Looking for inspiration? You’re meant to be searching through the inner workings of a slightly unhinged (in all the right ways) mind. You will have to do that eventually. But first, there’s a world of winning ideas that have gone before to play with.

Melbourne creative (and unlicensed librarian), Maurice Moynihan, has made that world of ideas instantly accessible. Drop in a brief. Out come the award winners from a category you’d have walked straight past.

It’s called Adnauseum and it reads your brief, then raids the award annuals for you. The site reads your brief and finds the closest ideas from 44,371 award-winning and shortlisted ads from Cannes Lions, D&AD, One Show, Spikes Asia, ADFEST, AWARD and others.

“Paste your brief into a chatbot and it’ll hand you the same twenty award winners everyone’s already seen,” Moynihan stated. “What you actually want is the odd one from somewhere completely different that happens to fit.”

Adnauseum first works out the problem your brief is really trying to solve then flags the questions worth asking before anyone starts. Then it goes looking through ads filed not by category, but by the problem they had to solve.

For example, upload a brief for password-management software and back comes NZ Fire Service’s Made From Remains, a newspaper printed with the ash of burnt-down houses, and a shampoo called Stop the Water While Using Me.

“Neither of them has a password in it, which is kind of the point,” Moynihan adds. “The ads in your own category are your competitors’, and you’ve already sat through all of them.”

Open one and it says why it’s there for your brief, then nudges you with one question about how to borrow the thinking. For Tide’s unwashed jerseys “Their password is named after the dog. How could the dog be the one who says it’s time to change it?”

If your unhinged brain doesn’t get excited by what it finds there’s always a career in client service.

Have a go yourself.