Creativity Squared: A Peek inside Matt Kuttan’s Obsessively Filled Journal

Growing up in Mumbai, Dubai, London, New York and Chicago has given me the opportunity to pick up five languages and I’ve also been fortunate to have worked in a host of other international cities. So, connecting with others is truly a passion. Saatchi and Leo Burnett have sent me to Latin America and Asia to foster more cross-agency work and my extrovert nature made me always raise my hand when opportunities arose for travel and networking. One of my strengths is to go into any part of the world and hit the ground running with the understanding of cultures and relationships. 

Because I’m always the first one to meetings and take copious hand-written notes that fill volumes of books, I’ve been told numerous times that I’m OCD, which I blame on my boarding school days, where we had to be well-organised if you didn’t want to get whooped. Wasn’t it Flaubert who said, ‘Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work’? However, that drive can be tiring and there is a tendency in the industry to think that people who are methodic cannot also be very creative. I’m also a voracious in-taker of random inspiration ranging from images to words that go into my journals as you never know when and what it might trigger. Art is everywhere and I’m always surprised at the level of originality and craftsmanship I encounter. My iPhone has over 20,000 photos of things that caught my attention and for the past seven years I’ve got a continuous streak of posting exactly one photo per day (no more, no less), of things around me onto my Instagram.

My jealousy of something I wished I had done has always been my personal gauge of good creativity. One of my favourite words is ‘clever’ and most of what I generally like embodies that. At the risk of sounding like the grouchy old man on the porch, my admiration of the creative work has greatly diminished since covid, which I feel it emanates from the briefs and the mandatories themselves. Many artists and musicians are adapting to the creative restrictions that our current society is demanding, but since we answer to brands that are very risk averse, we have level-set to more mediocre, generic work. A lot of the work now is about casting quirky actors and jumping the shark. But I do see brand acts and tech-based ideas that still surprise me. Other than that, some of Apple’s and Airbnb’s well-crafted work continues to impress, and the rest of the world has helped elevate activations to an important role in a brand’s presence. 

I try my best not to start brainstorming on a laptop. A nice notebook or journal and a smooth pen makes such a difference to me. Everyone has their own process that I respect, but the common habit of starting ideation with images from Getty is not my cup of tea. One technique that keeps me from stagnation or writer’s block is where I take famous campaigns and swap out their products with what I’m shilling. It gets the grey cells going and lets me build or adapt and create a new stream of consciousness. Paul McCartney once said The Beatles would never just sit in a studio and try to write something from scratch. If they hadn’t pre-written something, they would jam on music they admired from other artists and then add their own spin to it. 

Working with millennials and gen z, the concept of thinking without thinking is really growing on me, too. Malcolm Gladwell calls it ‘thin-slicing’ and the ways we tap into our personal spontaneity and adaptive consciousness can generate a good round of ideas that we can parse through for great nuggets while eliminating useless information. Our agency PeterMayer very often organises ‘juntos’, based on Benjamin Franklin’s group thinking sessions to generate ideas and we invite various departments and include clients to them. The first rule of these sessions is to leave your ego at the door and second is not to overthink, because that is what stifles creativity. Also, continuing to craft after the genesis of an idea gets the work into greater fertile territory. Spoiler alert example: in the first few drafts of The Sixth Sense, Bruce Willis’ character wasn’t dead. That came later with further refining of the script.

I started with painting at art school, before design and music videos caught my eye and I moved to New York to study further. I switched to art direction for many years at various agencies and gradually evolved into a writer. I keep hopping between these different realms like a jack of all trades and that’s what keeps my juices flowing and partnering with those with more expertise in those fields. As I’ve moved into a leadership role over the past 10 years, I’ve come to realise that a great leader is not always the best creative, but someone who brings out the best in other creatives. Bringing someone else’s ideas to fruition brings as much joy as doing so with your own. At Leo Burnett, I loved implementing Pablo Jimenez and Kamil Kowalczyk’s ‘Literacy Store’ idea into McDonald’s and it remains one of my favourites. Preselling a terrific insight to a client has always laid the foundation for getting great work sold. That and a great relationship between account and client makes all our jobs easier. Some of the greatest ideas I’ve seen have never seen the light of day because strategy and account hadn’t built that trust to ask clients to take a leap of faith. When a client can truly feel that the agency’s all-in for them too, that’s when the magic happens.