A legendary little book about producing ideas by advertising master James Webb Young with a foreword by another master Bill Bernbach.

The technique provided by Young, or “ the workflow” in modern internet fancy language, is extremely simple, and every one of us may have experienced using it unconsciously.

You may find the third step weird – one necessary procedure to get ideas is to drop your problem and prevent yourself from thinking about it – this makes your subconscious working on it for you.

And this trick is also used by other masters, including Ogilvy and Hemingway.

Big ideas come from the unconscious. This is true in art, in science, and in advertising. But your unconscious has to be well informed, or your idea will be irrelevant. Stuff your conscious mind with information, then unhook your rational thought process. You can help this process by going for a long walk, or taking a hot bath, or drinking half a pint of claret. Suddenly, if the telephone line from your unconscious is open, a big idea wells up within you. – Ogilvy on Advertising

It was in that room too that I learned not to think about anything that I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it. Going down the stairs when I had worked well, and that needed luck as well as discipline, was a wonderful feeling and I was free then to walk anywhere in Paris. – A Moveable Feast

The version I read: The McGraw-Hill, 2003

My rating: 7/10

1.The fomula to produce ideas is too simple to believe in

If you ask me why I am willing to give away the valuable formula of this discovery I will confide to you that experience has taught me two things about it: First, the formula is so simple to state that few who hear it really believe in it. Second, while simple to state, it actually requires the hardest kind of intellectual work to follow, so that not all who accept it use it.

2.The seemingly simple 5-steps workflow to produce ideas

First, the gathering of raw materials—both the materials of your immediate problem and the materials which come from a constant enrichment of your store of general knowledge. Second, the working over of these materials in your mind. Third, the incubating stage, where you let something beside the conscious mind do the work of synthesis. Fourth, the actual birth of the Idea—the “Eureka! I have it!” stage. And fifth, the final shaping and development of the idea to practical usefulness.

3.Do your homework : gather specific materials relating to the product or brand you try to sell

  • Gathering raw material in a real way is not as simple as it sounds. It is such a terrible chore that we are constantly trying to dodge it.
  • This, I suppose, is because a real knowledge of a product, and of people in relation to it, is not easy to come by. Getting it is something like the process which was recommended to De Maupassant as the way to learn to write. “Go out into the streets of Paris,” he was told by an older writer, “and pick out a cab driver. He will look to you very much like every other cab driver. But study him until you can describe him so that he is seen in your description to be an individual, different from every other cab driver in the world.”

4.Enrich your brain and idea armory by gathering all kinds of general information about life and events

  • In advertising an idea results from a new combination of specific knowledge about products and people with general knowledge about life and events.
  • Every really good creative person in advertising whom I have ever know has always had two noticeable characteristics. First, there was no subject under the sun in which he could not easily get interested—from, say, Egyptian burial customs to modern art. Every facet of life had fascination for him. 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.
  • The construction of an advertisement is the construction of a new pattern in this kaleidoscopic world in which we live. The more of the elements of that world which are stored away in that pattern-making machine, the mind, the more the chances are increased for the production of new and striking combinations, or ideas.
  • There is one, however, on which I would put greater emphasis. This is as to the store of general materials in the idea-producer’s reservoir.
  • But you can also enormously expand your experience, vicariously. It was the author of Sard Harker, I believe, who had never been to South America, yet wrote a corking good adventure book about it. I am convinced, however, that you gather this vicarious experience best, not when you are boning up on it for an immediate purpose, but when you are pursuing it as an end in itself.
  • Still another point I might elaborate on a little is about words. 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.
  • 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.

5.Use cards to index the specific information you gather, and use a scrapbook to store the general information you gather ( nowadays maybe Evernote can do both well )

  • It lies even more in the fact that it keeps you from shirking the material-gathering job and by forcing your mind to go through the expression of your material in writing really prepares it to perform its idea-producing processes.
  • We run across an enormous amount of fugitive material which can be grist to the idea-producer’s mill—newspaper clippings, publication articles, and original observations. Out of such material it is possible to build a useful source book of ideas.

6.Masticate the materials you gather

As you go through this part of the process two things will happen. First, little tentative or partial ideas will come to you. Put these down on paper. Never mind how crazy or incomplete they seem: get them down. These are foreshadowings of the real idea that is to come, and expressing these in words forwards the process. Here again the little 3 × 5 cards are useful. The second thing that will happen is that, by and by, you will get very tired of trying to fit your puzzle together. Let me beg of you not to get tired too soon. The mind, too, has a second wind. Go after at least this second layer of mental energy in this process. Keep trying to get one or more partial thoughts onto your little cards.

7.Forget your problem and do something else

  • In this third stage you make absolutely no effort of a direct nature. You drop the whole subject and put the problem out of your mind as completely as you can.
  • You remember how Sherlock Holmes used to stop right in the middle of a case and drag Watson off to a concert? That was a very irritating procedure to the practical and literal-minded Watson. But Conan Doyle was a creator and knew the creative processes.

8.And then the idea will appear

  • Now, if you have really done your part in these three stages of the process you will almost surely experience the fourth. Out of nowhere the Idea will appear.
  • Do not make the mistake of holding your idea close to your chest at this stage. Submit it to the criticism of the judicious.

9.What kind of ideas should ad men pursue ? relevant and dramatic

The result of many years of work in advertising have proved to him ( George Lois ) that the key element in communications success is the production of relevant and dramatic ideas. —— Bill Bernbach

10.Finding connections between facts is of chief importance in producing ideas

Consequently the habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas. Now this habit of mind can undoubtedly be cultivated. I venture to suggest that, for the advertising man, one of the best ways to cultivate it is by study in the social sciences. A book like Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class or Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, therefore, becomes a better book about advertising than most books about advertising.

11.Pareto’s classification of people

  • Whatever we may think of the adequacy of this theory of Pareto’s as an entire explanation of social groups, I think we all recognize that these two types of human beings do exist. Whether they were born that way, or whether their environment and training made them that way, is beside the point. They are.
  • In this classification speculator is a term used somewhat in the sense of our word “speculative.” The speculator is the speculative type of person. And the distinguishing characteristic of this type, according to Pareto, is that he is constantly preoccupied with the possibilities of new combinations.
  • The term used by Pareto to describe the other type, the rentier, is translated into English as the stockholder—though he sounds more like the bag holder to me. Such people, he says, are the routine, steady-going, unimaginative, conserving people, whom the speculator manipulates.