Want More Ideas? Be a Curator

There’s this book written by James Webb Young, an advertising copywriter who started his career in the 1930s. It's called A Technique For Producing Ideas. A quick read, this book is full of anachronisms that remind you how very long ago it was written. But hidden in this little, old book is the secret to creativity. I’m reminded of it as I dig into my new role as Found Content Evangelist here at Catch+Release.

In this book, Mr. Young outlines five key steps to help you generate new ideas. Here are the five steps:

• Gather materials
• Digest raw materials mentally
• Unconscious processing
• The A-Ha Moment
• Ideas meet reality.

Every step is important. But I want to home in on the very first step, which I think is the most essential — gather materials. You might think this simply means “do your research”. And you’d be partly right. Fully researching your category, product or problem is table stakes. But brands live in culture. Essentially, everything around you is material for gathering. And that’s where Found Content comes in.

The best creatives gather material like beavers build dams. In other words, all the time. They are tapped into culture on another level. It’s a habit with them. They are natural born curators.

They collect great music, TikTok bakers, typography websites, articles about creativity, Snapchat filters, and bowling highlights. If it’s in culture, they're tattooing it in their brain. They know that the more inspiration they expose themselves to the better their own ideas will be.

At Catch+Release, we know a little something about curation. Our curators are curious, creative thinkers just like you who have been taught our proprietary curation methods. And they are, right this very second, gathering usable materials from all over the internet for our clients at the world’s biggest brands and agencies. The interesting thing is that our curation team doesn't expect every single shot we find to get picked up by the client. However, we know that shots can still be a proponent of the creative process. Sometimes a shot ends up playing the role of inspiring and informing us. Of course, other times, shots end up being picked up for the finished spot. My recent fav is the spot we helped Applebee’s put together for their award-winning commercial “Fancy Like”.

When Applebee’s wanted authentic TikTok dances, our curators were ready. And if you want to learn more about curation, we just wrote the book on it. It’s called The Storyteller’s Guide To Found Content and you can download the first part of it here.

To see how gathering more material helps craft better ideas, let’s look at the next step in A Technique For Producing Ideas: Digest raw materials mentally. This simply means smashing the gathered material together in new ways to find interesting combinations. This is what most advertising creatives call “concepting”. The creatives who have more inputs can make more combinations. For example, did you know that there’d be no Subservient Chicken if the creatives working on Burger King at Crispin Porter Bogusky in 2004 hadn’t been watching the late night programming block called Adult Swim on Comedy Central?

Steps 3 through 5 in the Technique are about letting go. Once you’ve made as many combinations as possible in an attempt to solve your problem or write your ad, you drop the whole thing and do something relaxing or invigorating. Like have a run or take a shower (Unconscious Processing). Your brain is still making combinations, however, which leads to a flash of genius (The A-ha Moment) which you then present to your stakeholders for feedback (Idea Meets Reality).

So if you want more ideas, curate more Found Content. Download the guide or book a 30-minute call with a curator right now to talk about how we can help you develop a Found Content strategy or finish your next project.

Happy curating!