Creativity Squared: Brett Brown Is Conquering Fear One Idea at a Time

I’m a culture junkie. Deeply curious and easily fascinated. I think creativity is an art that we all practice because nothing is inherently creative. It’s up to us as people to take our experiences, our passions, our eccentricities, our curiosity and use them to make new connections. That’s how I see the world. Full of experiences waiting to make some non-linear connection that introduces a new idea into existence. Weaponizing everything. That’s why it’s so important to get out of the same office, the same routines, and separate yourself from advertising. Following my curiosity led me to a lot of weird roles and opportunities. Seeing so many ways to express creativity has helped me have a truly media agnostic approach. The medium is irrelevant until there’s an idea. Writing and art directing are secondary to concepting. Once there’s an idea there, it can go anywhere. And it’s up to us to unearth those opportunities. I weaponise everything, which means everything is an opportunity.

Judging creativity is as simple as asking how it makes you feel. Does it incite some sort of emotional reaction? Does it make you laugh, get you excited, get your heart racing, make you think, make you daydream, make you care? It’s easy to overthink things. Especially with so many different requests coming at us at the same time, but ultimately, we make work that has to pierce the veil of apathy. Ignore all the nonsense, take a step back, put yourself in the shoes of whoever has to experience this thing, and ask yourself, ‘do I give a shit?’ That’s the most important thing. After that, it is the clarity, execution, craft, all the things that heighten the idea. The world has enough boring ads in it, we have an opportunity to make the world a more interesting place. It’s our responsibility to be honest with the work because we all have to deal with what we put out there.

I start with a stack of paper and a sharpie. I write down the one thing I’m trying to say on the paper. If the brief isn’t clear or has the word ‘and’ in it, I keep writing my sentence without the word ‘and’ until everyone in the room agrees this is the one thing we’re trying to say. Then I put that paper up on the wall and work against it. That’s how I approach every project from banners to Super Bowl campaigns. Then I just work through ideas. Trying to get through as many as humanly possible as fast as possible. Zero filter. Just trying to get as many of the bad ideas out of the way early on so we can land on some of the ones that we think have potential. There’s no formula here, just expressing the idea however it comes out. A line, a script, a doodle, an experience, a site — whatever works, works. 

Then you pressure test how big of an idea it is. How far you can take it, how many places you can fit the idea. The most important being whatever’s on the brief. Now you have what fancy people call a ‘transmedia campaign’ that also solves the request. At some point I’ll usually then do the ole PR writeup to take the opportunity to make sure the idea feels like something people would want to be a part of. I’ll do this for a bunch of directions so we can edit with meaning, purpose, and brutal honesty. Being as hard on the work as possible because if we aren’t, the internet will be. Or worse, nobody will care. So we narrow the directions down until there’s a few we like and ultimately pick one to blow out. From there it’s all craft. Geeking out on the details and worldbuilding around the narrative.

I grew up moving all over. Nearly every year I went to a different school. So I found myself taking in a lot of experiences, perspectives, and having to develop skills that would travel. Drawing, daydreaming, making up stories, telling jokes, all things I found myself in. This led me to love comics and animation, where art and copy aren’t exclusive tracks of storytelling. They’re just more ways to tell a story. From there I watched HBO way, way, WAY too young and loved horror movies. But what drew me to them was the props and sets. I chased down making-of interviews where they’d show how that entire reality was built. All this led to a sense of how important worldbuilding was. How to contain chaos and nonsense in a way that people wanted to dive into. A long, weird road eventually led to advertising. Short of imagineering, this is the only place where I could truly use every single thing in order to world-build around an idea. That’s what shaped me. 

On the other side of it was why I moved. A childhood defined by instability and ADHD blunted my sense of fear. And fear is what will make or break creative projects. Fear kills creativity. It makes it average. It makes it expected. Fear makes things safe. We are up against the real world here. Even if — no — especially if the idea is so stupid it has to work, you’re going to have to conquer fear and navigate a forest full of responsible people operating out of fear. But the fact is, there’s no safety in being safe. Boring brands die a quiet, uninteresting death. Even if it doesn’t always succeed, ultimately, fearlessness will always win.