When Tony Davidson was a young advertising creative, he stuck a picture of skydivers jumping out of a aircraft into a scrapbook. “Underneath I wrote shapes, I didn't have a clue what I was going to do with it,” he said.

Two decades later, the executive creative director at Wieden & Kennedy London was looking for inspiration for an advertising campaign for Honda and the idea came back to him.

It was the start of a live commercial lasting 3min 20 sec and taking up an entire advertisment break, in which team formation skydivers spell out the car manufacturer's name in the air. It was an acclaimed success, with 2.3 million viewers tuning in to watch and many more seeing it on YouTube.

Ideas are what makes advertising addictive, he said. “You tell someone an idea and it's like a joke, you can see that they get it.”

Even though he has worked in the industry for more than 20 years, inspiration still turns up in unlikely places.

He has three rules: collect everything- hence his passion for scrapbooks and fleamarkets - and never use an idea until it's right; surround yourself with “inspiring things, people”; and get out of the office - which becomes increasingly difficult. The irony is not lost: “You get rewarded for being a good creative by being told to manage people.”

In his eight years at the helm, the business has grown from 20 people to 150. He tries to make time to walk round and oversee junior creatives. “The temptation for creative directors is to take all the best briefs, but if you do that you are not allowing others to learn. The trick is to hire people who are better than you"

Inspiration is tempered by commercial objectives. Mr Davidson disliked the Honda strapline- “The power of dreams”. “I said that's terrible' and wanted to start afresh.”

The company refused - but when he looked into the company's history, he was captivated by the founder Soichiro, a blacksmith's son who succeeded through a passion for mechanics. W&K's next tagline, a“difficult is worth doingamp”, was Mr Honda's motto. Digging deep into a brand lends a campaign authenticity, Mr Davidson said.

“The DNA of the company is in its founders. Stick that culture on the walls around you and try to become that company emotionally. It stops you writing ads. I don't like adverts. They've fallen into a set way of being done. People decode them and say I'm not interested'.”

Yet he has always been fascinated by them. As a child, he remembers hanging upside down on the sofa with his siblings, playing “guess the commercial”. “I wasn't really aware of what they were, I just thought they were fun.”

At school he excelled at art and studied design and communication media at Manchester Polytechnic. He landed a job at BMP, the advertising agency, as a junior art director.

At the end of his first year he was told to find a creative partner. Bill Bernbach, credited as the father of modern advertising, introduced the notion that copywriters should work with art directors. Mr Davidson says he and Kim Papworth, his creative partner do not fit the mould.

“Kim's dyslexic and can't really write, and I'm not a great art director. But somehow it works.” They have spent their entire careers working together- bar a three-year“divorce” when he went to work in America.

At Bartle Bogle Hegarty, they dreamt up Levi's Flat Eric campaign. The soundtrack topped the charts in ten countries. The partnership is a “yin yang thing”, he said. “He's the quiet one, more observant, while I'm the bull in the china shop.”

Creativity, that magic commodity, is the ability to put things together in unexpected ways, he concluded. The W&K office is a shrine to the unlikely, from the parking spaces with a dotted line and scissors to the entrance, where a besuited statue stands with a blender for a head.

Mr Davidson often cannot sleep for the bizarre pictures in his head but he wouldn't change it. “I was looking at a piece of art the other day and I thought that would make a great staircase. I don't think other people think like that, somehow.”

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