Advertising Brokers and Agency Stokers.

When the Titanic hit an iceberg in 1912, fifteen hundred went down with it.

The ship didn’t have enough lifeboats. But that wasn’t the real problem.

The real problem was that lifeboats were all anyone could think about.

You see, when the engineers and crew members of the Titanic looked at a lifeboat, all they saw was an alternative form of transportation. But broken down, a lifeboat is really just a thing that floats. More importantly, it’s a thing that floats that can keep people above water. 

So what if, instead of focusing on how many passengers could fit in lifeboats, the crew of the Titanic focused on how many passengers could fit on things that float?

What new opportunities open up? 

The ship was full of wooden doors, tables, trunks, mattresses, and car tires. Could any of those things have been used as flotation devices? 

And what about the iceberg?

Yes, it was the cause of the problem. But it’s also a massive floating object capable of keeping a lot of people above the freezing water. Could the lifeboats have been used to ferry passengers and provisions to it?  

We’ll never know if any of these ideas could’ve worked. But if this little exercise teaches us anything, it’s that there are always more solutions to problems, even to the most frightening ones.

You simply have to look beyond the obvious. Beyond the numbers. Beyond the metrics. Beyond advertising.

And even beyond the problem itself. 

We know it’s hard to see anything more than a lifeboat.

But we also know that creative thinking doesn’t have to be a fuzzy-wuzzy, unintelligible thing.

In fact, more often than not, the most creative solutions are actually the most logical ones. 

But like the iceberg that sank the Titanic, you just can’t see it yet.

Luckily, you have the one advantage that the people on the Titanic didn’t.

The advantage of an outside creative perspective.