Creativity Squared: Sneaking Up on Ideas with Gabriel Lichstein

Gabriel Lichstein is a copywriter at RPA who works on Honda, ARCO SW, Marathon, and PBS Kids accounts, as well as new-business pitches. Before entering the agency world, Gabriel was an in-demand treatment writer, writing more than 150 pitches a year for commercial directors in North America and Europe. As a screenwriter, he and his partner developed a film based on his life story for Academy Award winner Mark Johnson (Breaking Bad, Rain Man) and a talking animal movie with Academy Award winner Al Ruddy (The Godfather, Million Dollar Baby). Gabriel’s short films have been exhibited in festivals in Los Angeles, New York, Memphis, Baltimore, Montreal, Clermont–Ferrand, France, and São Paulo, Brazil, among others, and are part of the collections of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Arizona State Museum of Art. In 2022, he wrote a symphony about the Chicxulub impactor, the asteroid impact that led to the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. There are a lot of glockenspiels in it.

Person

I’m a curious person. I love reading. I love looking at art. I love watching things. I talk to everyone about everything, all of the time. A lot of that talking is asking questions. I wish I knew more about big philosophical ideas. I wish I could sing. I wish I could play the drums. I wish I could remember jokes. I think I am a great dancer, but I cannot say everyone agrees.   

I went to film school, which was a very hands-on experience. It gave me a lot of confidence about diving in and making things. When I open a new program, I usually start clicking the buttons to see what happens, and then once I have made a mess of things, I watch some YouTube videos to figure how to do things somewhat right. I learned enough Ableton to write a symphony this year, which was a really fun and frustrating experience that let me use a part of my brain not connected to reading and writing. 

I think, as a creative person, it’s also important to look hard at the things you like and try to figure out why you like them. Dissecting something or discussing it or thinking deeply about it doesn’t take the magic away from it. It just makes you love and appreciate it more (or if you don’t love it, understand why you don’t). A really good TikTok is good for a reason. Watch it 20 times and really try to figure out what is so good about it. If you love a song, put it on repeat. Listen just for the bass or the drums or the structure of the lyrics and you will hear all kinds of new things you may have missed before. You will love it even more because you will know what you love about it and maybe you can take something and use it for yourself one day. 

Product 

I don’t have a traditional advertising background, so I came into the job thinking, “What is a cool thing we can do?” and came up with a lot of semi-cool ideas that didn’t have much to do with the brand and have been relegated to a folder called “semi-cool ideas that don’t have much to do with the brand.” As I’ve had a bit more experience, I have come to admire clarity and cohesiveness -, some sort of unbreakable throughline in a project. Even things that seem kind of awesomely random usually have some clever connection to the brand and work so well because, under the surface, there is something very smart there, some kind of insightful armature that holds everything together. 

Not everything is for everyone, and I try to expose myself to all kinds of things, both popular and more esoteric. Generally, I like things that are a bit playful. I love the Burberry film with the flying and the Apple film with FKA Twigs. Also, the Big Red Boots. I also love genuine emotion. I just finished working on the latest iteration of Honda’s Project Courage. The engineers who build the Honda race cars built an electric ride-on vehicle that kids can drive when they are in the hospital. Honda dealers across the country are bringing the vehicle, called the Honda Shogo, to their local hospitals through their generosity. We made a film about the project, directed by Sarah & Jeremy. Everyone involved, from the engineers and the doctors to the Honda dealers, had a profound emotional experience. It is something I will never forget. 

Process

I’ve been lucky to have exceptional creative partners both in school and at RPA. 

My partner at RPA is art director extraordinaire Eden Han. Usually, when we are starting work on a project, we touch base to see if we understand the brief in the same way, and then we go off on our own to do some thinking and see how many ideas or fragments of ideas we can come up with. I walk, and think when I’m walking. Work makes me incredibly hungry, so I eat a lot. I am a collector of images and ideas, and I look at the ideas folder on my desktop for inspiration before I start something new or when I am feeling a little stuck.

Also, if there is something from a different project that we loved but it didn’t quite fit for that one but would be perfect here, then we’ll see if it will fit. I do a lot of free association.  The process is always a little different, depending on how much time we have and what the creative constraints are. I think it’s fine to work backwards from an execution towards a concept if the final concept makes sense and isn’t just an excuse for the cool execution. Ideas have to work in a clear, linear way, but they don’t have to be created that way. 

Sometimes you have to sneak up on the idea a bit and not look right at it and leap on top of it before it gets away, so I don’t press too hard at the beginning. I always think of myself as a detective investigating myself. I do a lot of work when I am falling asleep or waking up and that usually leads to me sending myself emails in the middle of the night. In the morning I wake up to four or five cryptic emails that I have sent the night before. Sometimes there will be an email from 2:39 a.m. that says, “PIZZA INOCULATION!!!” and sometimes there will be something a bit more useful that will jog a memory and lead to an idea. I am a super-slow typist, so I type a few words in caps to remind myself and then fill in the details later. 

Then, Eden and I get together in person, and drink vanilla iced coffees, to see what we have that overlaps and how things can be combined and added to and which ideas are actually good, and which take 25 minutes to explain, which means they are probably not so good. Then we try to find the essence of the ideas and then build out from there. We talk to strategy and account because they always have smart things to say and their own perspectives. Once we have a few things we like, we see if we can beat those ideas. And then we see if we can beat those ideas. And then we run out of time. 

Press

In 1971, John Baldessari wrote over and over, “I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art.” 

I believe that interesting, creative advertising works better than boring ads. I think doing boring work is a much greater risk for a company than doing creative work that may miss the mark now and then. I am not the first person to think or say this. I think we all believe this, and we just have to remind ourselves sometimes.

You can do good work without being a genius. You can do good work without working 70 hours a week. You can do good work even if you have a bad haircut, bad teeth, the wrong accent, cheap clothes, old shoes, if you didn’t go to the right school, if you’re too young or too old, if you have no money. You can do good work if you don’t live in a big city or work at a big agency. You can do good work without a big budget. The big thing is you have to want to do good work, and everyone involved also has to want to do good work. It is not naïve to think that if you have that starting point, maybe you can make something great, or, at the very least, interesting.  

I think it is important to practice being creative. Be honest with yourself about your ideas. Be kind to yourself. Try, and fail, and try again, and fail again. 'Fail better,' as Mr. Beckett said.