I was reminded of this by rewatching the excellent Sir Ken Robinson Ted Talk.

Several lifetimes ago, I worked with a girl who could do a quite amazing thing.

What captivated people about her was that you could give her a couple of ideas: Getting old and rainforests, running the marathon and losing out on a bet, and she would come up with something new; normally something surprising and something which you very rarely would thought of yourself.

She was very well educated, she was very bright and very interested in cultural things, but I don’t think any of those facts in their own right were responsible for her ability. It was just something her brain would do, that mine doesn’t, firing off these ideas, not really knowing what to do with them, like a kind of lucky, positive Tourette’s syndrome. The ideas would rarely be commercially useful. You couldn’t really use them for anything. But it didn’t really matter because they would make you think of other ideas, to make new connections you’d not made before.

Of course, what she had was a fairly extreme form of what people mean by ‘creativity’. It means – in part – being able to deconstruct ideas and then put them back together, it means, in part at least, the ability to make imaginative connections, to find new things to put with the old ones. And when it’s used commercially, it also means you need to have the ability to work out which ideas can achieve a business objective. So it’s what a ‘creative’ does in an ad agency, and a little bit of what a planner does.

I’ve been made to think of this by a number of things recently. I live in a world where creative and artistic become extremely blurred terms. Of course there is a very old and broken syllogism I’ve mentioned several times before which confuses necessary and sufficient conditions: my house has a roof, your house has a roof, therefore my house is your house. Or: a lot of artists are creative. I’m an artist, therefore I’m creative.

Some artists aren’t creative, they replicate art, or pastiche art without interpretation. The creative services in most marketing companies are full of artisans like art workers, typesetters or graphic artists, who often produce beautiful work, but in a very synthetic or reductive way. It’s an incredible skill – and another one I don’t have – but I don’t think it’s about making new things from nowhere.

A colleague, again from a previous life had a funny take on this in the agency setting, asking why one team of people were allowed to call themselves ‘the creatives’, although the planning team weren’t allowed to call themselves ‘the clever ones’, or the account men ‘the responsible ones’.

Where do we see creativity in our day-to-day lives. I don’t see that much of it coming out of ad agencies, I see a lot less from digital ad agencies. Old ideas done in new ways is not creative, it’s barely even craft.

Take a trip on Google and follow some of the connections that bloggers are making on various topics. Often rather brutally done, but very creative.

And here I think is where we find the most exciting ideas about creativity. Where brainstorms work, it seems to be because on hearing one idea linked to another, we are able to start constructing new maps of the world, leading to different connection, and new ideas. If two is better than one, and three is better than two. Can we think together on the web in a way which can be harnessed.

Spurred on by a number of posts (Shaun McIlrath as a Scamp guest presenter, Russell Davies on ‘Uncanny Valleys’) and the enormous amount of crap that pours through my door and email inbox daily, I wanted to jot down my views on the myth of direct marketing. It feels funny saying this about an industry that employs so many people, that has such a body of writing behind it, and which impacts our life every single day; but the whole idea seems fundamentally flawed.

I’m not coming at this from the point of view of an industry watcher and analyst. I don’t have any smoothed and exaggerated case studies to make the point. I’m not even proposing to wheel out any of the usual quasi-psychological backing which (a bit like the ‘scientific bit’ in cosmetic adverts) typically makes an appearance is arguments over something works or doesn’t.

I’m coming at this from the point of view of being a human being.

The promise of direct is extremely seductive. In its most basic form it is this: if you can really understand each of your audience individually and say things that resonate with that person, they will respond more positively.

This is – of course – true. But is it relevant to any marketer with more than  about 5 customers? No matter how much data and computers you have on hand to analyse and segment your customers, you’re still going to be faking it. The reason you can’t communicate 1:1 is very simple. There is 1 of your and loads of them. Sure, you’d like to talk to your customers as if they were your friends but you can’t because friendships are complex and subtle. For direct marketers, the problem really is that you can’t even FAKE it very well.

Some fashion-related brands will have staff whose job it is to keep their celebrity customers happy – sending them free stuff, finding out what they like, asking them what else they need etc.

If you can afford to do this for all your customers, I guarantee they will love you forever. But direct marketing isn’t this, direct marketing is a huge attempt to fake it. And in the words of one of the comments on the Scamp piece, shit sandwich or shit soufflé, it doesn’t matter, we smell it a mile off.