Page 63 - THE DO-IT-YOURSELF LOBOTOMY Open Your Mind to Greater Creative Thinking

54 CREATIVITY = PROBLEM SOLVING

portion of this commercial, we came up 8 seconds short of our 15-
second target.
“Can’t we find more money?” we pleaded with the client.
“No.”
“Can’t we find a way to stretch the budget?” we pleaded with the
animation house.
“Well, you can afford animation as long as the commercial has no
more than seven seconds of unduplicated animation,” they said. “So if
you can find a creative approach that allows you to loop the frames,
like a hummingbird flapping its wings or a flag waving in the breeze,
you don’t pay for the part that repeats.”
Hmm.
We had a problem. Looping the animation cells was a solution. But
how could we creatively pull this off? I remember thinking, “This is
crazy, we can’t let a production reality like this dictate the conceptual
direction of the TV spot.” Well, before we discounted this approach
entirely, my partner and I thought of the Chinese water torture. The
whole premise of this ancient, perhaps apocryphal, exercise was the
excruciating pain caused by the tedium of the process. Wasn’t that the
problem inherent in the evil competitor’s software product?
Bam! A problem caused us to stretch. No, it wasn’t the usual kind
of problem you’d expect to prompt fresh thinking. After all, it was just
some quirky production value reality. But I have to tell you, I’m not
sure we would have come up with this idea, which happened to be
right on strategy, if this problem hadn’t caused us to think in an arbi-
trary way.
Footnote: The campaign went on to cause a minor stir in the high-
tech marketing world, as it outperformed Microsoft and a dozen other
major players in its primary run at Comdex, the technology industry’s
major trade show.

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YOU CAN LOBOTOMIZE

When you can’t find a solution to a problem, a real problem, because
no solution exists, then you have no choice but to be creative.

Suppose you have seen the problem a hundred times before. Does
that mean you can’t be creative? Certainly not.