The Nominative Determinsm of Graham Fink's Creativity

“My name is Graham Fink. not a great name to have at school, all the kids used to take the piss out of me… But eventually I got to like my name because it stood up. I grew into my name and it grew into me.”

Creative advertising icon Graham Fink has been living with nominative determinism for his whole life - and so he distilled a lifetime of ‘Finking different’ with the audience in Margate. A perspective-jolting joyride through seven key points, as thrilling as the waltzer and rickety roller coaster outside.

Starting off with the deceptively simple advice, ‘stand out’. Sharing a supercut of earnest Covid ads from major brands, each identical in every beat by turgid bear, Graham demonstrated how little ‘standing out’ actually happens. In order to stand out and to generate ideas and work, Graham suggested that people need to ‘eat their heads’ - metaphorically, we think. Getting out of the habit of overthinking, which can kill ideas and prevent truly different things from being made. “Go with your heart, that’s where the magic is.”

In terms of unlocking that ‘heart’, Graham said the key was ‘more ideas’. He relayed the story of two hapless students who had attended his workshops but failed to impress with their books. He charged them with coming up with 100 ideas a day for made up briefs. When they returned two weeks later with 1400 ideas - one generated every four and a half minutes - Graham went through each idea and discovered multiple gems of potential, ideas the pair could barely remember coming up with. Having unlocked their flow, the pair were snapped up by BBH and are now senior creatives at Apple. 

Graham shared the story of how his passion for talent and bloody-minded persistance led to the youngest ever creative to win a Grand Prix at Cannes Lions. Upon seeing a striking graphic displayed on the front page of a newspaper the day of Steve Jobs' death, Graham rallied the power of Ogilvy, where he then worked, to contact every creative course in Hong Kong, to find the mysterious graphic design student behind the image. He met the young student and suggested they might work together at some point. A few weeks later, Graham shared a Coca-Cola brief with him - the resulting work was the iconic Coke Hands and Jonathan Mak, at 19 became the youngest Cannes Lions Grand Prix winner ever.