Before we start anything creatively, we have a firm understanding of our objective and our frame of mind for the campaign. Who's our audience, and what's their day-to-day behavior? How can we complement those behaviors? How is our message more than an interruption? Why would people care about what we're saying?
Interpretation
Understanding your audience and objectives is vital for effective communication in creative endeavors.
This quote emphasizes the importance of having a clear objective and understanding the audience's daily behaviors before embarking on any creative project. David Droga highlights that successful communication should resonate with the audience and not merely serve as an interruption in their day, urging creatives to consider the needs and interests of their target demographic for impactful messaging.
In practice
In a marketing meeting, when discussing strategies for a new product launch.
Long before social media existed, the proto-tweets of advertising had penetrated American popular culture: 'A mind is a terrible thing to waste.' 'Where's the beef?' 'A diamond is forever.' 'Think different.' You'd be hard pressed to find a writer's craft that has more directly influenced the vernacular.
A lot of people ask what it takes to move from being a creative to a leader: Take everyone's career personally. People will work hard for you if you work hard for them. Any idiot can be a boss; all you need is a title. But to be a leader, you need to earn respect and have an opinion you stand by.
I think young people are the most creative and the coolest - people that we should be learning from. Even when I'm at a party, I'm analyzing it and thinking about it in the context of how I would write about it. That side of me never switches off.
Bring together things that have as yet never been brought together and did not seem predisposed to be so.
The enemy of creativity... is fear. We're all born creative, it takes a little while to become afraid. A surprising insight: an enemy of fear is creativity. Acting in a creative way generates action, and action persuades the fear to lighten up.
Everything you've ever read of mine is first-draft. This is one of the peculiarities of the comics field. By the time you're working on chapter three of your masterwork, chapter one is already in print. You can't go back and suddenly decide to make this character a woman, or have this one fall out of a window.
Usually when I start a new project there's a fear of the unknown; maybe it's a band I've never been in the studio with before. People are so different. It's almost like you need to go through the process, discover and unlock what it is that makes that band that band. And a lot of times they don't know it.
(Talking about his first computer) Like all kids we not only fooled around with our toys, we changed them. If you've ever watched a child with a cardboard carton and a box of crayons create a spaceship with cool control panels, or listened to their improvised rules, such as "Red cars can jump all others," then you know that this impulse to make a toy do more is at the heart of innovative childhood play. It is also the essence of creativity.
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