ALLEN GANNETT: How to be more creative: Creative Curve #066

Allen Gannet is the founder and CEO of Trackmaven, a company that works with large brands to help them uncover the meaning, revealed by patterns, in their marketing data. In working with major brands like Microsoft, Marriott, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Home Depot, Gannett noticed a significant pattern: most marketers, event well-known ones, weren’t hitting their goals. While their ad campaigns demonstrated creative thinking, their commercial success often fell short. He asked himself, could there be a method to combining creative and commercial success?

FREE Creative video shared on the show:  https://angusnelson.com/creativity (angusnelson.com/creativity)

In This Episode, You’ll Discover:

What is the method of creative greats

The power of structure

Why education has actually stifled our creativity

The FOUR Laws to creativity

How “Creative Genius” is a social phenomenon

The importance of timing

Campus Network vs. Facebook

How so many of the greats are copycats

and much more!

Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
 

Go and BUY your copy now:
https://amzn.to/2QYtaiF (The Creative Curve: How to develop the right idea at the right time)

 

NEED A SPEAKER AT YOUR EVENT? 
https://angusnelson.com/speaking/ ()

Topics include:

•Honing Your Humanity with New marketing strategies to create brand influence

• Influence Building: Growing your confidence, career, and income

•Future of Work: Managing Millennials

https://docs.google.com/a/angusnelson.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdqnJ82O4wLSaDXaumEKC5mMvXAKwUZwZ4VFhU7if5siFIZeg/viewform?c=0&w=1 (CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION )

Thanks for Listening!
Thanks so much for joining me again this week. Have some feedback you’d like to share? Leave a note in the comment section below!

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see on the left or bottom of this post.

Also, http://getpodcast.reviews/id/1040543696 (please leave an honest review for the Up In Your Business podcast on iTunes)! Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated! They do matter in the rankings of the show, and I read each and every one of them.

If you have any questions, please shoot me a note on the “https://angusnelson.com/contact/ (Get In Touch)” page.

Join our https://www.facebook.com/groups/573410096144520/ (Private Facebook Group community).

And finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on iTunes to get automatic updates.

Thank you for joining me, until next time!

Transcription:
Have you ever found yourself waiting for a great idea to HIT you?

Ever gotten STUCK because you felt you just didn’t have just the PERFECT idea or plan?

You’ve likely found yourself struggling to muster a creative concept in your life, thinking you’re not like Jobs, Musk, Warhol, Mozart, or Rhianna… as such, you may have, as a result, thought less of yourself – disqualifying yourself from forward progress and the next step towards this thing in your head defined as “success”.

What if I told you it simply isn’t true?

What if you actually have the capacity for great ideas? What if you are capable of conceptualizing that THING you so desperately want to dream up?!

Today, I want to help connect you to your inner creative, base on the book “Creative Curve – how to create the right idea and the right time”… and at the end of this show, you’ll get an exclusive link to download a very special video by our guest. He recorded a brief tutorial just for this audience about how to jumpstart your creative process. So stay through to the end to get that link!

Earlier this year, I was speaking at an MGM Resorts event in Las Vegas and met Allen Gannett. Coincidently, one of his PR people had sent me an early copy of his book, The Creative Curve, and like the great networking that I am – knowing that Allen was going to be there, I had already begun reading it… so, of...

Allen Gannet is the founder and CEO of Trackmaven, a company that works with large brands to help them uncover the meaning, revealed by patterns, in their marketing data. In working with major brands like Microsoft, Marriott, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Home Depot, Gannett noticed a significant pattern: most marketers, event well-known ones, weren’t hitting their goals. While their ad campaigns demonstrated creative thinking, their commercial success often fell short. He asked himself, could there be a method to combining creative and commercial success?

FREE Creative video shared on the show:  angusnelson.com/creativity

In This Episode, You’ll Discover:

What is the method of creative greats
The power of structure
Why education has actually stifled our creativity
The FOUR Laws to creativity
How “Creative Genius” is a social phenomenon
The importance of timing
Campus Network vs. Facebook
How so many of the greats are copycats
and much more!

Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

 

Go and BUY your copy now:

The Creative Curve: How to develop the right idea at the right time

 

NEED A SPEAKER AT YOUR EVENT? 

Topics include:

•Honing Your Humanity with New marketing strategies to create brand influence

• Influence Building: Growing your confidence, career, and income

•Future of Work: Managing Millennials

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION 

Thanks for Listening!

Thanks so much for joining me again this week. Have some feedback you’d like to share? Leave a note in the comment section below!

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see on the left or bottom of this post.

Also, please leave an honest review for the Up In Your Business podcast on iTunes! Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated! They do matter in the rankings of the show, and I read each and every one of them.

If you have any questions, please shoot me a note on the “Get In Touch” page.

Join our Private Facebook Group community.

And finally, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on iTunes to get automatic updates.

Thank you for joining me, until next time!

Transcription:

Have you ever found yourself waiting for a great idea to HIT you?

Ever gotten STUCK because you felt you just didn’t have just the PERFECT idea or plan?

You’ve likely found yourself struggling to muster a creative concept in your life, thinking you’re not like Jobs, Musk, Warhol, Mozart, or Rhianna… as such, you may have, as a result, thought less of yourself – disqualifying yourself from forward progress and the next step towards this thing in your head defined as “success”.

What if I told you it simply isn’t true?

What if you actually have the capacity for great ideas? What if you are capable of conceptualizing that THING you so desperately want to dream up?!

Today, I want to help connect you to your inner creative, base on the book “Creative Curve – how to create the right idea and the right time”… and at the end of this show, you’ll get an exclusive link to download a very special video by our guest. He recorded a brief tutorial just for this audience about how to jumpstart your creative process. So stay through to the end to get that link!

Earlier this year, I was speaking at an MGM Resorts event in Las Vegas and met Allen Gannett. Coincidently, one of his PR people had sent me an early copy of his book, The Creative Curve, and like the great networking that I am – knowing that Allen was going to be there, I had already begun reading it… so, of course, we already had stuff to talk about.

Later, after I had devoured his book, Allen and I jumped on a call and discuss. And, in my focus to make sure his side of the conversation sounded great, my microphone sounded horrible… so we’re going to do this show a little differently. More of a journalistic style if you will…

Allen Gannett is the founder and CEO of Trackmaven, a company that works with large brands to help them uncover the meaning, revealed by patterns, within their marketing data. In working with major brands like Microsoft, Marriott, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Home Depot, Gannett noticed a significant pattern: most marketers, event well known ones, weren’t hitting their goals. While their ad campaigns demonstrated creative thinking, their commercial success often fell short. He asked himself, could there be a method to combining creative and commercial success?

Allen Gannett:  Yeah. So my day job is I work with marketers and so I run a company that is a big inquiry behind them. So we have our own analytics platform, we do consulting. And so we spent all our time trying to apply science to art. And in doing this I was talking to all these marketers and marketers who are supposed to be the most creative people in business I found were over and over again. Like, oh, like I wasn’t born creative. Like that’s not me. I can’t do that. Like, you know, if I want to be creative, I have to hire an agency. And I was hearing all of this like I can’t, which drives me sort of batty and so I started researching more and more about creativity and getting really interested in the topic because I was trying to tell marketers the story of like, you actually can become more creative.

And isn’t that the way most of us think? I’m not like this person, I’m not like that person…

Allen Gannett:  And so I started giving a talk about how creative genius is actually if you look at any of the science is really a nurture thing, not a nature thing. And I was applying it specifically to marketers and the talk was going really well. People really motivated by it and it sort of over time I realized that this is not just a problem for marketers, but it’s craters of any field, right? You think about the people who are daydreaming about being great chefs are musicians and they’re like, Whoa, is me. I’m not, you know, a Michelin Star Chef. I’m not Mozart. I’m not, you know, Santana, I don’t have these amazing talents that just oozing out of me. But we actually read the stories of creative genius. You want to talk to these people. They’ll tell you over and over again. That’s not how it actually works, but for some reason we’re not willing to believe it. And so this book was all about trying to convince people with a lot of, you know, science and data and, you know, firsthand interviews and no, no, no. Like, you actually can learn this stuff.

If you and I are always disqualifying ourselves, focusing on what we aren’t, what we can’t, or how we’ll never… our future becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy… never actually realizing our full potential and impact on the people and career around us.

Yet, when we were children… we saw the world as an endless sea of possibilities.

Allen Gannett:  So, uh, there’s this amazing quote. I think it’s attributed to different people at different times, but I think, you know, whoever acts to Saturday night, I think it will open, as you know, this famous creative executive went to a kindergarten class and he asked me the kindergarten class to raise your hand if you’re creative. Everyone’s hands went up. He went to a sixth grade class, ask them question. Half the hands went up, you went to a high school senior class and you’ll quarter of the hands went up, you went to college class. No hands went up. And this is sort of the notion of, I think when we’re little, all of us realize our own innate creative potential and we sort of go through the system of life and education and sort of beat out of us really violently. And so, you know, my, I was,

I love Allen’s choice of words – Violently… yet, that’s how we begin to believe that we are not as awesome as those around us. We compare ourselves to others. We doubt ourselves and our abilities. We actually sabotage ourselves from being “creative”.

 

What if, instead, we understood that almost all of the greats had some similarities to their creative genius? First, they had a method…

Allen Gannett: 11:17 Yeah. So the thing is, when you look at any great creative, so take a musician, take a playwright over and over again, you find that the highest performers actually have the most structure. So I give an example in the book of

 

There actually is a methodology to creating new ideas and innovation. And later, you’ll learn it’s a lot easier than your think. You see, we are way to focused on the outcome and not nearly cognitive of the actually process of how anything actually comes about.

 

I spent a day with the Ben and Jerry’s flavor team and their process for creating flavors is incredibly data driven. It’s incredibly methodical. Every year they come up with 200 flavor ideas and then they test those with the audience of 750,000 people via survey and they asked questions. The two questions are, how long are you to buy this flavor and how unique is it? Because the thing is I about the book is that great ideas are both familiar and novel and so if Ben and Jerry’s just ask people what are they most likely to buy that all they’d ever have is cookie and Brownie caramel flavors, right?

 

Allen Gannett:  And what they need is they need ideas that are both commercially viable but also unique. So it actually pushes the brand forward. So it’s actually innovative and there’s a really fine balance there. And the issue is that when you’re just free associating and brainstorming, there’s no process, right? You’re shooting in the wind, there’s infinite possibilities. You’re not learning, you’re not building knowledge upon each other, which is not how the great creatives actually work. I talked about in the book, there’s a sort of mafia, a pop song, writers all focused around Max Martin, who’s a Swedish hit doctor, you know, he’s written tons of number one singles. He’s written, um, Taylor swift, reasonability run most number one singles, a lot of the Katy Perry hits and he’s taught all these people his way of writing music and they’re all become wildly successful because they build upon each other. They have a structure. They’re not just free associating. They have some money to build upon that. They know that works. Then they can in turn bring their new ideas and innovations back to the group and really create this sort of dynamic where there’s a community of these amazing songwriters. And so that’s radically different than sitting in a conference room with a whiteboard just saying. What ideas do we have?

 

For me, I moved to Nashville to get around other creative individuals – those who were doing some of the same things I wanted to do. Allen describes this as one of the LAWS – it’s Creative Communities where the power of these creative peers create clusters, patterns, and collaboration.

I tend to like being the dumbest, poorest guy in the room because I want to be around others that inspire, challenge, and motivate me.

Another one of these LAWS is Consumption – the act of exposing yourself to a large degree of content around your area of focus. As our brain is processing all of the available content, it discerns patterns and concepts along the way.

 

Allen Gannett:  Well, so what you’re saying, I mean, and some of those buzzwords. I think the way that I’d say to really simplify a lot of this is that a lot of the things that we. When we think of the sort of Western model of creativity, which is this sort of like aha moments, creative genius oriented model is really based around that. There’s these mystical moments, but when you actually look at the science of these mystical moments and scientists have studied this, they, the scientific term is sudden insight. Scientists have studied this. It’s not actually mystical, it’s just different register. It’s just unique and what happens is this type of processing, it all happens in our right brain is much more subtle. It’s much more metaphorical. It’s like the shy kid at the playground is thinking of ideas and like only when things get quiet or only when an idea is really great does actually pop into consciousness.

Allen Gannett:  And so in order to have those great ideas that your right hemisphere can process, you have to have all the inputs. You have to have the ingredients, you have to have the fuel. So if you haven’t consumed lots of music, it can be one. Lots of books. If you want to be a writer, you’re a right hemisphere is not going to be able to connect those dots. So of course you know, you  don’t wake up with great melodies in your head like Paul Mccartney did with the creation of the song yesterday because you haven’t spent, you know, literally 10 years as a kid in a musical family surrounded by music and then went and worked in a cover band where you’re constantly hearing all this music all the time. Right? And that’s actually not surprising. And so I think that for me is one of those things where when you look at how our brain works, these things that seem magical are actually just biology.

 

And there’s a strong correlation to these inputs that causes us to sub-consciously connect to the things we’ve already known… and it’s that familiarity that hooks us into believing this is something that we like!

 

Allen Gannett:  Totally. Yeah. So I talked about in the book, but basically they did this amazing study where this professor Greg Burns took these students and put them in an Mri machine and had them listen to music. And then these were all songs by unknown artists. They weren’t hits and he had them say which songs they liked and didn’t like. And what he found at the time when he first did it was that there was no relationship between the songs that they said they liked and how their brain activated. There’s no patterns. Fast forward five years and he said the same data and he looked at which of those songs have become a hit. And what he found was that there was a correlation between the songs that became a hit and the one that activates certain parts of the brain. And so what that tells us is, even though we’re not actually conscious of it, there are certain underlying things that are brain picks up on it, our brain likes and those formulas, those structures. If you can tap into those, that’s incredibly powerful.

 

So what a number of greats actually did was to copy the systems that they observed around them. The IMITATED the forms and structures of songs or stories…

 

Allen Gannett:  Yeah, that’s good. So when I talk about in the book is that, you know, you have to consume lots of content, but it’s actually not just about consumption. Because in order to go to the next level, which is actually a little structure, own ideas, you have to actually have what I call interactive imitation, which is that I interviewed, for example, Andrew Ross Sorkin, who’s the guy who cowrote billions. He has deal book on New York Times wrote too big to fail. Like just like sort of a wonder kid. And he talks about how he learned how to write as a journalist is he would go to the New York Times Archive. He was a 22 year old New York Times writer, had this dream job who go to the archive. He would find front page stories from the business section and he would actually go and he would actually write out what was the outline, what was the structure of the story, you to start with a quote and start with a metaphor, how did this work?

And then he would take his own stories and fit it within the structure that he knew worked. And by having this process, he learn what’s the great structure of stories. And that’s really important. That’s a trend you see over and over again is that these creative grades go through some period of intense imitation where they’re constantly imitating or to learn these structures that will resonate.