BBDO was founded in 1928 as a merger between BDO (Barton, Durstine and Osborn) and Batten Company.

During the years of Alex Osborn’s association with BBDO, it became one of the leading advertising agencies in the United States, with a total of 52 offices throughout the world. Its annual billing increased from $1 million in 1919 to $20 million in 1939, when Osborn became executive vice-president, and to $207 million in 1957.

Osborn (b. 1888 – d. 1966) became increasingly active as an author, and published several books on creative thinking. In 1948, Your Creative Power was published, in which Osborn presented the technique of Brainstorming, which had been in use for many years at BBDO. Eventually, Osborn’s writing career overtook his work in advertising, and in 1960, after more than forty years, he resigned from BBDO’s board of directors.

In 1954, Osborn created the Creative Education Foundation, which was sustained by the royalties earned from his books. Along with Sidney Parnes, Osborn developed the Osborn-Parnes Creative Problem Solving Process (commonly referred to as CPS). He co-founded the Creative Education Foundation’s Creative Problem Solving Institute, the world’s longest-running international creativity conference, and CPS has been taught at that conference as well as year-round in other venues for more than 50 years.

Many of my Heartstorming concepts were born in creative problem solving. However, Heartstorming and CPS energize in opposite ways. Read the Heartstorming Philosophy.

Osborn lists steps that can be taken to improve creativity:

1. Break up the problem into smaller pieces
2. Search for alternatives.
3. What other uses?
4. What can be borrowed or adapted?
5. Modify with new twists.
6. What can be added or multiplied?
7. Is there something that can be magnified or minified?
8. What can be substituted?
9. What can be re-arranged?
10. Consider the vice versa.

S.C.A.M.P.E.R.

Bob Eberle took Osborn’s creative stimulators and arranged them into an acronym to encourage ideation. Let’s SCAMPER our way through developing some new thinking about the promotion of commercial photography. Feel free to comment on this post by adding to the list. Remember not to judge your ideas as you are forming them. The silliest ideas may spark something original. Come up with as many ideas as you can in a limited period of time. Have fun.

1. Substitute: What if you substituted sky writing for paper? What if you transferred an image to a flattened out piece of silly putty? Send edible photographs. Cakes?

2. Combine: What if we collected all the photography promotions that were printed but never sent and arranged them end to end? How many times might they circumnavigate the planet?

3. Adapt: Create an ASMP or APA mobile. Maybe it is an 18 wheeler. Cover the entire vehicle inside and out with photographers’ promotions. It could be something like a traveling museum of printed promotions.

4. Modify/Minimize/Maximize: Create a truly mini-portfolio. Send it out with a loupe or magnifying glass.

5. Put to Other Uses: Use old promotions for papier mache. Make a forest of papier maiche trees.

6. Eliminate: What if art directors, art buyers and the like needed to promote to photographers to ask them to please collaborate with them?

7. Rearrange: Make the world’s largest house of cards. Get mentioned in Guiness Book of Records.

share this

Photographers and other commercial artists want to market effectively. Yet many believe marketing is a necessary evil. I am a marketer. I am not evil. Some say they market just to keep their name out there. This is a passive approach. Many believe marketing is a way to avoid selling. Marketing without effective sales is often impotent; a waste of time, energy and dollars.

Thinking back at my years as an agency creative director — a business filled with marketing and sales experts and even geniuses — few agencies had marketing and sales plans for themselves, although it is the first thing agencies develop for their clients. When was the last time you saw advertising for an advertising agency? Phew! Is it possible that advertising agencies do not believe in advertising?

It would be difficult to find someone at an advertising agency called a salesperson. Yet the irony is that they succeed by increasing sales for their clients. For many agencies and commercial artists, sell is a four letter word when applied to acquiring new business. Instead, agency people who are involved in selling are called new business developers. I thought it would be interesting to define the term before we begin to turn ourselves into new business developers.

The following definitions are among the most appropriate for this context listed in the dictionary.

What’s New ?

Being an addition: added, additional, extra, fresh, further, more, other.

Something existing or appearing for the first time.

What’s Business?

The purchase or sale of goods or services in order to make a profit.

What’s Development?

The act or process of developing; growth; progress. The process of growing or evolving.

What is New Business Development?

The process of growing your profitable services by attracting and adding first time clients to your roster.

share this