- Have you exchanged stories with a stranger this week?



- Have you been beaten senseless in a street fight?

- Have you ever drunk a glass of vinegar?

- Have you been refused service in a restaurant because of your colour?

- Have you fought in a war?

- Have you worked in other industries other than advertising?

- Have you had a near death experience?

- Have you cried so uncontrollably that you had to vomit?

- Have you been fired from your job?

- Did you pick on other people in school?

- Have you been in a threesome?

- Have you ever been lost without money in a foreign country?

- Were you picked on in school?

- Have you been arrested?

It's a pool that you can tap into whenever you write. A very important pool. Even for advertising. Especially for advertising. A person who's just had their heart broken perceives the world differently to someone who never has and will express themselves differently.

Just as a person who's been addicted to drugs perceives the world differently to someone who hasn't. They just do. They're changed by their experience. Everything we experience feeds us. Our cultures offer us with experiences which shape our personal ways of perceiving things. For instance, anyone who has lived in the UK will know that the English and the French aren't terribly fond of each other.

It's not something that consumer's everyday thought however it's there in the national psyche, just waiting for someone to use it. And use it Howell Henery did with their ad for Black Currant Tango. It resonated to sell because they had tapped into that cultural truth.

I assume this way of thinking could work somewhere else. Korea?, Greece?, North and South India?, Japan?, Turkey? It's a pretty human emotion, after all. A person who has grown up in Asia is going to see the world somewhat differently from someone who grew up in America or England.

That doesn't mean we're all so unlike and will never understand one another. I don't subscribe to the view that only Asians know how to advertise to an Asian market. It's as short-sighted as thinking that only Europeans know how to advertise to a European market.

People are more alike than they are unlike. There's far more unifying us than separating us. We all want to love. Be loved. We all eat. We all want security. And we all like to buy stuff. The contexts perhaps change but people commonly don't.

Our cultures help shape our ways of perceiving things. And different ways of perceiving things are a valuable resource in advertising where we all feel like we've seen everything before. About 10 years ago, Sweden started to come into view on the world advertising map. They had a strange way of perceiving at things, to say the least.

And it showed in their work. The Diesel advertising coming out of Paradiset in Stockholm was enormously successful. The Swedish agency's bizarrely kitsch and ironic point of view turned out to be really interesting to cynical Generation X.

Traktor, a group of Swedish directors responsible for producing much of the Diesel work became the most singled out directors in the world. In turn, their work started to influence advertising in the US and the UK. But what happens when you move some of those Swedes and put them in a new environment?

Would they still be different? Would they be understood? Two of the Diesel creative, Linus and Paul ventured to the US to try their hand at Fallon. Here's a little of what they did. It didn't appear anything else in the US, which meant it leaped out like the proverbial dogs? balls. And, once again, helped change advertising a little more over there. Other creative and agencies started endeavoring to do more kitsch and ironic work. Remember the C-Net campaign from Leagus in San Francisco and the Discovery.com campaign from Hal Riney?

Both campaigns incidentally, directed by Traktor. They had changed the industry in the US by showing them a new voice. When Neil French first turned up in Singapore, he brought a unique voice that changed the market there.

When you mixed that up with Australians like Jim Aitchison, the style started to advance further. The next generation helped bring Singapore its own aroma. People like Calvin Sho and Francis Wee took those European and Australian influences and brought their own sensibilities and experiences to them.

Thanks to all that influencing and cross-fertilization, Singapore now has its own definitive advertising style. Advertising is always better when you endeavour to mix things up. Wieden & Kennedy did it throughout the 90s.

They brought in non-advertising people and made them work with ad people. They brought in designers and architects and mixed them up with philosophers and just plain odd people. Say what you like about their work then, but you can't accuse it of being like anyone else's. It was unique. It was honest. It was thoughtful and funny and ironic and provocative. It wasn't like advertising.

They also brought athletes to work on the advertising. They recognized that sport was a culture with its own truths. And if you weren't being authentic, then your audience would reject you. No one wants to hang out with a phoney. Of course, the Swedes weren't the first group of invading foreigners to help diversify advertising voices.

There were Australians going to the UK and the US a decade or so earlier. Eugene Cheong and Tan shen Guan had ventured over to the UK to endeavour and add their voices to the mix. And we've already talked about Neil. Consequently what happens when you start taking voices out of Asian and get them to relate some of their thoughts and memories in the Western market? Well, a good example is Tarsem's ?Elephant? spot for Coke.

He had seen elephants swimming while growing up in India and it added a fresh image to most of our visual psyches. Because you don't see many swimming elephants in Atlanta. I'm going to bastardise a Tarsem quote, however I think it's an fundamental insight into what we do. ?You don't pay me for the film I shoot or the awards I've taken, every movie I've seen.?

With changing emigration and more open, diverse, worldly media, more foreign and alien experiences start to spread out and permeate into other cultures. You start to see some likable imagery come from unexpected places. The Peugeot Sculptor spot was from an Italian agency, for a French care, with an Indian theme.

So what am I getting at? Don't be closed. seek new experiences. Real ones, preferably. If you can, don't go straight from school, to college to advertising. Get arrested first. Leave the country. Go out and take your experiences in a different place. Then come back changed and make use of that new modified voice at home. Or in another place again.