What Can I Do To Be More Creative, Mr. Angry Copyranter?

OK, I'll TRY to help you lessers.

These days (here he goes again), everybody is “taking a stab” at ad creativity. Marketing folk. Tech folk. MarTech folk. And they are virtually all stabbing it to death, many using AI as their big ugly knife.

Truth: there is no shortcut to making good ads. It is a process, a learned process that you only get better at by doing the process over and over and fucking over to the power of infinity (OK, that’s a bit hyperbolic).

This is via painter Victoria Primicias. Read more about her process here.

I’ve tried writing this in the past, but I left out some of my process. So, below—with the help of some Hall Of Fame Creatives better than me—I will share my steps to coming up with Big Ideas.

This is thanks to 30+ years of knowledge, 30+ years of creating, literally, thousands of ads of all types—most never making it past the spec stage because I worked at a small agency where we pitched virtually every week, often with little chance of winning the business. So no: it hasn’t been, isn’t, and never will be, free.