The Full (disclosure) Monty
Wednesday, May 19, 2010 at 10:09AM THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS AN ORIGINAL IDEA.
My first boss and sometime mentor Steve Cosmopulos told me that when I was first working for him after he left Hill Holiday Connors Cosmopulos and started his next agency Cosmopulos, Crowley & Daly. I was a fledgling and flailing arms akimbo art director just out of Mass Art and he gave me my first job.
“Every idea you come up with has probably been thought of and done by somebody else,” he said. Hmm. That kind of stinks, I remember thinking. So what’s the point then?
The point of course, is that it doesn’t matter. Our job as I see it is to push ourselves creatively forward, and to always be thinking. You can’t worry about what’s come before you, or what’s coming after you, so to speak.
Which brings me to this big can of worms. Actually, truth be told, two cans of worms I have in front of me. The decision whether to open the first one or not was recently made for me by someone else. You see, in my first blog on this site, I explained how I came up with the concept of the “Homeless Art Director”. Yeah, it’s kind of wordy, but I felt like it was a story worth telling, as I felt I had an epiphany when I came up with the idea. Was all excited. Smiling. Patting myself on the back for coming up with a concept I could not only run with, but one that I really connected with personally, too.
So back to that can ‘o worms. You see, there’s this movie that was done by a Boston ad guy Erik Proulx called “Lemonade”. He also has a pretty interesting web site called http://www.pleasefeedtheanimals.com. I had heard some vague rumblings about the movie as it was in production, I guess, and some of my ad friends had mentioned it on their own blogs or LinkedIn or Facebook. Doesn’t matter really. It’s basically about a bunch of talented ad folks who have been laid off from their jobs and found ways to reinvent themselves, or make “Lemonade” from their “lemon” situations. Forgive me if I’ve oversimplified it, but honestly, I still haven’t seen it.
The worms. Yes, it’s time to open the can. I recently received an email from a guy in Vancouver named Mark Busse. He’s a partner/design director at a firm called industrial brand (http://www.industrialbrand.com). Now I don’t know Mark, though through several emails I can say he seems like a guy I’d like to have a beer with. Anyway, he sends me a cryptic email with the subject line:Not very original. In the body of the email is a web address http://www.homelesscopywriter.com, and then “Enough said”. Huh? Or better yet whowhatwherewhenwhyhow?
I went to the web site, and sure enough, a copywriter in Vancouver named Geoff Vreeken (http://www.geoffvreeken.com) had created this site after being laid off from his job, and he decided he wanted to give back in a way he hadn’t done before. It’s a nice idea and seems like a good cause. Now I don’t know Geoff either, but I received an email from him as well, the day after I got the cryptic email from Mark Busse.
The email basically said “I had quite a few people at Design Week 2010 telling me my old concept had been ripped off. Maybe it has, maybe it hasn’t, but I wanted to make you aware of www.homelesscopywriter.com, a charity site I launched last year. Best of luck, Geoff Vreeken. Pretty non-partisan, actually, when you consider that he’d essentially been told “Hey, that guy just put an X-Acto in your back...”
Now I’ve done my fair share of charity and non-profit work over the years. I was on the board of the Greater Table for 15 years and helped raise close to a million dollars through our Super Hunger Brunch, which is a great event and still continues to this day, and is now run by The Greater Boston Food Bank as they have the resources to successfully handle such a large event. So all I’m saying is that yes, I do give back, and still do- I get it, and we all should.
So Geoff, and anybody out there listening, I humbly must say I created my own site in my own way in my own office. The only witness who can vouch for me is the dog, and he’s just not talking. And I’m hoping I can just put this puppy to rest now.
By the way, there’s also a “Homeless Photographer” (http://www.collectivelens.com/blog/2007/08/26/the-homeless-photographer/), and a “Homeless Writer” (http://www.thehomelesswriter.pnn.com). Give it enough time, and www.HomelessAccountExecutive is sure to follow. Not sure what this says about the state our industry, but give me “www.livinginthelapofluxuryartdirector” any day instead.
Oh yeah, about that second can of worms sitting on my desk? Watch for my next blog- I promise to open it as well. My can opener just broke-seriously. Talk about coincidences.
Reader Comments (4)
Screw him. There's "homeless screwball" everything out there. What are you supposed to do ...Oh, Im sooooo sorry. Let me take down my site which I've spent countless hours developing so YOU can have the whole "homeless" schtick for yourself." Get lost jackass, I say! I thought you were going to say that the homeless copy guy wanted to team up with you the homeless art director and do some work together or at least grovel together on Boston Common over day old bread. If it makes you feel better, I'm Killer Copy. Been using it for years. Someone recently posted a copywriter job with the first line of copy "You have killer copy"... I got emails from tons of people asking if I wrote it (especially since I was freelancing at the joint that placed the ad!). Told them no and that the no-talent schmuck that wrote it was a hack who saw my site and she ripped it off. Big whoop. Good luck homeless art director, hope you're not art directing for food yet!
From Brian D. Sadie
eloquentb@wordpress.com
Wednesday, 19 May 2010
Hi Craig,
A funny thing happened to me when I was a cub reporter and photographer running from bulls in Spain...
When not suffering too greatly from participating during my first visit to Pamplona, where I was expected to photograph and report on the San Fermin festival, I also took notes and made sketches for stories, novels, and screenplays, all of which I was certain would be magnificently original. But, new to that life and quite naïve, the realization that so many others had done so much in the same places that I then wished to do – and that they had often done it so well – discouraged the bloody hell out of me. What, I wondered, could I hope to achieve and leave the world as a writer and artist interested in original vision and truth when so many writers, painters, musicians, and others from long and even longer before had already lived and bequeathed it?
I stopped writing for a while, although I continued to read. Eventually, I re-read Gilgamesh and some trusty Greek and Roman classics, and was revived, inspired again to create something artistic. Those early works made clear to me that what matters is the personal understanding and expression of obviously basic feelings about life. That’s it. In some fundamental sense, perhaps, originality begins and ends there, particularly in an age when technology, reproduction, and education have so uniformly affected the world’s operational practices and cultural expressions relating to emotional reaction, intellectual method, and daily experience.
In other words, don’t sweat it, Craig. There’s sameness to nearly everything now, or at least a familiarity, but a brilliant idea is equally brilliant when thought by a little-known person unaware that someone half-way around the planet thought the same thing but wrote about it in an obscure rag several years before. We’re human, connected by the fabric of the stuff that not only physically makes us similar but also by the intangible things that we just don’t bloody get.
Yet…
Very thoughtful..... As far as 'stealing ideas' goes, anyone remember William Shakespeare? Greek mythology, Shakespeare, soap operas. My friends, it's the same stuff but being redone in a different way. Live and let live - or live and let create would ya.
More power to you, Craig!
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