I know working in advertising and marketing is all deadset glamorous and everything – so much creativity you can barely contain it within four walls, not forgetting all those freebies and long lunches – but sometimes it is also just sitting around the boardroom table trying to come up with new ideas and somebody says, ‘Well, you know how we’re always trying to show we can think outside the box, well.. why don’t we make an actual box and…’
And maybe that will also be one of those days when nobody can come with anything better (it’s a Monday morning, the trains are on strike, your favourite barista is on holiday…) so you go along with it anyway because, you know, it’s better than nothing, and everybody heads back to their desks trying to ignore that niggling voice which asks how did I end up here anyway? Is this really what I thought it would be like? What does it all mean?
And so eventually, after much toing and froing, there is an actual piece of paper folded like a box and on the outside it says ‘Think outside…’ even though the person looking at the box is already outside it, presumably thinking to themselves ‘What the hell is this?’, and what the box really wants from you is to look inside the box. Please…
And it’s not even a real box anyway, not like an origami box you can actually put things in. It’s more like a double gatefold with flap. It’s a nice fold, a bit out of the ordinary, probably costs a bit extra. But it’s not a box.
Does that matter? It’s advertising so we know it’s all lies anyway – supposedly beautifully told but sometimes prosaically, half-heartedly, as if nobody really stopped to think about what it was they were doing or trying to say anyway.
This piece is produced as a self-promotion by an agency called 121 Creative which claims that what differentiates it from other agencies is its ‘one-to-one approach’. 121 – geddit? So if it’s one-to-two you’re after, no way, they don’t want to know about it, and if you’re expecting two-to-one then, please, look elsewhere. It’s One. To. One. OK?
Today, the notion of thinking outside the box is a cliché for avoiding conventional thought processes, usually in relation to management practices. Originally though, the phrase had a slightly different meaning. The ‘box’ is a reference to the common boxwood (Buxus semperveritas) often used as a hedgerow plant in England, especially for creating mazes. To think ‘outside the box’ therefore was to be outside the maze, wandering without aim or purpose – essentially unconstrained and somewhat feral.
When I hear the phrase these days, typically as a hackneyed reference to doing the same old thing under a different guise, I do somewhat yearn for a return to that original wildness, when thinking outside the box really did mean being out of bounds, off with the fairies and beyond the pale.