At ADFEST 2026, Ravid Kuperberg, Partner and Trainer at Mindscapes in Tel Aviv, presented “The Rules Behind Breaking the Rules.” Drawing on award-winning work from around the world, he showed that more than 80% of Grand Prix and Gold Cannes Lions can be linked to one of sixteen recurring thinking patterns. Rather than relying on inspiration alone, those patterns can be translated into practical thinking tools that help creatives develop more original ideas. The session focused on two of them: Replication and Dynamic Connection.
Kuperberg interestingly pointed out that the biggest obstacle to creative thinking is our brain. That original thinking is often limited because the mind naturally falls back to what it already knows. To demonstrate, Kuperberg asked the audience to imagine the most creative table they could. Almost everyone still pictured a tabletop with its 4 legs. The exercise illustrated two cognitive biases:
Structural Fixedness: We tend to picture familiar things the way we’ve always seen them.
Functional Fixedness: We tend to think familiar things can only do what they’ve always done.
Both pull the mind towards familiar answers. Mindscapes translate recurring thinking patterns into practical thinking tools that help people move beyond those defaults and approach problems in new ways.
REPLICATION
The first thinking pattern takes an existing practice, feature, or solution that already works in one environment and applies it to another facing a similar challenge. Kuperberg described two approaches:
Import: Bring an existing practice into the brand’s world. He illustrated this with Renault’s “Plug Inn” by Publicis Conseil that imported Airbnb’s peer-to-peer model to allow homeowners to rent out private EV chargers.
Export: Take the brand’s own practice into a new environment. As shown in VML New York’s “Preserved Promos” for Ziploc where Ziploc’s food-preservation role is exported to expired grocery coupons, allowing shoppers to “preserve” coupons as long as Ziploc was included in the basket.
Replication can also move across different environments. From Physical to Digital, like how Cheil Pengtai Beijing and Cheil Hong Kong embedded CPR training into Blood River, turning gameplay into CPR practice in “Back2Life” for Samsung. From Nature to Human, similar to how designers were inspired by the kingfisher’s beak to shape the Shinkansen bullet train through biomimicry. And from Human to Nature, the way Mindshare Melbourne attached step counters to chickens to demonstrate genuine free-range movement. Different executions, but the same thinking action: applying something familiar in a place where it has never been applied before.
DYNAMIC CONNECTION
The second pattern creates a new relationship between two variables that have never been connected before. Kuperberg divided them into two groups:
Internal variables: Elements the brand controls, such as price, discount, packaging, product design, or website resolution.
External variables: Elements outside the brand’s control, such as location, movement, sound, behaviour, or mood.
Kuperberg expanded on external variables. They should represent the brand message or benefit, not simply create an unexpected connection. Plaza Vea linked website resolution to internet quality, automatically serving a lighter website in areas with weaker connectivity in “Redesigning for E-nclusion” by Fahrenheit DDB. Whirlpool tied discounts to how much a washing machine “danced,” reinforcing its message of appliance reliability with its “Dancing Washers” by VML Mexico. He noted that Whirlpool could just as easily have linked the discount to the number of birds in the sky. It would still be unexpected, but it would have nothing to do with the product. Calm, an Argentine mattress brand, linked discounts to the intensity of a partner’s snoring through a Gemini-powered WhatsApp bot, turning a promotion into a story about sleep in “The Sound of Divorce” by Ogilvy Argentina. The connection becomes meaningful when the external variable communicates the brand message, rather than simply creating surprise.
To develop Dynamic Connection, Kuperberg suggested starting with two lists. The first contains every internal variable the brand can control, pushing beyond the first few obvious answers. The second contains external variables that best represent the brand message. Reading the two lists against each other reveals connections that intuition alone is unlikely to discover. AI can help expand both lists and uncover more possibilities, but selecting the most relevant and meaningful connection remains a human decision.
Original ideas may appear unpredictable, but the thinking behind them can be learned. These patterns are not formulas for creativity. They are practical thinking tools that help the mind move beyond familiar ways of thinking, making originality less dependent on inspiration and more intentional.
Creative ideas rarely come from waiting for inspiration. They emerge when creatives deliberately overcome intuitive thinking, challenge cognitive biases, and apply proven thinking patterns that reveal possibilities others simply don't see.
So now you know what to look for.
