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This is what’s amazing about almost all the good creative people I’ve ever worked with in advertising. They’re handed a flawed strategy barren of insight for a thankless client, a ridiculous, personal-life-killing deadline, and a boss who tells them that no matter how great this work will be, no matter how flawlessly the presentation goes off, there is almost no chance at all of our winning, because the client is done with us. Time and again they’re presented with situations like this, yet they throw themselves into the project with heart and soul. Sure, they will combine this with bouts of world-class bitching, a requisite period of eye rolling and cursing of the powers that be (account people, creative directors, clients, products, media buyers, and the Man), and sure they’re getting paid good money to do this, but in two decades I rarely saw it get in the way of the work, and I rarely saw work presented that a creative person did not care deeply about.

When a brainstorming session is going well, the cynic (who harps on all of the above negative realities) goes into hibernation, and the believer becomes transfixed by the rush of unadulterated energy that can only come from the soul of an original idea. It is hard to explain. You don’t have to like or believe in the product or client, but if the idea begins to make conceptual sense—creative sense—and if it has the scent of something that can be provocative and original and especially memorable, all negative feelings and distractions vanish and something else takes over.

I call it intellectual adrenaline. Yes, intellectual. With advertising there’s something about the combination of having to solve a major corporation’s strategic problem in a creative way, while a clock is ticking, the whole time knowing that others in your building and in buildings around the world are also trying to solve the same problem, with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, that is thrilling and somewhat addictive. But it’s not just the money or the ego-stroking salvation of a major corporation. Sometimes it’s equally if not more challenging and addictive when the client has little or no money and the assignment is fund-raising to restore inner-city baseball fields, or a used-record store.

I’m not so sure that it’s art. But it is creativity. And in the right environment it is contagious.

This is what happened to us that morning under the fluorescent lights at that ugly conference table. The intellectual adrenaline began to flow. The negativity of the cynic was replaced by the enthusiasm of the creative evangelist.

It’s a great time. But it is also the most dangerous time for a creative advertising person or anyone in the business of creating ideas for others. Because it is when we begin to care.

The Profound Difference Between

Caring and Believing

We broke up around lunchtime, feeling good about our ideas, our possible creative executions, and our theatrical production. After the teams went off to flesh out their assignments, I met with my producer and my director. They’d already secured the theater. They had scheduled auditions for later that afternoon. And someone from the big-screen projection company that could turn this into a truly live, multimedia event was waiting in my office.

Between meetings, auditions, and run-throughs at the theater, I walked the halls of the agency, checking in on the work in progress, encouraging, redirecting, occasionally improving upon, but more often killing executions that didn’t feel right before they went too far. If a team truly loved what I wanted to kill, I would hear them out and let their idea live for the time being, usually with the stipulation that they would need to have something else as a backup. From a creative perspective, there aren’t a lot of pluses (other than the typically larger salary and production budgets) to working at a large agency. There’s always a competition between teams and groups. There is a gauntlet of levels through which a winning idea must