The Omnivorous Inspiration Edition

On creativity, dot connecting, and relevance

Noah here. In 2009, Bob Isherwood, the former Worldwide Creative Director of the famed advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi, gave a speech about creativity at an industry event called Dubai Lynx. Titled “ORE,” for originality, relevance, and emotional connection, he started with a video featuring the likes of Jimi Hendrix, steam trains, and the Guggenheim before getting into the meat of the talk: a nearly-thirty minute lecture about nanotechnology. Here’s an excerpt: 

Which leads me to the group of threads that surprised me most when it became part of the nanotechnology tapestry; the group that has its roots in biochemistry and molecular biology. But having accepted that nanotechnologies were to do with structures and phenomena that have nanometre dimensions, as indeed we suggested more than thirty years ago, I should not have been surprised. DNA molecules and proteins have dimensions of nanometres and, as molecular biologists can manipulate the molecular structure of proteins and DNA, they can surely call themselves nanotechnologists, should they wish to do so.

If that seems out of place at an advertising conference, it’s because it was. Isherwood was illustrating a point about relevance by giving a speech that had been given a year prior as part of the BBC’s Reith Lectures by physicist, engineer, and former Vice Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, Alec Nigel Broers. Not entirely surprisingly, many didn’t take kindly to Isherwood’s approach. “It seemed ‘the point’, if ever there was one, had long ago left the auditorium and gone for a leisurely coffee,” wrote Campaign Middle East after the talk. “The preceding lecture, a transcript from a senior scientist, was very good but irrelevant to this particular audience, explained Isherwood. The point being that messages must be relevant. Had it really taken us almost 45 minutes to arrive at this?”

Why is this interesting?

That review wasn’t alone. Isherwood told me recently that his wife had called him in Dubai crying after seeing all the negative feedback online. But reading over the talk and looking back on the ideas being communicated, I think there are much more interesting threads to pull.