Creative has always come first around here. The constant development of concepts is part of our culture. In fact, we even get ideas about ideas. That’s what happened a couple of decades ago when our creatives were hanging out creating things. They started thinking about all the places ideas tend to come from and their destinations.
They classified them and began to define the terms. Another thing we like to do around here is have a little fun, so these weren’t textbook definitions. They attached humorous descriptions to each. It was pretty funny. But, what were they going to do with all this comedic gold?
Enter Idea Guy, a stick character born to illustrate the common consequences of these ideation situations. Confusion, regret and frustration were common themes of these scenes. Idea Guy became an ABC mascot of sorts when we began incorporating him into agency marketing materials.
Then he just kind of disappeared. Since we’re always churning, we came up with other ideas to promote ourselves and he faded from our creative conscience. But, damn, that was so much fun and the definitions were solid. So, we resurrected the series with a timely twist.
We went digging through the archive, dusted off the definitions and the Art Department went to work prompting AI software to visualize them. The results of this experiment ranged from waaay off to dead on. We had some laughs at the terrible ones, tweaked the best and trickled them out on our social media as AIdeas.
Going from the simple stick figure we sketched to the vivid imagery artificial intelligence manufactured was quite a leap, but we think the human-generated copy is just as relatable as it was 20-some years ago. Turns out the ideas you don’t forget or regret have the potential for lasting influence. So, keep that in mind!
