At school today we had a very unusual exercise to help us with the brief we’re working on. A crap brief, for a crap company with little room for creativity if you wish to win it (yes, it’s a competition). However, the exercise was pretty interesting. It was based on Systemic Constellations, a psychological angle on sociology which revealed some less revolutionizing facts (e.g. we need to belong) and some quite interesting. My experience was that a lot of the stuff happened because we acted on gut feeling instead of intellectual or rational appeals.
The lecturer wanted to make the techniques used more abstract, maybe to make is job seem harder (like branding) but I think they explored one thing; Gut Feeling. Now, the more influenced we got, the more we rationally discussed things, the more the gut feeling coincides with your rational conclusion. Basic stuff, taoism or whatever, but a practical way to understand it and I believe that a lot of people in my class was encouraged to act more on instinct. That’s good.
What the exercise taught us about the brief I don’t really now, it confirmed my previous beliefs and cemented my opinion that the brief demands sex, sex, male kissing female, male dominating female and sex. Shit advertising. The argument for working on such a brief is that we need to get used to doing bad advertising, client pleasing or whatever you might call it, that’s the reality, a solid case. But the question then is, is that what I want to do? At my creative placement we worked on fun briefs with much room for creativity and some boring ones, “it puts the lotion on its skin.” I wasn’t completely discouraged but I realised that I no longer want to be a creative for creativity’s sake. Then I can as well become a movie director.