There Are No New Ideas. There’s An Abundance of New Ideas.

When someone utters the words, “there are no new ideas,” he’s either advocating for execution (where the magic happens), for the value of mashups and derivatives, or he has no imagination at all because new ideas sprout like fields of wildflowers in the minds of creative people with advertising problems to solve.

But what about the time-fractured people on the receiving end of today’s onslaught of ads? Haven’t they seen and heard it all by now? If they have a smartphone, chances are good they’re suffering from content fatigue.

Matt Batten, the executive creative director at Edge, argues that we are absorbing more information and experiences than ever before, which erodes our abilities to appreciate the new.

Surely this level of exposure affects our response to the stimuli. Behavioral psychology says it must. So when a creative idea is put forward to our internal teams, and our clients, their baseline of reference is now a thousand times more cluttered. This over-exposure to entertaining and innovative ideas makes the concept before them seem less interesting, less inspiring. More ‘meh’. We’ve lost our ability to be inspired by the new.

I know what he means; yet, I have no idea what he means. Even if it’s true that “we’ve lost our ability to be inspired by the new,” we have not lost our ability to be inspired. I find new things to read, new music to listen to, new films to watch, new places to visit, and new things to eat as often as possible. I also find new commercials to enjoy, critique, and share. Likewise, the best people in advertising keep finding new ways to tell timeless stories.

Canadian Wine Drama and Origin Story

Winevertising is not a ripe creative category. This new spot for Inniskillin Wine by Toronto independent agency Bensimon Byrne helps to change that by degrees.

Directed by Academy Award-nominated Canadian documentary filmmaker Hubert Davis, the campaign’s 60-second anthem spot presents the winery’s origin story in cinematic fashion.

Canadian wine growing regions can rival any new world wine and Inniskillin is largely is responsible for the birth of the modern wine industry in Canada. The producer has vineyards in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario and Okanagan, BC.

Maybe VW Should Have Let It Be

Johannes Leonardo made this animated love letter to the Bug, a car the automaker no longer makes. It’s a well-made tribute, but making an homage to DDB’s “Think Small” is a tall order. Whether cleared, or not, it takes courage to approach this high bar.

Meet 2020 With Your Boots On

Greatest Common Factory in Austin made this new Western-themed spot for Tecovas, a startup online retailer of cowboy boots, also based in Austin. I like the voice over, the tagline, and the cinematography here.

Austin Community College Is for Everyone

Simple is good and this is simple. Plus, a simple edit at the end makes the ad more interesting.

Fanta, It’s A Thing

Preacher’s work for Fanta is a visual feast of advertising flavors. I don’t know if this fresh work for Fanta qualifies as new or inspiring, but I do know it’s cool.

By the way, did you know Fanta was first made in Germany during WWII? A trade embargo made the import of Coca Cola syrup into Germany difficult, so Max Keith, the head of Coca-Cola Deutschland needed to innovate and work around the problem. He decided to create a new product using only ingredients available in Germany at the time, including beet sugar, whey, and apple pomace—the “leftovers of leftovers”, as Keith later recalled.

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