The Creative Process —Sept '22

Good ideas. Oh so precious. Yet they often lie around underfoot to be stumbled upon… Or they suddenly flare-up and lead to creative solutions. No telling what the spark might be.

Take the origins of rock-n-roll hits. Jerry Allison—the drummer for the 1950s rock group Buddy Holly and the Crickets—died in late August, and the New York Times recounted how one of the group’s biggest hits flared into life. It was like this: Allison and Buddy Holly went to see a John Wayne move, “The Searchers,”in which one of Wayne’s key lines was, “That’ll be the day.” You can imagine his drawling, sarcastic delivery.

Sowhen Holly suggested that he and Allison write a song together, the drummer imitated John Wayne and said, “That’ll be the day.” Right there was the spark. “Right away Buddy starts fiddling around with it.” Allison recalled. “In about a half-hour we had it.”

In1957 their hit—“That’ll be the Day”—spent 3 months on Billboard’s Top 30.

This process—shall we call it creative association?—happens all the time when a sharp team is developing a winning brand. Quick example: Our client in advertising technology merged two high-tech platforms, one specializing in serving advertisers and the other rich in a portfolio of content providers. The two sectors are known in the industry as buy-side and sell-side. The merged company promised to be a more efficient market-maker in digital ads, a balancer of buy-side and sell-side needs, an equation of interests.

“It’s an equation,” someone on our team said, and another jumped on it: “There’s your brand name—equation.” In the subsequent naming process, Equation became a leading candidate as other ideas came and went.

In the course of vetting, comparing and brainstorming, “equation” morphed into “equator” and then into “equative” and finally into the distinctive and expressive new word “equativ.” Launched in July, 2022, Equativ is renowned for its robust, balanced offering of AdTech services.It’s also pretty famous for having a creative brand name sparked by a great idea.

Claude Singer
Managing Partner