A Technique for Producing Ideas - the simple five-step formula anyone can use to be more creative in business and in life!

So it is with the production of ideas for advertising--or anything else. 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

"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.h

And when you do you usually find that it is not quite the marvelous child it seemed when you first gave birth to it.

In advertising, the specific materials are those relating to the product and the people to whom you propose to sell it.

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.

The second important principle involved is that the capacity to bring old elements into new combinations, depends largely on the ability to see relationships.

Once I jotted in a book the question: "Why does every man hope his first child will be a boy?" Five years later it became the headline and idea for one of the most successful advertisements I ever produced.

What you do is to take the different bits of material which you have gathered and feel them, as it were, with the tentacles of the minds. You take one fact, and turn it this way and that, look at is in different lights, and feel for the meaning of it. You bring two facts together and see how they fit.

One more stage you have to pass through to complete the idea-producing process: the stage might be called the cold, gray dawn of the morning after. In this stage you have to take your little idea out into the world of reality.