E "Eddy"Edwards
It's Friday, mid-morning and crisis is about to strike. The creative director of your small to mid-sized design group failed to mention to you yesterday that your biggest client's marketing people are showing up today to have an "informal" charette about new and exciting concepts to assist the further branding of said client and/or their product.
It's show time, folks! No big deal, right? Done this a thousand times before. Except, you stayed up until 3:45 pretending to be a 20 year-old farm state college girl who has been experiencing strange "yearnings" of late and who just happened to "accidentally" wander into a "Vampire Lesbian" online chat room. It's now six hours later and you are at work and brain-dead.
But trooper (and themed entertainment wage slave) that you are, you grab your pile of buck slips (or 3rd grader's writing tablet or whichever affected writing media you are using these days in hopes of creating a sufficiently "edgy" creative persona for yourself) and have a seat in the conference room. You sit where you can see out the window (you know that your mind is going to be wandering off, so at least it can look like you are gazing in deep thought out the window rather than fixating on the trash can or light switch or something). This ploy seems to be working, too, as the morning drifts by. Staring out the window, of course, you are the first to see the catering company van pull into the handicap space in the parking lot.
Soon, that table in the back of the conference room (where all the TV & VCR & "media system" remote controls, spent Sharpies, and rude caricatures of some other client from the previous last minute meeting end up) will be filed with platters of stuffed pita shells, half sandwiches, a heaping bowl of Chinese chicken salad, fresh-baked peanut butter cookies, and a platoon of Snapple Peach Ice Tea bottles.
In other words, in a very few minutes, the attention in this room with become frozen on whatever the last concept that the wacky creative types pitched before the food arrives. Once eating has begun until 3:30 or so, no new ideas will emerge, just vague reworkings of that Last Big Idea. Come that hour, the Alpha Marketer will say something like "Well.this has given us all a lot to think about. Work it up, [your name here], and we'll mull it over."
Time is of the essence! You must save yourself. Unfortunately, your last new idea went out the door while you wee in the chat room. Now . . . nothing. You are blank as a fart, creatively speaking, a fact that will, unless you act quickly will surely sink up the room.
Sure, you could just bolt for the door, but there's catering -- free food! -- coming! Priorities, always.
Hmmm.no sleep, combined with the coming onslaught of animal/and or fish protein, empty calories, and many, many carbs, and nothing but Snapple Peach Ice Tea sloshing around in your guts commingling with the two Venti Drip of the Day with an extra shot of Espresso (served to you in soggy paper cups).
Disaster seems immanent! What do you do?
The answer: Recycle.
Remember that idea you had about two years ago for the inflatable, plush-covered children's musical play area based on those sexually questionable British Kid-Vid icons? Turn those giant inflatable flowers into giant inflatable bimbos and there you have it, the "Chevrolet Presents 'Arrowsmith's Backstage Party,'" the perfect stadium parking lot big event / corporate branding tie-in. That planetarium data system that only projects individual pale green points of light? "Chicken of the Sea's 'Beneath the Sea-Tastic Ocean Wonderland!' Featuring the Plankton-ettes!"
The point here (at long last) is that you really shouldn't feel bad about not always having the latest bleeding edge concept or show system or whatever at your fingertips at all times. Simply take the last couple or few really good ideas that you actually spent some time with in concept development (since ideas like that never get green-lighted, nobody much will know anything about it except you anyway) and store these basic Übber-ideas (the basic technology, basic showcraft, the basic, audience interactive system, basic whatever) into the ancient lizard brain section of your gray matter, right there atop the medulla oblongata (that's where all the other bits of "fight or flight," "immediate reaction to danger" stuff comes from). With that data e-prommed in place, they can be sent at a moment's notice directly past any conscious decision-making elements of your mind and straight to your mouth.
At a moment's notice, you can leap from your chair and, with a casual smirk, say, "Well, this is a kinda funky thought that just occurred to me, but how about if we were to . . ." Then just let these oft-used stored ideas works their magic, the details of the generic idea getting colored by the last thing that the client said before you leapt into action.
Won't your fellow creative types, I hear you say, soon realize that you always have the same few basic concepts to pitch at every meeting? Relax: sure they will and they may even snigger at you behind your back (or even openly, if they are bigger or have a better parking space than you); soon enough, they'll be dong it, too.
So get into the spirit of Recycling and come to also know and, if not love, then to fake a certain attraction for the "cheat-sheet" ideas of your fellow wackys. When they know what you're going to pitch and you know what they are going to pitch, everyone can jump right in to these "impromptu" creative breakthroughs, steamrollering with the "new" ideas, giving the client the impression that since all of the wackys seem to be in-sync on this concept, it must be a great idea, whatever the heck it is.
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