Heather Larimer Considers Creativity a “Survival Skill”

Heather Larimer is the executive creative director at Orchard Creative, has been a copywriter and creative director for over 18 years.

At Orchard she has led the Etsy and Georgia Pacific accounts, and was the creative director on the iconic Ocean Spray ‘Jiggle’ holiday work. Earlier in her career, Heather wrote the global tagline for Delta Airlines [‘Keep Climbing’], worked on brand and product launches at TBWA\ Media Arts Lab, and was instrumental in establishing the brand for Laurene Powell Jobs’ national education reform project, the XQ Institute.

She began her advertising life at Wieden+Kennedy, and has worked at TBWA\ Media Arts Lab, MAL\FOR GOOD, and the Emerson Collective, among other well known agencies.

Heather chatted with LBB about walking the line of logical and chaotic creativity, as well as sharing the best bit of advice she’s received in her career

Person

I think as a creative person I alternate between being very logical and linear and being utterly chaotic and pointillistic.

It can be hard to know which mode is going to yield the best result, but I’m glad to have both available. But when I’m truly stuck, I indulge my despondency. I allow myself to feel the bad feeling and then keep following it until it lands somewhere useful. Like, what do I strongly dislike about this issue, category or task? And how can I use that to get somewhere interesting and true?

I do believe that creativity is innate, unfortunately. I say unfortunately because I don’t think you can teach it or buy it. It’s often the kids who can’t behave or do things in a way that makes other people comfortable, who come up with interesting ideas or ways of approaching problems.

One of my most talented colleagues was a great student growing up, but she’s become a great creative because she needed to get creative in other areas of her life that were challenging. I myself was a chaotic and messy student, and so I learned to escape some consequences of that by being ‘insightful’ or ‘sharp.’ If I had found an essentially interesting idea, it might be ok that it was illegible, late and two pages short.

Which is to say, creativity is how you get out of the uncomfortable box you find yourself in. If you haven't been in a lot of uncomfortable boxes early in life, I don’t know what to tell you.

Creativity is a very powerful survival skill, and so I have not only enormous respect and reverence for creative people, but also a profound tenderness towards them. Like, I think musicians are modern day saints. They have given more love and joy and deep feeling to the world than any other discipline. Even a cheesy song like ‘Hotel California’ has been the soundtrack to a million meaningful or memorable nights. That’s vast and mystical to me.

Product

The scariest thing about judging creativity, your own or someone else’s, is that the internalised rubric is naturally very broad. It’s mostly based on creative things you’ve already seen before.

I’m always fighting between what is diligent and ‘good’ and what is lawless and great. It’s really hard to know under pressure. My arm hairs usually stand up or I feel a deep chill when I come across something remarkable. Sometimes I spontaneously cry or laugh uncomfortably loudly.

An involuntary reaction is the best barometer. If I am thinking about it too hard, it’s probably almost good enough but not great.

I am the proudest of our spot for Ocean Spray, ‘Jiggle’, because it’s hard to imagine it coming from another creative team and because it’s a miracle it got made. Christine Taffe, the writer, and I are both from the hard-core Midwest and know the jelly very intimately. And Doh Lee, art director, came to the US from Korea as an exchange student and landed in a conservative town in Missouri and of course met the alien jelly at his first Thanksgiving. I believe you can only make something as weird as ‘Jiggle’ from a place of true love and reverence, not from an ironic stance.

I also am very, very proud of the incredible range of work we’ve made for Etsy, from the initial ’Your Mission’ holiday campaign to ‘Thank You, France’ to ‘Who’s Waldo?’ to our latest holiday campaign which is very close to my heart. Etsy has been one of the best client relationships of my career. And I was already a huge fan before working with them.

In terms of the industry, I resent ads invented to shoehorn in a joke that’s been kicking around someone’s head for years. Using a client to get that kooky, kooky thing finally made is just cheap.

The best ads are so specific to the client and product; you shouldn’t be able to swap out the product or category if you're really doing your job. And of course I don’t like broadstrokes ads that feel like they’re cynically or lazily constructed to be pic or funny ads…those are the Imagine Dragons or OneRepublic of advertising. Look at me making a big ad that will give people a big emotion! Probably there are more current bands to bag on here, but I don’t know who they are and don’t want to find out.

Process

I think the best place to start is by asking what’s true about something. Bad true and good true. I know this is what strategy does as a discipline, but I think creatives need to do it more earnestly and archeologically within themselves.

Like, the ‘Jiggle’ example. We kept talking about how weird it is that this freaky-ass food is invited to the most conservative meal of the year. What’s that about? Why do we pretend it’s normal?

Or, there’s the ugly truth that getting a great gift can make your heart sink a little – because now you have to respond in kind. Our creative team of Patrick Wells and Kevin Igunbor brought an incredible script about that for Etsy, that became a Super Bowl ad. Truth is where to start, which is of course paradoxical because advertising contains a lot of smoke and mirrors and blatant overpromises.

That’s why truth is such a powerful place to start, and naturally very disruptive. People know truth when they see it.

Relatedly, I think contradictions are important and extremely fruitful. Some of the most creative people I know are deeply contradictory. You could never invent them as fictional characters – they would be accused of being sloppily conceived. I am a literal mom from Omaha and I am also very weird and disruptive and ‘wrong,’ a person who will throw herself into a wall for a cheap laugh. These things do not belong in the same body, but here they are, wrestling for the mic. I think embracing contradiction is a good way to find a fresh way into an idea, a project, or perhaps, a life. Ask me in 20 years. I might think contradictions are stupid.

Press

I had an unusually winding road to advertising, and also to my role as an ECD. There have been several times I’ve dropped out of agency life, because I thought the creative department was a losing game for women, or utterly impossible for moms, or just toxically narcissistic and bro-coded. I try to be really honest and raw about that ambivalence. I think scepticism is healthy; it doesn’t disqualify you from adding value, probably the opposite. Wieden+Kennedy made so much space for people who thought advertising was contemptible and were great because of that.

I grew up in a liberal family in Omaha, Nebraska. My mom is a therapist and my dad was an engineer who spent his career at IBM. Until I was 25, I had no idea what I was good at or what I could pull off as a career. But because my parents were constitutionally different, I became good at balancing thinking and feeling and if I have a superpower, it's probably that. I alternate those two modes vigorously. I like to try on the opposite any time I think I have the answer.

Because it took me so long to find advertising, I wrote a lot before I became a copywriter. The sheer volume of sentences I’ve written in my life so far is enormous. I thought I was going to be a novelist, I got my MFA in creative writing and English but just lacked the mettle to tough it out long term. I also wrote music reviews for alt weeklies, wrote songs and lyrics, and then eventually my purported writer chops had me writing manifestos in my early ad career that were overwrought and pretentious – and they usually got laughed at and crumpled up. One of my bosses would just put his head in his hands. That’s how I knew it was bad.

I think the best advice I ever got was from Susan Hoffman, my first ad boss. She took one look at some nerdy thing I wrote and she laughed and punched me on the shoulder and said, “Ha! Just fuck it up!” I almost cried because I was desperately trying to not fuck it up. I wanted to be competent and good. But she was right. People need to fuck it up more. Break it. Burn it. Flip it around. See what holds up to that kind of desecration. What's left – that’s the real, potent idea, dizzy and smoking.