The birth of a viral ad - what Edgar Allen Poe and Geico have in common | Starlee Kine | TEDxNewYork

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Where do good ideas come from? Writer Starlee Kine set out to answer this question by tracing one particular idea back to its origins. It all starts with a Geico caveman.

So, how many of you
have ever had a good idea?

It's the worst thing
that ever happened, right?

I feel whenever I had a good idea,

it's amazing, but it's also very scary,

because I can't control when it happens.

I feel very --

Every good idea I've ever had

I've been convinced
is the last good idea I'll ever have,

and it feels like an actual miracle.

I find this a very stressful way to live.

I don't like just having to wait for it.

I think with good ideas
you can't just will them into existence,

they don't keep regular office hours,

you can't just be like, "Today
is the day I find the idea."

As someone who has to do this
for a living, it does drive me crazy;

so I was trying to figure out
if there is a way

that if you could make
the process more systematic,

if there's any way to harness it.

I don't think there is a way to figure out
when the ideas will come,

but maybe you can figure out
where the ideas come from.

I want to start by telling you about
an idea that my friend Noel had in 2003.

He was living in Virginia,
and he was working for an ad agency,

and everyone there wanted
to work on really flashy ads;

by Apple and Gatorade;

what was not flashy
at the time was insurance.

They definitely didn't want
to work on insurance.

There was this company
that no one heard of, called Geico,

that wanted to do these online.

wanted to do a campaign about how to show

that it was really easy
to sign up for their insurance.

All the copywriters feared this campaign,
and literally, would run away

when they would see the clients and all,

and Noel must have not run fast enough.

He got caught; he must have come out of
the bathroom maybe, and seeing the client;

and the Geico ad landed on his desk.

He was totally bummed,
and he was stuck with this campaign.

So, he and his team would get together,
and they would brainstorm

about how to make insurance
not boring somehow,

and how to convey why it would be
so easy to sign up for this service,

and none of the ideas seemed right.

They had an idea where they could have
a baby that wasn't potty trained

but could still fill up
the insurance forms;

it seemed very messy and not streamlined.

They were just like, brainstorm,
brainstorm, brainstorm

and nothing was coming to them.

Then, when Noel got home --

He was reading this book by the writer
George Saunders called "Pastoralia"

and he really liked this.

This made him feel really good.

The title story is about
an amusement park;

it's set in no-time in this book.

The title story was in
this amusement park,

and there are different exhibits
to show how different people live.

There is a wise mountain hermit
exhibit, and stuff like that.

and the main exhibit is--

- what the story focuses on -
is about cavemen;

like a cave-husband and a cave-wife.

They are played by two actors,
but they live in there;

they do everything; they never leave.

They eat, they sleep; their actual lives
are playing these cavemen,

the cave-wife and the cave-husband.

It's a really funny great story,
and Noel really liked it.

Then he would go back to work,
and he'd try to figure out this campaign.

Everybody was just blocked;
their brains needed to rest.

When they broke for lunch,
Noel sat down to eat,

and suddenly, it just came to him.

He thought of the cavemen,
and he said, "That's it!"

He thought, "It's so easy,
a caveman can do it."

The whole slogan came to him fully formed,
and he knew that was the right one.

Then that became the commercial

that you guys are probably all thinking of
in your head right now.

It was like a good direct line

from reading this story
to coming up with that campaign,

which I find amazing.

I felt, when I first saw that campaign,
I never would have thought,

"Oh, George Saunders was
inadvertently responsible for that."

I was like, "So,
if George Saunders inspired that,

who is George Saunders inspired by?

What had inspired his inspiration?"

I called George Saunders up, to ask him,

and he was really great,
and we talked a lot about inspiration.

He told me a story

about how, when he was
first starting out as a writer,

he really only read dead authors.

He liked Hemingway,
he liked Norman Mailer.

He would refuse to read
any contemporary fiction;

anything that was written by someone alive
he wasn't interested in.

He was sure he was right,
and he could just dismiss that

with never have a look at it.

But then, one day, he was like,
"I guess, if I'm going to say

that it is all terrible,
I should read some of it."

So he decided to--
he had made this plan,

where he went to
the Chicago Public Library.

he was living in Chicago,
he went to the big library.

He took a stack of 15 journals.

His plan was that he would read
all the journals, dismiss everything;

everything would be bad,
and then he could go back

wanting to write like Hemingway again.

He opened up the first journal,
and he read a story.

It was bad, and he was really relieved.

He was like, "Of course, I knew it."

Then he turned on to another story,
and it was a story called, "Hot ice,"

by a writer named Stuart Dybek.

As soon as he started reading it,

George Saunders started to sweat,
his face turned red.

He got really panicky,

and by the time he was done,
something had changed.

That night, he went home
and started writing

in the style that George Saunders --
actually, his style.

He found his voice that night
after reading this story.

He said it was just like that.

It was instinct connection,
direct line to inspiration.

I found that amazing, and I was,

"Well, I have to call Stuart Dybek then
to see how far it goes."

So I called him up, and he was fishing
at that time, and he was like,

"Yes, of course I have
a moment of inspiration."

He said he was really obsessed
with writing like the realists.

He likedº Saul Bellow
and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

He writes these stories
that are connected to reality,

but they're also fantastical.

He said that when he was 25

- he always wrote
while listening to music -

and when he was 25,
he went to the same library in Chicago;

exact same one that George Saunders
would later go to.

He was really into these Hungarian
composers named Kodály and Bartók,

and he checked out
this recording they had done

called, "Sonata for Unaccompanied Cello."

He took it home, and he put it on.

And the minute the music played,
he started writing furiously.

He filled three or four pages,
and he looked down,

and he had written in a voice
he didn't know he had,

in a style he didn't know
he knew how to do.

He said the music instantly
opened up everything for him,

and he became the writer that he became.

So that was very inspiring to me.

I would have called up more people,

but then, people started
to not be alive any more.

So, I started to research
and dig up stuff,

not bodies, just stories of inspiration.

It turns out that Kodály and Bartók

were really inspired by Debussy;

the composer Debussy.

And then, Debussy was really inspired
by the poet Baudelaire,

and Baudelaire was
extremely inspired by Edgar Allen Poe.

And Edgar Allen Poe actually--
"The Raven," right?

"The Raven" turns out to be inspired

by a bird in a Dickens's story
called "Barnaby Rudge."

Poe hadn’t even liked it,
he had panned it,

but he was super inspired by this bird.

That bird in that Dickens's story
was actually inspired

by Dickens's real-life pet raven
named Grip.

But Grip sadly died
from eating paint chips,

before anyone could go on a record
with what he was inspired by,

so it kind of ends there.

So, Geico to Dickens.

I felt, when I learned all this,
the bad news is--

I guess there is no getting around
the waiting for the inspiration to come,

but even though it doesn't make the
creative process more easier to control,

it does make it feel less lonely,

because all these ideas
are strung together through history.

And it also makes you feel like,
"I'm living in an action movie now."

Like, "Watch out!
Inspiration can strike at any second."

You just have to be ready
to act on it when it does.

(Applause)