CLOSE-UP: ON THE CAMPAIGN COUCH ... WITH JB.

Q: A friend who produces big-budget films tells me it is extremely difficult to sell a truly original idea to a studio. He says they like to have reference points and prefer an idea that is already 'out there', such as a book or true-life story. Because a lot of advertising campaigns imitate existing visual treatments (pop videos) or other art in so many ways and are therefore easier to sell - are we in danger of always following rather than leading?

A: There are two points I would like to make about truly original ideas.

The first point is that they don't exist and the second point is that the closer an idea gets to true originality, the more likely it is to be a turkey.

In The Act of Creation (1964), Arthur Koestler took 700 pages to explain that new ideas are the result of the collision of two existing ideas - what he calls bisociation. (How the first ever two ideas came into being remains a puzzle of Adam and Eve inscrutability.) I challenge you to have an idea that has absolutely no discernible parentage. A virgin birth is as improbable for an idea as it is for an infant. It follows that any idea claiming orphanage - owing nothing to its antecedents because it has none - is certainly lying and probably a turkey. Big clients and big studios are right to view it with extreme caution.

The traditional 'meets' movie pitch is a perfect example of bisociation: Hedda Gabler meets The Simpsons, for example. The offspring will be different from anything that has gone before while owing everything to its origins.

I hope that's clear.

Advertising's failure is not that it copies ideas but that it copies techniques; and a technique is no more an idea than Times Roman is a newspaper. A great advertising idea attracts admiration not to itself but to its subject.