Can creativity be templated?

Yes it can, according to a team of Israeli researchers.

In 1999, the researchers studied 200 ads that had been award winners or finalists in top advertising competitions. The researchers found that nearly nine in 10 of the ads could be classified into six templates.

Next, they studied 200 less successful ads — those that had not earned awards. The researchers found that only 2.5% of those ads could be classified into templates.

“The surprising lesson of this story: Highly creative ads are more predictable than uncreative ones,” write Chip and Dan Heath in Made to Stick. “It’s like Tolstoy’s quote: ‘All happy families resemble each other, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ All creative ads resemble one another, but each loser is uncreative in its own way.”

Traditionally, creative idea-generation techniques have focused on a lack of system and logic. We try to brainstorm as many different ideas as we can. We say, “there are no bad ideas.” We bring in diverse opinions through focus groups and free association.

But what if we’re wrong?

Find the patterns.

A better approach, according to the Israeli researchers, is to identify patterns in successful communications and brainstorm ways to implement those patterns.

This approach itself follows a pattern in creative thinking.

The researchers found that nearly nine in 10 of the ads could be classified into six templates.

Next time you’re developing creative campaign, use these proven templates to jump-start your ideas:

1. Pictoral analogy

This approach merges or replaces your central image with another one. An ad for the French Open Tennis Championship, for instance, featured a tennis ball shaped like a croissant.

You can see the thinking behind this ad:

What images depict tennis? What images depict France? How do I merge the two?

More than one-third of the top-rated ads in the study used this template.

2. Consequences

For this approach, point out unexpected consequences of a product attribute. A commercial for car loudspeakers, for instance, showed a bridge on the verge of collapse when the speakers of a car parked on it were turned way up.

To use this template, ask:

What’s a key feature of our product or service? How can we exaggerate the consequences of using — or failing to use — this feature?

More than 18% of the top-rated ads in the study used this template.

3. Extreme situation

This approach shows a product performing under unusual circumstances or exaggerates a product’s features to the point of absurdity. A commercial for locks, for instance, shows a woman barking at burglars to scare them away.

For this approach, you say:

You don’t have to buy our product. Alternatives for achieving the same results include [something ridiculous].

Some 12% of the top-rated ads in the study used this template.

4. Competition

For this approach, show your product or service winning in competition with something else. One ad, for instance, shows a person trying to decide whether to answer a ringing phone or finish eating the advertised cereal.

Nearly 10% of the top-rated ads in the study used this template.

5. Dimensionality alteration

A woman is arguing with her husband for canceling his life insurance. In a moment it becomes clear that the scene occurs after he has died, during a séance.

For dimensionality alteration, manipulate a product’s relationship with time, space or some other aspect of its environment.

Nearly 10% of the top-rated ads in the study used this template.

6. Interactive experiment

For this template, you invite the viewer to perform or to imagine performing an experiment that demonstrates a need or problem that your product or service can solve.

One ad, for example, included a large black square. When the audience member shakes her head over the square, she can see that she needs dandruff shampoo.

How can you demonstrate the need for your solution in action?

About 6% of the top-rated ads in the study used this template.

Can creativity be taught?

Next, the Israeli researchers took a group of novices — people with no advertising experience at all — and broke them into three teams.

1. Team One trained for two hours on how to use the six creative templates.
2. Team Two learned about classic idea-generation techniques like free-association and brainstorming.
3. Team Three received no training at all.

Those who’d learned the templates created more creative, memorable and effective ads than the other two teams.

The researchers tested the top ads with consumers. Team One’s ads were rated 50% more creative and 55% more effective at creating a positive attitude toward the products advertised.

The next day, the customers were asked to recall the ads. Team One’s ads were remembered 45% more often than Team Two’s — and twice as often as Team Three’s.

Why reinvent the wheel?

Call it thinking inside the box: The irony is that frameworks, formulas and templates like these can actually help you come up with more effective creative ideas than “free-thinking” techniques.

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Sources: Jacob Goldenberg, David Mazursky, and Sorin Solomon, “The Fundamental Templates of Quality Ads,” Marketing Science 18 (1999), 333-51

Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Random House, 2007

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What a great assignment I just completed for a technology comms team: I templated their blog posts, intranet announcements, lead generation emails, news releases, speeches, success stories and white papers.

Now all the writers have to do is to fill in the blanks with their fascinating research and delightful prose. No more reinventing the wheel.

Over the years, I’ve templated everything from event invitations to proposals to webpages for my clients.

Save reading — and writing — time.

I love writing templates because they:

• Save communicators time. Story patterns exist, and a savvy writer can deconstruct them. Instead of reinventing them with each piece, spend your time coming up with brilliant facts and figures and polishing your prose.
• Overcome information overload. Once readers are familiar with the template, they don’t have to learn each subsequent, say, webpage’s structure, write Martin J. Eppler and Jeanne Mengis in “Preparing Messages for Information Overload Environments,” an IABC Research Foundation report. That reduces processing time and effort.
• Result in more effective communications. A group of Israeli researchers found that nine out of 10 award-winning ads used templates; only 2.5% of less successful ads had.

To write better, easier and faster, template your press releases, webpages, proposals, case studies — even your personality profiles. The secret is to develop standard structures that are flexible enough to cover a variety of subjects.

Here are 13 templates to consider:

1. Story tables or grids

Are you comparing X number of items by Y number of characteristics? Make your story a table or grid. Here’s why:

The Poynter Institute’s Chip Scanlan and The Sun News’ Josh Awtry offer these grid templates — what Autry calls “nonlinear storytelling” — to consider:

Issues roundups. This grid does two things, Scanlan writes. It lays out the information in a logical format for readers, but, almost more importantly, it frees up the communicator’s time and energy to pursue more complex stories.

Year in review/preview. Top-stories-of-the year roundups “can get long in a hurry,” Autry writes. Instead, how about creating a simple form where communicators fill in the blanks on key issues of the year?

Meeting stories. These are tough. Too often, communicators blah-blah on about who said what in chronological order. “When it’s just a meeting where some things were approved and some action was taken, wouldn’t this information better benefit readers as a grid?” Scanlan asks. I think it would.

Grids are so effective that if a story lends itself to one, I’ll always choose that option.

“Why don’t we, as an industry, embrace different ways of presenting information other than the linear story with a beginning and an end?” Autry wrote. “Why do we take perfectly good information and muddy it up with conjunctions, prepositions, and the like for tradition’s sake?”

2. Lists

Listicles and other list stories make it easy for skimmers to get the gist of the message without doing a deep dive on the topic. No wonder they’re so popular on social media and other platforms.

3. Case studies

For case studies, testimonials — even mini narratives — try this simple structure:

• Problem
• Solution
• Results

4. Web pages

In a recent project, we created templates for some sections of Saint Luke’s Health System’s new website. Department pages, for instance, included:

• Highlights: A bulleted list of our three most compelling differentiators — firsts, mosts, bests, biggests and onlies
• Nut graph: A one-paragraph summary of the department
• The team: Notable players
• Services: A bulleted list
• Learn more: Contacts and links
• Testimonial: A callout from a patient

Your web pages will be different, but you’ll save a lot of time if you’ll develop templates. We’ve templated web pages for Tellabs and PetSmart Charities, as well as Saint Luke’s.

5. Memos

Procter & Gamble uses this one-page memo template:

• Idea
• Background
• How it works
• Key benefits
• Next steps

If a memo at Procter & Gamble exceeds a single page and doesn’t use this format, Eppler and Mingis write, it’s likely to be returned to the writer unread.

6. Project proposals

Procter & Gamble also uses this two-page proposal template:

• Background
• Objective
• Rationale
• Plan
• Open issues and questions to be answered
• Next steps

7. Solutions descriptions

In their IABC Foundation report, Eppler and Mingis themselves demonstrate the power of templates by organizing their solutions pages like this:

• Context: Who’s doing it
• Main idea: Why it works
• Implementation: How to
• Caveat: Issues to avoid

8. Advertising

Most creative ads use one of these six advertising templates, according to a group of Israeli researchers:

• Pictoral analogy: Replace the central image with another one — a croissant for a tennis ball, for instance
• Consequences: Car speakers that are so loud, they make a bridge collapse, say
• Extreme situation: A jeep driving under the snow to demonstrate its all-weather capabilities, maybe
• Competition: A race between a car and a bullet, for instance
• Dimensionality alteration: A woman arguing with her husband about life insurance — in a seance, after he’s died, for example
• Interactive experiment: the Pepsi Challenge, for instance

9. News releases

These elements of the social media release template would make a good template for any release:

• Headline
• Deck
• Introductory paragraph or two
• List of key facts
• List of quotes

10. Personality profiles

The International Association of Business Communicators and Qualcomm and are among the companies that template human interest stories. In fact, all these organizations get profilees to fill in the blanks, so communicators need only edit the profiles.

IABC’s template includes these questions:

• Which word or phrase do you think is overused right now?
• How would you explain your profession to a child?
• What did you have to learn the hard way?
• If you could choose another profession, what would it be?
• What’s the best reward for a job well done?

11. Critical issues memo

Mike Hall, corporate communication manager for Pioneer Hi-Bred Europe, developed this memo template for outlining critical communication issues:

• Situation: What happened?
• Response strategy: How we are dealing with it?
• Media coverage: What are the media writing about it?
• Media strategy: How we will move forward and with whom?
• Standby statement to press: What do we currently release as the corporate view on the issue?

12. SPIN memo

Here’s another way to template a similar message:

• Situation
• Problem
• Implications
• Next steps

13. Narrative structure

Writing an anecdote or story? Eppler and Bischof suggest this structure:

• The (hero’s) context
• A challenge or crisis to overcome
• A failed attempt
• A successful attempt (climax)
• Resolution
• A moral, or lessons learned

Write by number

Words like template, formula and recipe are sometimes seen as profanities in a creative field like writing. But good writing is at least as much science as art. And you can’t argue with results like “easier to read” and “easier to write.”

No doubt about it: T-e-m-p-l-a-t-e is not a four-letter word.

What template could you use for your next piece?

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Source: Martin J. Eppler and Jeanne Mengis, “Preparing Messages for Information Overload Environments”, IABC Research Foundation, 2009

Chip Scanlan, “Nonlinear Narratives,” The Poynter Institute, Oct. 16, 2003

Josh Awtry, “Grid Tips,” The Poynter Institute, Oct. 15, 2003

Josh Awtry, “‘There just isn’t a story here,’” The Poynter Institute, Oct. 15, 2003

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People remember information better when stories are organized according to well-known structures. (Mandler and Johnson 1977; Kintsch, Mandel and Kozminsky in 1977; Mandler 1978; Stein 1976; and Thorndyke 1977)

The reason: People have mental frameworks — aka schemata — that they’ve built through experience and instruction. These mental frameworks provide a skeletal structure for organizing information as they read. (Anderson, 1977; Rumelhart, 1975)

“Comprehension and composition bear a reciprocal relation to each other.”

— Robert C. Calfee, Ph.D, professor of Education and Psychology at Stanford University

The more familiar the writer’s framework, the easier it is for readers to place new information into their own schematas. Otherwise, information just comes across as a list of facts, which people can only recall through rote memorization.

That’s why researchers Robert C. Calfee and R. Curley set out to create a taxonomy, or classification, of the most well-known story structures. Here’s what they learned along the way.

Common story structures

Bonnie J.F. Meyer suggests using one of these five structures for the major points in your piece:

Bonnie Armbruster, Ph.D., professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, lists these common structures:

• Simple list: List items or ideas where the order of presentation is not significant.
• Compare/contrast: Describe similarities or differences between two or more things.
• Temporal sequence: Show the passage of time.
• Cause and effect: Organize by reason and result.
• Problem/solution: Cite the problem and the solution.

Draw a narrative line

Armbruster also offers these elements for a narrative story:

• Goals
• Actions
• Outcomes

In 1975, cognitive psychologist David Rumelhart developed this formula for a simple narrative:

• A story = a setting (It was a dark and stormy night) + 1 or more episodes
• An episode = an event (Boy meets girl) + 1 or more responses
  • A response includes:
    • A plan (He decided to call her).
    • An action (He picked up the phone.)
    • A consequence (And she came running.)

All the story structures that are fit to print?

Based on their survey of story structures, Calfee and Curley developed this taxonomy.

Which of these story structures can you use to make your next piece easier to read, understand and remember?

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Sources: Robert C. Calfee, and R. Curley “Structures of prose in content areas,” In Understanding reading comprehension, ed. J. Flood. Newark, DE: International Reading Association, 1984, pp. 161-180

Bonnie J. F. Meyer, “Reading Research and the Composition Teacher: The Importance of Plans, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 33, No. 1 (February 1982), pp. 37-49

Bonnie B. Armbruster, “The problem of inconsiderate text,” in Comprehension instruction, ed. G. Duffey. New York: Longmann, 1984, pp. 202-217

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In her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion describes a moment with her late husband, the novelist John Gregory Dunne:

“When we were living in Brentwood Park we fell into a pattern of stopping work at four in the afternoon and going out to the pool,” she writes. “He would stand in the water reading (he reread Sophie’s Choice several times that summer trying to see how it worked) while I worked in the garden.”

“Amateurs plagiarize. Real writers steal.”

— T.S. Eliot, 20th-century American poet

That’s how good writers get better: by studying work they admire until they “see how it works.”

Did you ever take your Mom’s toaster apart to figure out how it worked? You can do the same thing with writing.

Choose a piece you love from your clip file of writing samples. Then take it apart and put it back together until you understand why you like it and what the writer did to make it that way.

Find the template.

In my clip file, I have a short piece about Las Vegas from Time magazine. I collected it for a single sentence:

Lounge music may be to the symphony what Velveeta is to cheese — but hey! — it’s all part of what makes Las Vegas great.

Take it apart. Here’s what I love about that passage:

• The two comparisons (Lounge music = symphony; Velveeta = cheese)
• The fact that those comparisons are also compared to each other
• The word “Velveeta” (cheesy brand names are always fun)
• The full sentence with an exclamation point between dashes

Put it back together. So now you know what to do: Write a sentence with two comparisons compared to each other, a cheesy brand name and a full sentence with an explanation point between dashes in the middle. The template looks like this:

Blank may be to blank what (funny brand name) is to blank — hypershort sentence! — something.

When I asked participants in a workshop to model that passage, one came up with:

Youth hostels may be to the Hyatt what love beads are to diamonds — but hey! — it’s all part of what makes your Adventures Ltd. vacation great.

Practice X-ray reading.

The Poynter Institute’s editorial guru Roy Peter Clark calls this approach “X-ray reading.”

“Using the method of close reading,” he writes, “I find a passage that intrigues me, put on my X-ray glasses, and peer beneath the surface of the text to view the invisible machinery of language, syntax, rhetoric, and critical thinking that creates the effects I experience as a reader. I then forge what I see into a writing tool.”

Steal the techniques (not the words).

When I was in graduate school, one of my favorite journalism professors, Rick Musser, confessed that he’d always loved the introduction to The Dane Curse, a detective novel by Dashiel Hammett:

It was a diamond all right, shining in the grass, about two dozen feet from the blue brick.

Someday, he promised, he’d find a way to adapt that image into one of his own pieces. Years later, when I was editing a piece he wrote for a magazine I worked at, I saw that he’d made good on his promise. Here’s his opening paragraph for a piece on a millionaire scrap man of Kansas City:

Sure enough, those are pennies down there in the muck, their mangled edges glinting in the Blue Valley sun.

That’s reading like a writer: getting inspiration from the very best writers, then adapting it — not adopting it, but adapting it — to your own work.

I know I don’t need to tell you that we’re not talking about plagiarism here. I once outlined this approach to a group of writers in a seminar. At the break, one of the writers pulled me aside and proudly explained how she collects Wall Street Journal headlines about personal finance then uses them verbatim as headlines for the personal finance articles in her own newsletter.

Eeek! I said. That’s not modeling. That’s plagiarizing.

The key to modeling is to steal the technique, not the words. Adapt — don’t adopt — others’ approaches.

Try it yourself. Feel free to borrow and improve on other people’s techniques. It’s a widely practiced form of flattery. Take whatever you can, and keep T.S. Eliot’s advice close to heart.

“Amateurs plagiarize,” he said. “Real writers steal.”

Learn more about reading to write.

• Read like a writer; write like a reader. To build your writing skills, read widely — from Ernest Hemingway to Stephen King. (Even if you’re not writing fiction.) Read voraciously: not just books on writing craft, but creative, writing, short stories and other types of books.
• Make time to read. Read a lot and write a lot. And when reading books, short stories or other brand messages, look for technique, don’t just get swept away in the story. Start a clip file of writing you love, so you can reverse engineer it.
• Absorb the prose. Type up passages you love or sleep on them. Call it “modeling lessons.”

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Sources: “Stop the Music,” Time, Aug. 21, 1989

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