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You know how it is, some­times when you’re try­ing to come up with ideas you get stuck. Just plain old-fashioned stuck. Everything you think of comes back to the same worth­less thought you had an hour ago. You can see only one route to a solu­tion and frankly it’s head­ing nowhere. And, of course, the dead­line isn’t get­ting any fur­ther away.

While I cover a couple of ways out in Cracked, there’s a really use­ful one that wouldn’t fit in: oblique strategies. Ori­gin­ally oblique strategies was a card deck cre­ated by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt to help jog the mind when the fog of work pres­sure des­cen­ded (details here).

It con­sists of over 100 cards (or as the deck terms it “Over one hun­dred worth­while dilem­mas”) and the idea is that when you get stuck you pick a card at ran­dom and con­sider your prob­lem in light of what it says. And they are oblique. So flip­ping my own deck at ran­dom gives me, “Go to an extreme, come part way back.” Now of course, if you are stuck that might be just the help you are look­ing for. What is the extreme con­sequences of the prob­lem? What would be an extreme solu­tion? How far back would we need to come to cre­ate a work­able answer? Work that train of thought until it goes no fur­ther and then select another card.

While there are a few such cre­ativ­ity decks around, for me oblique strategies works because it doesn’t try to solve the prob­lem for you. It still gives you room to think. And it can take you off in unex­pec­ted and use­ful directions.

You can still buy the phys­ical deck (it comes in a lovely under­stated black box) and costs £30. But you can also down­load it free as a wid­get for Mac, PC and Linux.

Don’t say I never give you anything.

You can now down­load your free, gratis, for-absolutely-no-money copy of Cracked: a small guide to big ideas. Ori­gin­ally cre­ated as a prin­ted book for internal and cli­ent use, Cracked is a guide to cre­at­ive prob­lem solv­ing. In it I cover some ways to approach mar­ket­ing prob­lems, a bit on audi­ences and then a bunch of cre­at­ive tips, tricks and tech­niques. I’ve reformat­ted it for screen and it weighs in at 472Kb.

I’ve licensed Cracked under Cre­at­ive Com­mons which basic­ally means that you can do what you like with it as long as you credit me as the ori­ginal author and offer the same rights to any­one you pass it (or deriv­at­ive work) on to. Click the license badge on the front cover for full details.

Take a look, see what you think. There’s a click­able email link on the last page where you can get in touch and let me know your thoughts. And, of course, if you want to see any of this stuff put into prac­tice, you know where to come. Enjoy.

The Independent’s media sec­tion today has a fea­ture on “Why we don’t make good ads any­more” – you can read the online ver­sion here.

They’ve inter­viewed the usual adland sus­pects (Frank Lowe, Mar­tin Sor­rell, John Hegarty, Tre­vor Beat­tie etc). The premise behind the art­icle is that ads today aren’t as good as they used to be – in the days of the Milk Tray man, Hovis bread deliv­ery boys, Smash and all the oth­ers that make up the pan­theon of golden age greats. The respond­ents are some­what divided. Frank Lowe’s com­ment reads as a lament for times past, the oth­ers tend to cri­ti­cise the lack of time that per­vades the industry and are split on whether online is cre­at­ive enough yet.

These kinds of art­icles are not new. Each gen­er­a­tion of cre­at­ive seems to feel a need to talk up the dumb­ing down of the latest crop of work. More recently there has been a flurry of rants as tra­di­tional adland has seen digital begin to eat its lunch and many cre­at­ive dir­ect­ors find it dif­fi­cult to adjust to a world where many people really, really don’t like TV ads (and where they can almost totally avoid them should they so choose).

There is also the wide­spread per­cep­tion that good work = awards. And, of course, some awards high­light some very good work. But, per­son­ally, I fear that many awards cre­ate a kind of self-fulfilling proph­ecy – estab­lished cre­at­ives award­ing work that they would like to have cre­ated (ie tra­di­tional advert­ising). I remem­ber some years back being on a judging panel where the dis­cus­sion got round to “Is this an (insert awards’ name) kind of ad?” and to what would get the best reac­tion at the awards’ night din­ner. This can’t be healthy.

Of course things are chan­ging (it was ever thus). There has cer­tainty been a shift in the kind of work that gets us most inter­ested these days. It doesn’t tend to be the big ad cam­paigns so much any more. It’s the dif­fi­cult, gnarly prob­lems that need clever, eleg­ant answers. It’s the left-field, asym­met­ric cre­at­ive strategies that refuse to fight on a level play­ing field.
It’s the ideas that are not only media neut­ral (or any of the other buzz terms) but which seek to cre­ate new media and forge new connections.

Time, as many in the Independent’s art­icle point out, is an issue. We don’t have the lux­ury of long, draw-out devel­op­ment any­more. But is this such a bad thing? I don’t know. Yes, I love to see beau­ti­fully craf­ted work that’s had oodles of lov­ing care taken over it. But on bal­ance I’d prefer to beat a com­pet­itor to the punch with some­thing quick, dirty and effect­ive. Bet­ter still, I’d prefer to get in early and set the agenda for a product or cat­egory. All the kern­ing in the world won’t match up to bene­fits like these.

Everything these days is in beta (as Rus­sell Dav­ies com­men­ted some time back). The days of 100% fin­ished, totally locked down cre­at­ive cam­paigns are his­tory. Instead, today’s com­mu­nic­a­tions are messier, trick­ier and more inter­est­ing for it. Cre­at­ives might make fewer good tra­di­tional ads any more but with so many oppor­tun­it­ies to do some­thing bet­ter and faster I can’t say I’m going to lose sleep over it.