Elon Musk’s Flying Car Gives Creatives a New Brief

Inviting customers to dream big

Elon shows us a car leaving the ground, and people immediately start imagining what they would do with it. Their commute. Their traffic. Their first day owning one. All the things that could go wrong.

That’s the part I’m most interested in. How quickly someone else’s product becomes material for your own imagination.

I wrote a while back that IP should stand for “Invitation to Participate.” Give people something they can step into, use and extend. Know what makes it yours. Have enough confidence to let someone else take it somewhere you hadn’t considered.

The Roadster offers a compelling example.

A flying car comes with decades of imagination already attached to it. We grew up expecting one. We’ve sat in traffic wondering when someone would figure it out. Elon puts a version of that possibility in front of people, and they already know what to do with it.

Now they have the tools to show you.

Giving Customers the Keys to Create

The gap between “imagine if” and a video you can share keeps getting smaller. Someone sees the demonstration, has an idea and makes their own scene. The brand becomes part of something they wanted to express. For anyone in our business, that should change the brief.

We spend too much time deciding what we want people to think. We should spend more time asking what we’re giving them to do. What’s interesting enough about this idea that somebody would spend their own time making something with it?

Elon understands how to create that opening. His biggest ideas are easy to picture. You can have serious questions about whether they’ll work and still find yourself imagining the possibilities.

Even the criticism has creative energy. People want to take the premise further, push it until it breaks, put it in their own world.

That doesn’t mean every joke builds trust. It certainly doesn’t mean everyone making a Roadster video wants to buy one. The car still has to become a product people can actually use. Attention creates expectations, and eventually you have to meet them.

Funnier, Stranger and More Interesting

But brands should be studying something here closely. People are willing to create with your ideas when those ideas give them something worth working with. A recognizable object. A behavior they can exaggerate. A possibility that becomes personal the second they encounter it.

You must leave room for their contribution. That takes taste and judgment. It takes knowing what to protect, what to make available and how to credit the people adding something. You also must accept that their version may be funnier, stranger or more interesting than yours.

I think that’s an exciting place for creativity to go. Make the thing. Give it a point of view. Make it distinctive enough that people know where it came from. Then give them room to surprise you.

We should be making more work that somebody else can’t wait to get their hands on.