.  She said she can never forget the look on Molly’s face as she distinguished, for the first time, red from blue.  The privilege of bringing color to a child’s life is beautiful.

For me, the search for creative wonder is a search for the ability to express these breathtaking moments through film, color, character, technology, storytelling, etc.

This blog is about sharing Jinal’s and my journey with you.

- Raghava K.K