Creatives are paid fortunes to think laterally, to come up with a word or an image that no one else has thought of. But now we have the most amazing lateral thinking resource at our fingertips – the internet.
You have dictionaries and thesauruses to help you with words. There are directories of English idioms and expressions which are particularly helpful with advertising copy. But, my personal favourite internet aid to lateral thinking is image searching.
Illustrating abstract notions is one of the most creative and fun things. Try putting an abstract term that complies with your brief (like, empty; separation; togetherness; contrast; love; big; help) into a stock photography site’s search engine and see if it gives you any ideas. Don’t forget normal search engine’s images searches like Google or Yahoo! They are getting better and better and give you a different option to the staid stock image.
Computers don’t have the associations with words that we do. They just dispassionately match the word we type in. Think of all the times you’ve had a search fail. It’s these “failures” that can spark an un-thought-of angle that could really make a campaign.
