DEV UNTIL YOU DANCE

A one, a two ...

Developing an idea from scratch is a process. The magic is you start and bam - there it is - the idea. Yay!

Except it doesn't always happen that way.

I'm cursed, like most creatives, with the dire perfection/never good enough syndrome.

But.

Instinct is the game.

You keep going until you hear it.

I was working through an ad challenge once, for the chocolate candy Kit Kat. The creative team wanted a sing-a-long. They were headed out to a state fair with a film crew and wanted to have people sing a song.

People singing about candy is kind of a Mad Ave fantasy, but it happens. Jingles stick. The best ones anyway.

But where do you find a tune like that?

Something that people can hear and sing-a-long with right away, while a film crew is standing there, and the camera is rolling.

And the idea was these were real people, not actors. Like a singing man-on-street interview. On the fly. Here. Listen to this. Sing this.

So I always work through ad projects the same way. I look for the safe idea. The established jingleers. The guys who'd done it before. Cover your base. Then I develop an alternate to that. Then I jump off a cliff. Three ideas.

I don't like looking at dozens of ideas. It's confusing. Three ideas covering a spectrum. That's my limit.

In those days New York was full of music houses who pumped out the jingles. You know the tunes. They were shaping the culture. Only thing was I was new to the business and I didn't get these jingles. I didn't understand the tempos.

Does the make sense?

They didn't make me dance is another way to put it.

It was a closed world. You went to these guys because they knew how to do jingles. They knew how to write these little hooks. Except I wasn't looking for a jingle.

The creative team wanted something that felt real. Like a campfire song that everybody knew already forever. A classic.

I sent out the specs and I got back songs. All sorts of songs. Too many songs. And most of them were jingle-slick. Little catchy nuggets. Earworms. But a little tacky as well. Corny. And maybe a little too musical. I'm looking for 'Home on the Range.' Or 'Shortening Bread.' Great sing-a-longs.

I used to laugh when people would come to me and say produce something like 'I Can't Get No Satisfaction.' If I could do that I wouldn't be producing jingles! So this idea that we could create a classic song for a candy bar was the kind of idea only advertising people think is doable. And here's the thing - it was.

I had this job in college producing student recitals. Everybody in the school had to give one, and I worked in the theater where all this went on. This guy shows up and says he needs the balcony for his show. I tell him we don't open the balcony for student shows, and he says he wants to put dozens of acoustic guitar players up there to represent some kind of cosmic chorus.

I'm sucker for things like that.

When I started working in New York, and I was looking for somebody outside the established scene, a fresh voice, somebody who could break the rules because he hadn't learned them yet, I remembered those 50 guitars in the balcony and looked that guy up.

His name was Michael Levine and he became my Kit Kat wild card. I jumped off a cliff with Michael Levine and he wrote a hit, a classic, a sing-a-long, a camp fire song, something people heard and sang back on camera and looked like they were having fun while doing it.

Kit Kat 'Gimme A Break.' I bet you can sing it right now.

A one, a two ...

Kit Kat 'Gimme A Break'