How To Get Ideas [antikvár]

Preface ) or seven years I helped teach a 16-week class on advertising at the University of Southern California. The class was sponsored by the AAAA—American Association of Advertising Agencies—and was designed to give young people in advertising agencies an overview of the profession they had chosen. One teacher talked about account management. One teacher talked about media and research. And I talked about creating advertising. I talked about ads and commercials, about direct mail and outdoor advertising, about what makes good headlines and convincing body copy about the use of music and jingles and product demonstrations and testimonials, about benefits and type selection and target audiences and copy points and subheads and strategy and teasers and coupons and free-standing inserts and psychographics and on and on and on. And at the end of the first year I asked the graduates what I should have talked about but didn't. "Ideas," they said. "You told us that every ad and every commercial should start with an idea," one of them wrote, "but you never told us what an idea was or how to get one." Well. So for the next six years I tried to talk about ideas and how to get them. Not just advertising ideas. Ideas of all kinds.