Creativity Squared: Amani King on Finding Ideas through Conversations

Amani King is executive creative director of Avocados and Coconuts, a creative production company in San Francisco, partnering with such clients as Airbnb, Allbirds, Nike, Lyft, and Ancestry. Prior to that, he was a creative director at ad agency Eleven Inc., where he spearheaded campaigns for Apple. He previously held freelance roles at TBWA\Chiat\Day and McCann Erickson, working on projects for Adidas and Xbox among many others.

Person

I strive to be an empathic creative person. So much of human experience is struggle and suffering - and, knowing this, so much of marketing and media plays to people’s weaknesses and insecurities. Fear is the easiest lever to pull to motivate people. I try to pull that lever as little as possible. I’m interested in relationships, interactions, and shifting vantage points – I find it helpful to regularly regard things from a 100-foot altitude and consider how things are interrelated.  How can a simple shift of perspective turn a totally ordinary moment, interaction, or transaction into something entirely different, something subversive, something hysterical? How can we see our own circumstances differently when we have a moment to look at the world through someone else’s eyes?

I think creativity is mostly learned, but intuitively, and at a very early age (so it may seem innate). Boredom is underrated, especially in early childhood. Kids with constant stimulation may end up with stunted imaginations, but in the face of boredom, a soda can can become a spaceship and the living room floor can be an alien landscape. We first learn creativity by finding ways to entertain ourselves and our friends. The best creative ideas arise naturally from curiosity and engagement with the world around us. A curiosity that fuels imagination and creation. 

I think I’m an 'ambivert'. It changes with the circumstance but I love complete solitude or quietly observing other humans just as much as I love being social or leading a creative project.

Routine is great as long as it can be regularly broken. Approaching daily life as a creative practice that you’ll never fully master makes the routine more interesting and rewarding and helps me stay in the present moment, which is all there ever really is.

Product

When it comes to judging a piece of work, I ask myself, "did I feel anything?" Did I have an emotional response before I had a critical one? Did I gain any new insight? There’s plenty of work out there that’s really good at pushing buttons, giving us an extremely brief dopamine hit before it’s lost in the wake with all the other billions of blips. And much of it is “creative” and quite entertaining. But the only work that matters to me, creatively, is work that really expands my mind and changes my way of seeing. That work is pretty rare and usually not commercial.

My criteria for work has changed over the years. It’s gone from wanting to just make cool things, to wanting to make things that deeply connect. It’s gone from an obsession with surface aesthetics to caring most about the story and how it unfolds. Now the focus is on how to make a meaningful connection and then to honor the intelligence of the audience with something worthwhile.

A series of six films we did for Rapha awhile back stand out as some of my favourite work due to their production approach and the way we were able to stay true to our subjects and their stories. These were cycling profiles of specific cities, as seen through the eyes of a notable local cyclist. Very run and gun, they prove that less (in terms of production footprint) can be more when you trust your instincts, choose great subjects, and give them room to just be themselves.

Honestly, I think there is a ton of great work out there currently. It’s an exciting time to be making things because the venues have really expanded; it's not just about 30 and 60-seconds or commercials in general, anymore. At the same time, there is also a ton of crap and it can be hard to filter for the good stuff. Our attention spans have been fried as well.

Process

When starting a new campaign, my process depends on the project. For campaigns and professional work, the more collaboration, the better upfront (with the right key people). I love to find ideas through conversations. The big brain dump… there are no bad ideas in the early stages and all that. For personal creative projects, I like to work alone with a more intuitive and experimental approach until the work starts to define itself and tells me what to do.

My go-to tool is the humble notebook and pencil. Scraps from the vast internet, curated into Google Docs and Drives. Solo walks to think through ideas. I’m starting to experiment with AI-based searching as well, which may change everything in short order.

For me, the simpler, the better. Platforms that promise to streamline your creative dev workflow usually lose me once there’s a whole new set of steps that need to be followed. 

I like to start a project as a blank sheet, but I always collect references. There’s no substitute for being able to point to a specific image, sound, texture, or vibe to explain something or to consider a counterpoint to your own arguments.

Working collaboratively and alone are important to me. I love collaboration for commercial work throughout the process but I also like to work the ideas alone at different stages. For personal work, largely alone.

When it comes to the hard bits of a project, I usually interrupt the process for a short while, usually with some exercise, or thumbing through an unrelated photography book. Shutting the thinking mind down for a bit and letting the subconscious work on the project in the background before returning to the task.

Finishing should be felt intuitively. It can always hypothetically be better but can it be better with the time and resources you have left in the present moment? Most of my work involves a lot of iteration; you’re building what you set out to build but you’re also listening to what the work and the process are telling you along the way. If you become good at listening, then the work will tell you when it’s finished. It will feel right and true to itself.

Press

In my early childhood, I lived at a Tibetan Buddhist meditation center in the Vermont countryside. I was the only kid living in a big farmhouse with my parents and a bunch of adults. I think this played a formative role in having an empathic disposition, and in using my imagination and creativity to entertain myself. At the time, my dad was a jeweler and my mom was a weaver and I think that played a role, too. Creativity was presented to me as a central part of being human. 

Observation, repetition, and experimentation were my ways of honing my craft. I trusted my intuition but also tried a lot of things just to indulge curiosity. If you enjoy the creative process, then you see it, evaluate it, and learn from it in everything around you. You pay attention to how the work is constructed and received. Not just the work within your field but in other professions, in nature, in everything. As mentioned earlier, I think of it as a practice and the failures are often more useful than the successes in finding your creative chops. 

I try to pay attention to things that support a flow state where you can surf on the process rather than wrestle with it – although wrestling is sometimes inevitable. Adapting, riffing, and responding to feedback loops organically. The studio setting is important: free of any clutter that isn’t project-related; good lighting and the right music (or silence) can be super helpful to get in the right mindset. 

My advice for clients looking to get the best out of the teams and agencies they worked with is to work with people with whom you have a natural communication rapport. The best collaborative work comes from this. You will benefit from having different ideas and perspectives but you have to fundamentally speak the same creative language. Things get stronger from there if you view the relationship as one team for the duration of a given project. You all get in the same boat and row together. If the relationship is purely transactional, then the work will usually reflect this and end up flat.

When it comes to how agencies can best facilitate creativity in terms of culture and design, I suggest encouraging and supporting outside creative endeavors and passion projects. Creative minds need stimulation and variable inputs. There can be good reasons for a creative team to own a piece of business but it can also slowly kill them if they are dedicated to one thing for too long. Diversity of inputs and outputs is the healthy diet. Encourage travel, at home and abroad. It’s easier to notice novel ideas and to have a bigger sense of what the world can be by engaging with other cultures.