Toast. When creativity goes too far.
The incident in Boston this week, with those cute little Cartoon Network characters threatening national security, causes me to ask a question: when does creativity go too far?
I’m not sure this instance is a clear case of poor creative judgment around the core idea. 20/20 hindsight certainly tells us the marketing firm hired the wrong morons in Boston to execute their concept (can you hire the right morons?). In a number of other large US cities the same cartoon figures didn’t appear to cause much of a stir. In most cases it seemed more thoughtfulness was used in “product placement.”
As is the focus of this blog, I want to make a distinction between the idea and its execution. I personally think this promotion concept at its core was pretty neat, particularly for this marketer’s target. Executed differently, I believe it could have been quite effective. I suppose, in the spirit of true guerilla marketing, you can’t buy this kind of publicity. But when the execution went overboard that decent creative idea seemed to take the heat.
This whole topic of “going too far” did remind me of an exercise we used to do at my creative camps which we called “toast.” The drill was designed to illustrate exactly what happened here, the consequences of creativity gone bad.
I would always conduct my “toast” exercise on the first day of 3-day Creative Camp. I’d hand out a worksheet to each camper with a dozen images of toast printed lightly across the page (see worksheet below). The instructions told the participants they’d run out of butter and now needed to find a dozen other ways to prepare toast. They were given a box of crayons and one rule - you can’t put the same ingredient on any two toasts.
When worksheets were collected, unknown to the campers, I’d sit down with the cook at whatever venue we held the camp, and together we decided which of the drawings on each sheet had gone too far from an appetizing or even all out edibility standpoint. The cook would then prepare breakfast on day three, including a piece of toast for each individual prepared in the fashion that camper had created, the execution that had gone overboard.
I recall one piece of toast with melted M&M’s. Yum. Another one I remember had bacon and honey. Yuk! But the example that best illustrated the point of this exercise, “watch what you create, because you may just have to eat it,” was the road kill toast.
It’s even more memorable in how the cook, in this case Annie Hasset, solved the road kill-on-toast dilemma. She bought a piece of luncheon meat, probably pretty close to the composition of your average road kill anyway, and using an Exacto knife, cut the meat of questionable makeup into the shape of a kitty cat. I recall she even used sprouts to represent whiskers. Then to finish off her road kill masterpiece, Annie squirted ketchup all over the inanimate little feline, giving it that fresh kill effect. Double yuk!!
The road kill toast creator, like all campers, was then forced to eat the object of her imagination gone wild.
I’m happy to report no bomb squads were called in and no arrests were made.
One of the funniest things about this incident is that Annie - you remember Annie the cook? - well our Annie was a vegetarian, so to her, this innocent little piece of luncheon meat might just as well have been a nasty road kill.
Teachers, parents, camp counselors; if you have any interest in using the “toast” exercise just download the worksheet below and have a ball. I’d love to see some of the most creative solutions, even if you don’t turn them into edible art.
Note: like the guitar case, “color inside the lines” exercise I wrote about last month, which some of this blog’s readers actually chose to participate in, we also saw a distinct pattern re distinctiveness. Clearly the early executions were right off the surface of the cliché strata; peanut butter, mayonnaise, even mashed banana showed up in great duplication, as I recall. But in the later executions, when people pushed beyond the obvious (using the law of large numbers, as I discussed in my pervious post) that’s when we saw the more unique subjects. And that’s where, in almost all cases, the campers went so far out to be considered “too far.” (Now, don’t think all of my exercises involve coloring images on worksheets like the guitar case and the toast. Really, these exercises are more the exception.)
For creative exploration, I actually do advocate going out too far, pushing the envelope, as it were, especially for group brainstorming sessions. Not that I always expect the far out ideas to make the cut. I just like to make sure we’re playing close enough to the edge, so we’re less likely to find ideas that can be easily discovered by our competition, and we have ideas that can help us maintain our differentiation, whatever the competitive landscape we might be on.
In the cases stated above, the Cartoon Network stunt and the toast exercise, there are consequences to going too far. In the world of creativity in business, I like to find the line during the creative process, not after the idea has been executed, when it’s too late and the damages as been done.
Toast worksheet (click image to download)
