Trawling the trash

Thinking about Linds Redding’s Overnight Test, my own experience was always that creatives in ad agencies were very binary in their judgement of their own ideas. Usually working in writer/art director pairs, thoughts would tumble out one after another, to be consigned to the waste paper basket just as quickly.

Basically, there would be a simple test. They were (rarely) great. All the rest were crap.

It seemed to me that there was a third group that got no further: ideas that didn’t work in their current form, but had real potential.

So in my early years at Saatchi & Saatchi, I used to do something similar to Linds Redding’s Overnight Test. After the creative teams had gone home of an evening, I would trawl through their waste paper baskets, looking for stuff that deserved a second glance. And I’d rather gently suggest those to the team the following morning.

Some were outraged, while others were grateful. That’s life.

The Overnight Test

I never met him, but I’d heard about Linds Redding, an art director in the advertising business in New Zealand.

He worked in London and Edinburgh before emigrating to New Zealand in the mid-nineties. There he worked for the finest creative agencies – Saatchi & Saatchi, DDB, Colenso and Campaign Palace – before setting up his own animation studio .

He wrote a fascinating blog. This is an extract from a piece he posted in March last year:

The Overnight Test… It worked like this: My creative partner Laurence and I would spend the day covering A2 sheets torn from layout pads with ideas for whatever project we were currently engaged upon – an ad for a new gas oven, tennis racket or whatever. Scribbled headlines. Bad puns. Stick-men drawings crudely rendered in fat black Magic Marker. It was a kind of brain dump I suppose. Everything that tumbled out of our heads and mouths was committed to paper. Anything completely ridiculous, irrelevant or otherwise unworkable was filtered out as we worked, and by beer ‘o’ clock there would be an impressive avalanche of screwed-up paper filling the corner of the room where our comically undersized waste-bin resided.

On a productive day, aside from the mountain of dead trees (recycling hadn’t been invented in 1982), stacked polystyrene coffee cups and an overflowing ash-tray, there would also be a satisfying thick sheaf of “concepts.” Some almost fully formed and self-contained ideas. Others misshapen and graceless fragments, but harbouring perhaps the glimmer of a smile or a grain of human truth which had won its temporary reprieve from the reject pile. Before trotting off to Clarks Bar to blow the froth of a pint of Eighty-Bob, our last task was to pin everything up on the walls of our office.

Hangovers notwithstanding, the next morning at the crack of ten o’clock we’d reconvene in our work-room and sit quietly surveying the fruits of our labour. Usually about a third of the ‘ideas’ came down straight away, before anyone else wandered past. It’s remarkable how something that seems either arse-breakingly funny, or cosmically profound in the white heat of its inception, can mean absolutely nothing in the cold light of morning. By mid-morning coffee, the creative department was coming back to life, and we participated in the daily ritual of wandering around the airy Georgian splendour of our Edinburgh offices and critiquing each teams crumpled creations.

It wasn’t brutal or destructive. Creative people are on the whole fragile beings, and letting each other down gently and quietly was the unwritten rule. Sometimes just a blank look or a scratched head was enough to see a candidate quietly pulled down and consigned to the bin. Something considered particularly “strong,” witty or clever would elicit cries of “Hey, come and see what the boys have come up with!” Our compadres would pile into our cramped room to offer praise or constructive criticism. That was always a good feeling.
This human powered bullshit filter was a handy and powerful tool. Inexpensive and practically foolproof. Not much slipped through the net. I’m quite sure architects, musicians, mathematicians and cake decorators all have an equivalent time-honed protocol.

Linds Redding died aged 52 in October 2012 from cancer. RIP.

Me and My Shadow

Even today, with the benefit of psychological profiling tools like Myers-Briggs, I notice that so often managers hire people in their own image. This can be comfortable, but it’s unlikely to be very potent in terms of innovation or leadership.

In my own case, I noticed quite early on that the partnership I had with Jennifer Laing at Saatchi and Saatchi was extraordinarily effective. Yet in personality type we were quite different. Somehow or other her strengths mirrored my weaknesses and vice-versa. Everything we touched turned to business.

And I’ve been lucky enough to have had a number of these symbiotic relationships later in my “career” – with Max Gosling at Lintas, with David Walker at Synectics, and now with Alison Duffy at Per Diem. In each case these partnerships have been associated with periods of major innovation and of sustained business success.

Of course, there is a great elephant trap involved in this. As polarised personalities it’s quite likely that you’ll not appreciate each other, maybe even disliking each other. So unless there is genuine mutual admiration, a real appreciation of the value of the other, and a shared sense of direction, success is unlikely to follow.

Knowing which is me and which is shadow in any given situation can be tricky. Flexibility as to who leads and who follows can be a moment by moment thing.

Do you have a terrific shadow?

Come to the edge…

I first came across this short poem in the Saatchi and Saatchi annual reports of the 1980s:

Come to the edge.
We might fall.
Come to the edge.
It’s too high!
COME TO THE EDGE!
And they came
And he pushed
And they flew…

In the Saatchi report it was always attributed to the British poet, Christopher Logue, but every time I saw it afterwards it was said to be by the French poet, Guillaume Apollinaire.

Saatchi was quite right – was it chosen by Charles Saatchi? It’s part of a long sequence by Logue published as New Numbers.

I think it’s really inspiring, coupling the power of creative risk-taking with the energy of committed teams in achieving success. It captures very well the spirit at Saatchi’s in the early days, on their way to becoming No 1 worldwide.

What do you think of this little poem?