CREATIVE MISCHIEF

 

 

When I was young, the comic for working class kids was the Beano.

It came out every week and cost about 6d (roughly 20p today).

Far-and-away the most popular characters were: Dennis the Menace, The Bash Street Kids, Minnie the Minx, and Roger the Dodger.

These were the funniest because they were the naughtiest.

Dennis was a total scruff and had a dog that was even scruffier called Gnasher.

Dennis’s main purpose in life was to play pranks on Softy Walter, who was always spotlessly clean, a complete swot, and the teacher’s pet.

The Bash Street Kids were similarly naughty, but their target was always the teacher.

Each week they’d find a way to humiliate him, cheat on exams, and avoid schoolwork.

Minnie the Minx was a tomboy, always in trouble for doing naughty things even boys were scared to do.

Roger the Dodger’s main purpose each week was, as his name suggests, finding clever ways to dodge anything requiring effort.

What all these characters had in common was they were all naughty, but in ways that were also creative and fun.

Each week they’d find different ways to get into-and-out-of trouble, to steal someone else’s sweets, or skip detention, or break some other rules.

So, growing up, these became our role models: naughty, creative, and fun.

Of course, the naughtiness wasn’t wicked, it was cheeky, and it usually ended up with Dennis, or Minnie, or Roger getting punished anyway.

But all the fun was in breaking the rules.

Only characters like Softy Walter (who looked like Jacob Reese-Mogg) did what they were told, they were teacher’s pet, and led smug, boring lives.

I think that’s why, for my generation, creativity included a large element of naughtiness.

We grew up with naughtiness, and cheekiness, closely associated with fun.

Following the rules was dull.

So naturally, when we grew up, we wanted to do exciting, rule-breaking advertising and the approval of people in authority wasn’t important, quite the opposite.

The excitement of doing great work came way before security and obedience.

As Paul Arden would later say: “I simply didn’t have the diplomacy to be safe and steady. I can’t explain it. I just got into trouble all the time. That’s why I was fired so often. I was fired five times.”

The excitement and fun was what drove us and our work, not following orders.

As Steve Jobs said “Why would you want to join the navy when you could be a pirate?”

To Jobs it was obviously more fun to break the rules than just follow them.

His co-founder at Apple, Steve Wozniak, said a similar thing: “Misbehaviour is very strongly correlated with and responsible for creative thought.”

If you don’t overstep the boundaries how can you progress?

As one of my advertising heroes, Ed McCabe, said “Any ad that doesn’t cause a ruckus is a lousy ad. I’m constantly in trouble and I think that’s proof of my worth.”

Or, as George Lois said “In the act of creativity, being careful guarantees sameness and mediocrity, which means your work will be invisible.”

Creativity thrives on breaking rules; if all you ever do is obey the rules they can get a machine to do your job, hence the rise of AI.

That’s why one of the things I was proudest of was starting ‘The D&AD Advertising Rejects Course’.

We took people who had been rejected by the main D&AD Students Course, as not being good enough, and we trained them ourselves.

And it worked very well, the ‘rejects’ got more jobs than the people on the main course.

In fact, the second year we ran the course, we had people pretending to be rejects who’d actually been accepted on the main course.

But they pretended to be rejects because our course was more successful.

Many of those rejects ended up as creative directors, but they wouldn’t have been in the ad-business at all if we’d listened to the established authorities, who said they weren’t good enough to be in advertising.

There are many instances like that where the fun is in breaking the rules and questioning conventional thinking, because that’s where the energy is.

It only looks like ‘mischief’ to people who are frightened to challenge the status quo or go against established authority

Because another name for this sort of mischief is creativity.