Hegarty on Creativity by Sir John Hegarty; “Creativity isn’t an occupation. It’s a preoccupation.”

March 12, 2014 3:45 pm

Hegarty on Creativity by Sir John Hegarty

By Henry Mance

Welcome back, vanity publishing – we have missed you. For a moment it looked like the concept would die in a digital age that gives everyone a platform for self-promotion. But rest assured, it is back with some new tricks.

First, there was Morrissey, the singer and former frontman of The Smiths, who insisted that his autobiography be published as a Penguin Classic. His showbiz anecdotes thereby joined the same imprint as Aristotle and St Augustine.

Then there was Charles Saatchi, the art collector and former advertising entrepreneur, who was apparently so desperate for his book to become a bestseller that he turned his assistant into a part-time mystery shopper.

“He gave me £200 so I went to different stores like Waterstones and other shops,” Elisabetta Grillo told a court in December, as she recounted how she snapped up copies of her boss’s book. “It was like four times a week.”

This month – in a worthy addition to the genre – comes Hegarty on Creativity.

Sir John Hegarty is one of Britain’s greatest advertisers. His agency BBH (the H is not for humility) has done a slick line in commercial creativity.

He has written a well-received book, Hegarty on Advertising. So he is surely capable of writing an interesting guide to the creative process. Isn’t he?

“Creativity isn’t an occupation. It’s a preoccupation.”

The agony begins.

“People often ask me: Do you have a five-year plan? To which I always reply: No, I have a five-minute plan.”

“Do you know what really upsets me? (Apart from peanut butter.)”

“When I’m asked, When do you do your best thinking? My answer is always, When I’m not thinking.”

If platitudes could kill, Sir John would need a lawyer. His book is intended to encourage us to think broadly – but it just serves up shallow slogans.

Vanity books from the advertising and marketing industry often fall victim to vapidity – see Dave Trott’s Creative Mischief or Bob Hoffman’s 101 Contrarian Ideas about Advertising, which contains 103 ideas (get it?). Their authors may write wonderful slogans, but they seem to be unable to switch to long form.

Of course, this is not vanity publishing in its traditional sense. The term used to mean any book whose printing was paid for by its author. That was always a dodgy definition – a form of self-publishing gave us Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It became even more suspect when the rise of the ebook made self-publishing cool.

Morrissey’s Penguin Classic, Saatchi’s book and Hegarty on Creativity are not self-published. But they are surely worthy of the term vanity publishing. As the author Mark Levine once put it, “the ‘vanity’ part comes in if you believe that your book is so amazing that you can put out whatever you want and readers will flock to buy it”.

It is not clear what Sir John believed when he wrote this book. His “50 provocative insights” are relevant principally to those working in advertising agencies – a narrow slice of the creative economy.

“When Picasso painted Guernica, one of his most famous works, I don’t think he was whistling happily to himself,” is one of book’s few empirical examples.

“The problem with Sydney is its weather,” is one of its only original thoughts.

Its killer ending – sorry to ruin it – is that the book is written on edible paper. That does at least solve the problem of how to get rid of it.

If publishers can’t control their authors, they do at least owe their readers a health warning.

“By looking in the opposite direction, you might just find something new,” Sir John writes on page 44.

Why isn’t that in big letters on the cover?

The writer is the FT’s media correspondent

Hegarty on Creativity: There Are No Rules, by Sir John Hegarty, Thames & Hudson, £7.95