Picture: THINKSTOCK
Picture: THINKSTOCK

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ARE we putting creativity in captivity? Henry David Thoreau went to the woods to "live deliberately ... to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life". We went into advertising to live madly, to live deeply — and have the marrow sucked out of our lives.

As young people straight out of advertising school, we walked into agencies with tall, bright candles. We were sparkly and new, our ideas as fresh and young as baby peas. But by the time we hit our late 30s, our candles can become messy stumps and our ideas wrinkly, dehydrated peas, if we allow them to.

This industry has an unshakeable reputation for long hours and never-ending work life. Back in the day, advertising agency Hunt Lascaris did some beautiful work for Standard Bank that said, "Great ideas don’t keep office hours."

While this is true, it’s also true that the best ideas come when there is enough room to think and breathe — not when we are hooked up to a caffeine drip and flogging our imaginations.

The search for a big idea is, by nature, elusive. As advertisers, we have skill in producing ideas on demand. But no one ever said we’d be factory workers putting lids on the toothpaste tubes of our ideas, with mechanical precision and robotic-like sameness. Maybe our formula is all wrong.

When I started advertising at Ogilvy & Mather, Rightford Searle-Tripp and Makin, the late great Robyn Putter was our CEO. One day, he walked into my office — he had the habit of mingling with the groundlings and popping by to dispense words of unforgettable wisdom — turned to me and said, "What are you doing this weekend?" I replied, "I don’t know."

And he said, "We always take so much out of our minds. We should make time to put stuff back in. Always have something to look forward to on the weekends." It is one of the best pieces of advice I’ve received about creativity.

Advertising is the business of creativity, but has become more "business" and less "creativity". The economic shift has made our clients nervous and clingy and we are doing way more in much less time. We know that the more we churn out, the better our chances of survival. This is creativity in captivity.

Smart technology has also made this the age of availability. And so, we check layouts at Sunday brunch and take our laptops with us on the way to the mountains. We are busy in the state of busyness, feverishly chasing unrealistic deadlines, instead of feverishly chasing ideas that could, perhaps, change our world.

This week, one of the world’s greatest advertising agencies, Wieden + Kennedy, announced that it would be testing limited work hours.

Aware of the competition faced by tech companies such as Google that recruit creatives and pay them higher salaries, Wieden + Kennedy, playfully known as "Weekend + Kennedy", has decided that no meetings will take place before 10am or after 4pm.

If the agency that brought us Nike’s famous words, "Just do it", could do this, would our local industry be up to it? I’m not sure. We would have to first break our own silly constructs that equate long hours to hard work and beautiful results. We would also need to ask our partners to release the whip and the fear, and ask our leaders to set the tone for healthier ways of working.

Advertising agencies are not Engen Quick Shops. We shouldn’t be flaunting "Open 24 hours" signs because creativity should not be purchased like a flaky pie and Coke at 2am. Creativity should be nurtured and released in good time, with our bodies intact and our imaginations unsabotaged.

We should revolutionise the way we think about time, for we came into this industry to suck the marrow out of life and not to discover in the end, that we have not lived.

• Gordhan is a creative director in advertising