RE: UKNM: RE: Creativity

[David Hughes]

What about the sequence of ideas?  Some say that there are no new

ideas...combining any number of old ones with new technology or new cultural

paradigms creates some value innovation.  My favourite example is "Its a

good thing the wheel was invented BEFORE the internal combustion engine

because the scraping noise would have been unbearable".


Dragging this thread back to New Media stuff, we see countless examples of

where some tried-and-tested off-line marketing techniques work significantly

better when executed on-line.  The internet and Direct Marketing were made

for each other and their combined power is a great example of a (business)

philosophy and new technology bringing synergistic innovation.


A bad example is where technology is "a solution looking for a problem",

providing little incremental gain for the consumer.  Eddie Shah's wobbly,

grainy colour pictures in Today newspaper came at a time when the technology

was available but unreliable and the consumer didn't really want/need the

luxury of news stories in colour...indeed, there are very few news stories

which really benefit from an obligatory colour picture.


Relating all that to Boo.com and other "over-designed" sites we all love to

hate, maybe the GOOD people in new media earn their corn by evaluating the

best (old?) creative solutions to apply to a client requirement and apply

the most appropriate technology to deliver it. With my e-mail marketing hat

on, too many people seem eager to rush into HTML/streaming media formats

when we have all barely scratched the surface of text e-mails.  If you want

to speak to the widest possible audience in a format which can be opened and

responded to by all, stay with text; you ain't gonna win many New Media

awards if you design in 10 point courier but you may give your e-mail the

best chance for a good response. Dull, but true.


David Hughes

Group Account Director

E-Mail Vision UK Limited

dhughesemailvision [dot] com

-----Original Message-----

From:

ownerchinwag [dot] com

 [

ownerchinwag [dot] com]On">mailto:ownerchinwag [dot] com]On

 Behalf Of Ashley

Pomeroy

Sent: 12 January 2001 13:50

To:

uk-netmarketingchinwag [dot] com

Subject: Re: UKNM: RE: Creativity



>>>>in fact it's very difficult to think that two people come up with the

same creative thought at exactly the same time.<<<<


As a side-issue there's something that Charles Fort (early 20th-century

chronicler of the strange) called 'steam-engine-time' - the odd habit that

ideas have of striking lots of people at a certain time, as if they only

allowed themselves to be thought when they were good and ready.

When something new is on the verge of breaking, it always seems to be

championed by lots of people at the same time; radio, television, steam

engines, cars and aeroplanes were all invented, often independently, by

different teams of people simultaneously.


The occasional flash of lightning would be something like penecillin, or

the observation that things must fall to earth for a reason - so perhaps

there are two kinds of ideas, those that are constantly evolving, and

those that just pop into being from nowhere.


Here's something interesting, too:

http://www.fanac.org/fanzines/IGOTS/fillo157.jpg

It's a picture from a book called 'Can it be Done?' by somebody called Ray

Gross from 1933.


-

"In the land of the blind, the blindest man is king"

Ashley Pomeroy -

arpslab [dot] org

 - http://www.ashleypomeroy.com/



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