Cracks and light.

This is arguably one of the more iconic Australian ads of the 90s. (You’ll have to view it directly on YouTube as the poster has annoying disabled external sharing.)

Now I wasn’t there, but as the story goes, this wasn’t the original script. The waiter was meant to just deliver the drinks, then point to which was which when asked. But on the day, the talent went rogue and started randomly sipping from and sticking his finger in them, and everyone just ran with it because it delivered a far more unexpected and funnier spot. Not only that, but it sold the product harder. These are clear carbonated drinks with real fruit flavour. Credit to agency, production, and client for seeing gold in what could’ve simply been a brash mistake. (And the talent for going full goblin mode and risking his day rate and rollovers.)

Over the years, I’ve met creatives that hold their ideas very tightly. Taking even commentary intended to play with the idea and see where it can go as a direct assault upon it. Directors so intently adamant about a particular technique or approach that it jeopardised a much grander vision. I was once told of a client who would sit in the offlines holding a storyboard up next to the TV to make sure that every single scene perfectly mirrored the sketches, whether it made for a better edit or not. Heart in the right place with all, perhaps, but unconsciously close-minded nonetheless.

A piece of advice I was given early in my career was ‘always go into something open to the fact that you might be wrong’. It’s good advice, and something I try to always be aware of. I’ve surely fucked it up many times and fallen on the wrong sword. It’s still a work in progress, but I think I have gotten better at it over time.

It’s not hard to see that the advertising business has become increasingly tightly wound. Everything has to be measurable, trackable, templatable, pre-testable, post-provable, historically justifiable. The room for new ideas, in a business of ideas, being compressed to the size of a pinprick. Now, this is a business, and we’re dealing with large sums of money, and I understand why things are the way they are. But what is also true is that placing an iron grip around everything to minimise ‘risk’ can inherently bring with it an even bigger one - being unable to see the forest for the trees.

Mistakes are part of creativity. They present with them both obstacle and opportunity, because by nature, they expose a different vein. A truth enshrined in the 15th century Japanese art of ‘Kintsugi’, which embraces imperfection by addressing faults, cracks, tears, and breaks in pottery by filling them with gold, and in turn, creating something better than was initially imagined or envisaged.

You can find this line of thinking scattered all throughout human history. This openness to imperfection. In 1992, Leonard Cohen famously sang: “There is a crack, a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”. About 600 years prior, Sufi poet, Rumi, penned “The wound is a place where the light enters you”. A Canadian songwriter and an Islamic cleric, centuries apart, coming to the same understanding.

Our job is to be very opinionated, and confident, and full of belief in what we do. But also, to always be open to something better. The two planes are in direct conflict with each other, but must concurrently exist. Because what Leonard and Sufi were both angling at is that we don’t know far more than we know, so if you look closely, that crack in the seam might actually let something in, rather than out.

In a business that increasingly rejects the slightest whiff of uncertainty, its incumbent on all of us to keep the tiny flicker of ‘what if’ alive. As much as some would like, we can’t rabidly control and predict everything. All we can do is create a particular environment for things to play out how we might hope, with all of its in-built cracks and holes and flaws, and then be aware enough to spot the patches of light.

Because had that script been presented ahead of time, by a copywriter in a boardroom verbalising that ‘the waiter then sticks his finger in the Spritz Mixed Berry’, it may very well have died before anyone got to see it.