Every really good creative person in advertising has always had two noticeable characteristics. First, there was no subject he could not easily get interested in...Second, he was an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information. For it is with the advertising man as with the cow: no browsing, no milk.
An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements.
A good idea has self-expanding qualities. It stimulates those who see it to add to it.
Drop the whole subject and put it out of your mind and let your subconscious do its thing.
Do not make the mistake of holding your idea close to your chest… Submit it to the criticism of the judicious.
We tend to forget that words are, themselves, ideas. They might be called ideas in a state of suspended animation. When the words are mastered the ideas tend to come alive again.
The habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas.
This use of advertising - to add a subjective value to the product - becomes increasingly important as the trends in our technology lead to competing products becoming more and more the same.
Thus, words being symbols of ideas, we can collect ideas by collecting words. The fellow who said he tried reading the dictionary but couldn't get the hang of the story simply missed the point: namely, that it is a collection of short stories.
Particular bits of knowledge are nothing, because they are made up of what Dr. Robert Hutchins once called rapidly aging facts. Principles and method are everything.
And so, while perhaps not all God's chilluns got wings, enough have for each of us to hope that we may be among those that have.
