When Two People In Business Always Agree, One Of Them Is Unnecessary

As a kid I was fortunate to be an academic high-achiever, ending up with a Masters degree from Cambridge University.

But I never felt I fit in with the intellectual set. At Cambridge I became a punk rocker and was constantly getting in trouble with the university authorities. I also found I liked drugs and alcohol.

Most of the time I felt like a fish out of water. When I left university and trained as a journalist, I still felt like I was living in a straitjacket.

And then someone suggested I take a copy-test at an ad agency (yes, they still had copy tests in those days). I did the Ogilvy copy-test. I was hired the next day.

It’s hard to explain the feeling of finally coming home vocationally, so to speak, doing exactly the thing I was meant to do: coming up with ideas. Turned out it was the only drug I needed.

I’ve since discovered that I suffer from cognitive disinhibition, the failure to ignore information that is irrelevant to current goals or to survival.

So much stuff comes in through our sensory organs that cognitive filters have to act behind the scenes in our brains to stop us being overwhelmed.

Certain people have reduced functioning in these filters, known as latent inhibition (LI). Reduced LI increases the amount of unwanted stuff reaching our conscious awareness and can lead to stuff like hallucinations, off-beat thoughts and strange perceptual experiences.

Reduced LI is also connected to the Eureka Moment. During insight moments, cognitive filters relax and allow thoughts on the backburner of the mind to come to the front, the same way that weird ideas surface in the mind of psychotics.

Intelligence is a key factor in funneling all this into acts of creativity because it allows people to assimilate this extra information without being overwhelmed.

Individuals who share all these factors have the opportunity to access thoughts and ideas inaccessible to those with less porous filters. It’s one of the major factors that allows us to be creative.

I'm a passable test case, eventually winning a Cannes Grand Prix, as good a measure of creativity as I guess you might want in our profession.

But this is only half the story: there’s another edge to this sword.

When Shelley Carson - author of this Scientific American article on which my piece is based and from which it liberally steals - carried out her extensive creativity research, she asked a Hollywood screenwriter if he felt like a square peg in a round hole.

The screenwriter responded: “I don't feel like a square peg trying to fit into a round hole. I feel like an octagonal peg with conical appendages.”

Those of us with reduced LI share this unsettling alienation with more a more unfortunate group – schizophrenics.

But while the latter are unfortunate to have the full-blown disease, we merely possess some of the markers. One of those is reduced LI another is schizotypal behavior, more commonly known as eccentricity.

Reduced cognitive filtering is why highly creative people focus intensely on their inner world: there’s simply so much there to deal with.

Invariably the above is at the expense of social, even self-care needs. Anti-social behavior is common with this group as are all manner of unconventional responses to the world – such as idiosyncratic dress (punk rocker at Cambridge anyone?).

My career has indeed been an uncomfortable mix of intense creative endeavor, increasingly followed by requirements to lead and manage and thus fit in – something I have never felt truly able to do. It led to me leaving advertising altogether.

Not least because I increasingly found myself at odds with an American ad agency industry keen to fit in with the culture and methodology of its clients. A culture of getting to yes rather than one of no, not good enough.

Even to the extent of jettisoning the truly creative for those who ‘play better’ both internally and with clients – a bottom-line-friendly move that has had the opposite effect as clients increasingly refuse to pay a premium for average creativity.

Lately, this has descended to the sheer madness of the primacy of young people – quite literally a world turned upside down.

That the ascendancy of the latter is due to a (brief) lifetime of immersion in digital is every bit as asinine as the idea that people could have been professionally favored due to their being born into the era of steam, electricity or the telephone.

But there has been method behind this madness: ad agency leadership is determined to slash what it sees as risk and business-ize the ad agency.

What used to be one kind of people (marketers) looking to another kind of people (ad agency folks) to come up with the kind of things the former didn't specialize in - ie. creative ideas - has instead become a meeting of minds dragging everything to an anodyne, consensual middle-ground.

Instead of celebrating and leveraging their difference, ad agencies decided it was safer to declare an understanding of their clients and their businesses, to position themselves business partners.

(I’m guessing that it was as long ago as 1970-something that somebody from the creative department of an American ad agency – in this case copywriter Burt Manning at JWT – became head of a major network.)

The digital era and its neat and tidy data-driven ‘certainties’ further streamlined the client-ad agency relationship around the certainty of technology.

All the time, anything even vaguely ‘messy’ like true creativity has been gradually relegated to marketing’s periphery, the attendant eccentricity officially deemed too hot to handle.

In true creativity’s place, Adland has adopted a meek kind of mock-creativity led so-called creative directors who tend to be little more than nice, even-keeled advocates of getting to yes. A mock-creativity where people routinely call products by name even though actual humans never do, while other people endlessly drive cars on desert/mountain roads to music or enjoy the hideous torture of airline travel in smiling bliss.

The unreal vanilla relationships and goings-on in the actual advertising have their roots in the make-up of ad agencies where collaborative consensus is the be-all and end-all. Not that there's anything wrong with consensus, but sometimes it's only the most creatively attuned who can see the true potential of an idea.

Where people used to say that the good is the enemy of the great, the blood, sweat and tears required to achieve greatness have long been an HR no-no.

Pepsico bigwig and all-around brilliant bloke, Brad Jakeman, was the first to articulate displeasure with this cosy yet counter-productive set-up.

In a terrific speech to the ANA in October of 2015, Jakeman expressed disappointment at having to attend meetings with his ad agencies where everyone on the agency side of the table looked exactly like everyone on the Pepsico side of the table.

Brad even set-up a Pepsico content studio in Manhattan’s Soho, so determined was he to get work from people who reflected the values, mores and thought-processes of actual Pepsi buyers and not himself and his staff.

The problem is that Brad Jakeman left ad agencies with a loophole when he said:

“I’m sick and tired of sitting in a room of white straight males talking to me about how we are going to sell our brands that are bought 85% by women.”

This, and the appalling goings on under Gustavo Martinez at JWT, sent everybody in the direction of sexual and racial equality and diversity and made the whole thing an HR issue.

What I wish Brad Jakeman had said was:

“I’m sick and tired of sitting in a room full of vanilla thinkers hanging on my every word and action with a view to giving me what I think I want. I don't know what I want or I’d be doing it myself. I want to see incredible, exciting, moving, engaging, mold-breaking work! Ad agencies need to blow up their hiring practices and instill some difference or I will.”

While you have to believe that diversity in hiring will produce diversity of thinking and a bigger talent pool, creating brilliant agencies isn't about skin color or sex or sexuality or age per se: it’s about bringing in – or back - the truly creative.

Nelson Mandela was a womanizer, accused of domestic violence by his first wife.

Bj?rk attended the Oscars dressed as a swan.

Salvador Dali used to paint himself blue and walk about with a loaf of bread strapped to his head.

Colette drank her father under the table – when she was six.

Charles Dickens used to fight off imaginary urchins with his umbrella and combed his hair many hundreds of times a day.

Artist Yayoi Kusama is obsessed with painting dots on everything. She prefers to live in an insane asylum.

Can your ad agency accommodate and manage creative brilliance and what goes with it?

Can your agency harness the passion and rough and tumble that are part and parcel of the creative process?

Or has your agency crossed over terminally to the vanilla side?

Because clients are increasingly bypassing their AOR and taking projects elsewhere.

And it ain’t because they're looking for more yes-men.