Want to create brilliant ideas? Go away.

Imagine living in a place where nothing exists except for what immediately surrounds you.

Your property is on a dirt road, with neighbors pockmarked every half-mile or so.  In winter, you have to plow yourself out or dig in for the long haul.

When you drive up the dirt road to your house and step out of your car, the silence is deafening.  The stones at your feet crunch like someone’s eating potato chips in your ears. The constant hum of nothing rushes into your ears like a backdraft, but you soon adjust to the peace and breathe in unaffected, unpolluted, unbelievable air.

Your dogs have the run of acres of the land.  Your garden produces a bounty of fresh rhubarb and strawberries and other good stuff.  “Your lake,” while open to others, is a short hike away and as beautiful and secluded a place as there is on Earth.

I stayed at a place like that over the weekend, in Southern Vermont. 

It was heaven.

And it was a great place to let my thoughts ramble and do a little extracurricular cranial sightseeing, landing in places that they ordinarily might not ever get to.

As you read this, you may be in your office or in transit, eating or drinking, surveying and surfing.  Wherever you are, you’re likely surrounded by people and machines and lots of artificial things that make noises and smells.  

There’s an energy to it that’s infectious.  It’s what keeps us going.

So for a few minutes, stop.

Get yourself to a place where those things don’t exist.  I bet it isn’t that far. 

Get out of town, or stay local.  Find a nook or cranny in your house or apartment or office or neighborhood where you can be assaulted by silence.  I bet you can find it.  Bring a pad of paper and something with which you can write or draw. 

See what happens to your mind and body when everything slows down. Watch how creativity creeps up from behind and smoothes into your lap.

If you can’t get to Southern Vermont, find your version of it. Surround yourself with nothing but potential ideas. 

It may not sound deafeningly silent, but it'll still sound pretty good.

Water in a Box

Before we continue our conversation about Discovery, an interlude about the importance of follow-through.

I’d bet lots and lots of people have thought of ways to sell water in something other than a landfill-filling plastic bottle.

So why haven’t the huge corporate monoliths brought an alternate to market? And why has a small ecologically responsible company beaten them to it?

Your guess is as good as mine, but I’d bet it has something to do with that annoying little thing called profit.

Too bad, because this is a phenomenal idea with wonderful design. And not only did they discover it, they made it happen. They brought it to life. So please find some and buy some, and be inspired by a great idea executed really well.

And PS, it’s delicious.

Can I get your digits?

No surprise, but the population growth of our great planet is growing. Within that fact, there’s good news and bad news.

The bad news: We’ve picked up speed, doubling to seven billion over the past fifty years. Resources are stretched. The poor get poorer.

The good news: More people means more cool ideas, more possibilities to put your head together with your universal brothers and sisters, more opportunities to find ways to work together to think up something smart, productive, profitable, beneficial, and fun. Solve the growing problems with even bigger ideas.

See where you stand in the chronological order of the world, and take pride in your digits. Then get together with someone and get thinking.

Gives new meaning to giving someone your number.

I'll pay you not to like my product

This is kind of genius.

One way to get people to use your product is to get the people they admire to use your product. Hence, celebrity endorsers, product placement, league deals, sponsorships, etc. It enables even simple little products to dream of someday becoming the next George Foreman Grill.

But the field is getting more and more crowded, endorsements are becoming less and less meaningful, and consumer cynicism around celebrity endorsers grows daily. So I love this Twisted thinking.

It’s a brilliant way for Abercrombie to make clear who they are, by saying exactly what they’re not. Not only are they publicly disassociating from Jersey Shore, they feel so strongly about distancing themselves, they’ll pay to prove it!

And they do it in a way that their target can relate to. “I wouldn’t go out with Danny Schuman if you paid me.” A familiar-sounding high school refrain (and a little too close to home...). Point is, you have to really really not like something to pay money not to be connected to it.

It’s irrelevant whether Snooki or The Situation takes the dough. It’s the offer, and the clear meaning behind it, that counts (In fact, some are now saying it's a big back-to-school publicity stunt).

Either way, it's smart. Abercrombie thinks so little of the Jersey Shorers, they’d rather give them money than have the cast members wear their clothes. Fun, ballsy, stake-in-the-ground move. Makes the brand feel like it’s iconoclastic and trendy simply because they buck other trends.

Suicide-preventing pens!

I’ve been away from the blog for a while helping other people come up with great ideas, but in the words of Sir Isaac Newton, great ideas never take a vacation. Here’s the proof:

Who knew there’s a magical, lifesaving pen out there? A pen that has literally prevented people from killing themselves!

Actually, I don’t have any proof of this, but the last time I lost an entire notebook of notes and thoughts from crucial client meetings, the only thing that stopped me from killing myself was a bottle of Chianti and an Ally McBeal marathon.

So this pen is called the Echo smartpen from livescribe. First, you have to write on a special notepad. Then, when you connect it to your computer, your notes, scribbles, drawings, etc, are instantly and magically uploaded. And when you click back on your page, the pen tells you when you made that note or drawing.

I’m not doing justice to all the pen can do. Put it this way. For anyone who has taken notes and then forgot about…
--Where you put them
--When you had the conversation
--What the context or reason was for the conversation
--What the hell they mean !#$#$%@$%#!#
…this is technological manna from heaven. Gives your brain a break, your anger a breather, your sanity a refresh.

The single biggest question I had: Why didn’t Steve Jobs get there first with an ipen? The answer, of course, is that he was beaten to the punch. By a PC, no less. But like all things PC, it just doesn’t look as cool as the Mac version.

More on great ideas to come.

The award for best use of hair extensions in a tv commercial goes to…

I love this commercial.

I don’t write about TV ads much anymore because they’re so pre-millennium, but there’s still nothing like moving film to disrupt your emotional state. In this case, in a good way.

This spot captures human nature subtly and beautifully in fun but understated performances. Each time you watch you notice a nice new detail. I especially love the way the dad gets his pony tail and then one more when he hears the second part of the boy’s career goals.

And it clearly brings to life the product’s selling proposition: that there’s such a great variety of flavors, there will be something for everyone.

In a world of executional dazzle it’s nice to see something as mundane as a family dinner become so funny, relevant, and engaging. And convincing. Let’s hear it for clarity and simplicity

Now that’s what I call a pacifier

This month’s winner in the “I thought of that years ago but dang it, someone actually did it!” category is the Adult Beverage Company. Let’s see if I can explain this without getting too complicated:

Chocolate milk + vodka = Yum!

Still with me?

Yup, another wonderfully simple idea hitting the big time, growing in leaps and bounds, getting widespread press for a cute little idea. Let’s hear it for the two mixologist-moms who cooked it up in their kitchens after livening up their kids chocolate milk after the little ones went to bed.

Further proof that the best ideas are sometimes right in front of your face and almost always super simple. Executing them? Now that there’s the hard part.

The first step is the biggest. After that, just keep your feet moving and soon you’ll be running.

And I have heard that chocolate milk is a good recovery source when you sweat…

A great idea in need of resuscitation

I’ve spent a lot of time in Los Angeles over the past 20 years, and I’d argue that LA is the least normal city in the world. In a wonderful, check-out-my-latest-face-lift, don’t-my-fake-boobs-look-natural kind of way.

The home of plastic surgery and plastic people, LA is also home to Skeletons in the Closet. A perfect name for any kind of store in a city where dirt is gold, but when it’s a shop run by the LA County Coroner, it’s even more perfect.

Lunch coolers and travel mugs with the Coroner’s logo, welcome mats and beach towels with chalk outlines of a body…lots of fun stuff. They even have a web site.

It’s an ingenius way of thinking outside the body bag to make a few extra bucks.

Problem is, they’ve been losing money, mainly because they’ve been selling the same merchandise for a while (most likely to the same people).

Won’t you help?

Please buy some dead guy stuff. Or better yet, send them some ideas for new stuff they could sell.

Embalming fluid as a hangover cure to bring you back to life after a rough night? Specials for couples like body bags for two? Or maybe rentals for a half hour on the slab?

One side note: This New York Times article mentions how Skeletons was created, but I’m betting whoever came up with the idea was watching Night Shift at the time. Bill Blazejowski, where are you when we need you?

Is this what Keith Richards was drinking all that time?

Sometime a few years ago, Ponce de Leon and Xaviera Hollander came to the owners of Pom Wonderful in the same dream.

The result was a body of advertising materials from POW Wonderful that has been at times extremely effective and at other times almost illegal.

First they tried to convince you that you would pretty much never ever drop dead if you drank POM, in simple, clean, eye-catching ads..

Now they’re letting you know that POM Wonderful just may be an aphrodisiac. Striking print images and TV commercials too, with Malcolm McDowell doing the VO (he’s awesome).

Pretty average ads, some not even that clear in their message. But the FTC, as expected, has taken notice. So it must be working, right?

Makes me want POW wonderful for two reasons.

I want to have a lot of sex and live forever, sure.

But in case that isn’t really completely true, I admire them for putting a message out there that makes them stand apart and get noticed.

I daer yoo not 2 laff

Pablo Picasso may not have been real hip to computers, but he might have changed his tune if he'd hung around long enough to experience all of the wonderful stupidity of the internet.

Visionary entrepreneurs are building empires on the foundation of pictures of cats wearing ties accompanied by misspelled captions. I dare you not to laugh at Lolcats.

Or Fail blog.

Or There, I fixed it.

All these sites are owned by the Cheezburger network, a bunch of crazies who identify possible new Funny by monitoring community forums, blogs, and websites and use the intel to spin off new sites. The sites are easy to make and spread and they’re hugely popular. Thousands of submissions are rejected; many of the rejects are the basis new sites.

It’s a bastard stepchild of America’s Funniest Home Videos, a wonderful way to make something out of nothing by coming up with a new way to Twist what already exists, and it’s brilliant.

So see what's under that pile on your desk. Pay closer attention when you're surfing the web. Take another look at the back of your cereal box. Never hesitate to take a good look at what you already have; it's a good way to discover something new. It might even happen by accident.

Just ask these guys.

Tadpole escapes, becomes a Prince

How many ideas have you had that didn’t become real?

How many times did you think of something in the middle of the night that would make you rich and famous, but you decided you’d wake up in the morning and write it down, only to just remember something about a cantalope and JD Salinger?

You could ensure that you always remember your ideas like Michael Keaton’s Bill Blazejowski (“I'm an idea man Chuck, I get ideas, sometimes I get so many ideas that I can't even fight them off!”) in the highly underrated “Night Shift,” by dictating all of them into a recording device. But then you have to bring them to life.

And that’s the tough part. How often have you had an idea at work that you knew, that you were 100% certain, would be massively, hugely, rdiculously successful, if only you could sell it up through the internal ranks, and then convince the client of it’s genius, only to have it die somewhere along the way, due to someone’s fear or lack of confidence or shortage of funds or one of 6,438 other reasons great ideas can get killed?

Well, for every tadpole of an idea that you wished you could get swimming, every brilliant thought you’ve ever had between 4-8 beers and/or 1-4 AM that you just couldn’t get off the ground once you could see straight, and for every frenzied, rushing sperm of a germ of a notion you’ve had that couldn’t be fertilized, we present Bloomframe, in video and in words.

I don’t know how they got it done, but this is one of those ideas that seems too smart, too obvious, too we-must-get-this-made to ever actually get made. Someone had a notion, fought for it, pushed for it, found others who loved it and believed in it, and somehow, it got made. That’s the story I want to believe.

Who doesn’t love balconies? Why can’t everyone have one? Now you can. Well done, Bloomframe. The first models are bound for the Netherlands. When it becomes available over here, I’ll take two.