Getting the Creative Idea Just Right

There are thousands of filmmakers out there who could make you a stunning looking film. What sets the great ones apart is their creative thinking and how they deliver work that answers and enlivens the confines of the brief. 

The case for creativity

According to Dynamic Logic 70% of a campaign’s effectiveness is defined by the quality of the creative messaging.[1] That means that getting this bit right is essential to maximising your return on investment and succeeding with your content strategy. So how can you come up with ideas which will make your content stand apart?

 “Inspiration exists, but it must find you working”

-      Pablo Picasso

Ideas for great work can come from anywhere. It really helps to have an open mind to different sources of inspiration that you might come across in your day to day life. I have always found that the best way to come up with ideas was to go through the brief in depth so that you are fully ‘inside’ what you are trying to achieve, the audience and possible techniques. I then find it useful to spend a couple of days mulling it over before settling on something. 

This reflects James Webb Young’s method outlined in his 1940 book, A Technique for Producing Ideas. It might be 80 years old, but it works as well as ever: 

Step 1. Gather

Get as much background information as you can. Try to understand exactly what the problem is (this is where a really good/thorough brief comes in handy). Look for inspiration / avoid cliche by understanding the ways that people have communicated on this issue before. Have a look at your Inspiration Scrapbook. You want to full immerse yourself in the brief and the problem to be solved.

Step 2. Think

Start playing with different ideas. Ask lots of questions: can we combine x with y? Try juxtaposing different ideas on top of each other. Throw idea 'paint' at the wall and see what sticks. Keep going until you can’t do it anymore.

Step 3. Forget

Move onto other things, but keep the problem in mind. Go for a walk, listen to a podcast, visit a museum or gallery, or just continue with your work. Mull the idea over in the background.

Step 4. Idea!

If you have worked through the first three steps properly, you will find that an idea should just pop into your head. This may well happen when you least expect it – you might find it useful to keep a pencil and paper beside your bed, so that you can write any late night flourishes down and go back to sleep without worrying about forgetting it. 

Step 5. Craft

Finally, you will need to hone your idea into something which answers all facets of the brief. This requires work to make it just right. You should make sure it works visually and conceptually. Like any diamond pulled from the rough, you will need to spend time polishing to make it really sparkle. 

…

Box: Keeping an Inspiration Scrapbook

We’re all subjected to so much content that it can be difficult to keep track of all the different inspirations that you might choose to draw on. Because of this, it’s useful to keep a scrapbook of different ideas that you have seen, which you think might work one day. This could be as simple as creating a playlist on YouTube, or a pin board on Pinterest. You could also download imagery into folder, ready to be included in a PowerPoint/Keynote when you want to review it. However you decide to do it, it makes the process of reviewing ideas and techniques significantly less frustrating if you have everything you need laid out.

…

Brainstorms 

I’ve always had a bit of a love hate relationship with creative brainstorms. It’s useful to have everyone who is going to be involved in the process in the room to discuss the project. Where I think they fall down is when you open it to the wider company, getting too many people who don’t quite understand the brief together. Brainstorm ideas can be fairly superficial, lacking the creative depth to hit all the points on the brief. If they are used as a starting point, they can still play a role, particularly if the aim is to get all those involved in the process to feel like they have some agency in the idea.

Whatever the size of your company - getting a large number of people together in a room together is expensive. I have found that while you never quite know where a good idea will come from, they do have a bit of a tendency to degenerate and stop delivering useful ideas relatively quickly – after about 40/45 minutes. To that end, here are a few tips to run a fruitful brainstorm session:

1.    Nominate a chairperson - someone who has had the time to really understand the brief.

2.    The chair starts the session off by reading the brief and explaining any ambiguities/answering questions.

3.    They then share any inspirations or additional material. 

4.    The chair takes notes on a large page/flipchart/whiteboard so that the group can see what has been discussed.

5.    Consider starting the session by getting people to discuss the brief in twos, or even working on it on their own, before reconvening as a group to discuss findings. This is a method that Hassan Rafiq at EY has been using to great effect – it’s a great way of getting more introverted people to have a valuable contribution to the meeting.

6.    You might find it useful to run the group standing up as this improves brain function / speed of meeting.

7.    There is no such thing as a ‘wrong’ idea, as each thought could inspire another group member’s thinking.

8.    The chair should make sure that everyone is contributing. 

9.    Don’t let the meeting go on longer than people have inspiration. If the group is starting to flag try reposing the problem with a slightly different question.

Questions can be more useful than answers. In an interesting Harvard Business Review (March-April 2018) article, Hal Gregersenshared a story of a brainstorming session that had run out of ideas. Rather than waste the last ten minutes, he asked everyone to think of the questions that they might want to answer in the next session. This then invigorated the debate as the attendees engaged their minds in a different way. In doing so, it kick started the whole discussion and led to far more fruitful results.

Focus groups and consensus creative

“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse”

-      Henry Ford                 

Avoid the temptation to rely on focus groups for your creative thinking. As the saying goes ‘a camel is a horse designed by a committee.’ Focus groups should only be used to test creative thinking with a given audience group. 

Be bold with your creative ideas. Make sure they are grounded in research and audience understanding and then allow the creatives to run with it. Choose your creative team/partners carefully, then back them. There is so much content shared online that you need to try to stand out. Creating content based on consensus will lead to work which is too vanilla to really hit any specific audience. Focus groups lead to consensus and consensus translates to no one getting what they wanted.

…

Box: Walmart gives away control

For their Oscars night ads in 2017, Walmart gave creative control to Hollywood directors, Antoine Fuqua, Marc Forster and Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg. They had to make a film based on a single Walmart receipt, reflecting the idea that: ‘every receipt tells a story’. The only guidance that the brand gave them was: “be storytellers”.

Appropriately, Rogan and Goldberg’s spot opens with a teacher writing: Finding Inspiration in Unusual Places on the board and saying: “Inspiration can be found anywhere if you really look for it”. It then breaks into a musical number with a breadth of different products sung about by a scootering, roller skating dancing ensemble as the camera moves seamlessly from scene to scene.

…

Other ways of finding content ideas

1.    Ask your staff – they have a huge resource of life experience and insight on which to draw. You could create a competition, encouraging people to come forward with stories that you can share.

2.    Ask your customers – run a competition, incentivise them with benefits and prizes. 

3.    Social media provides you with a vast supply of stories and potential subjects. This has the added benefit of helping you to build your potential audience through finding the stories that you will share. 

4.    Charitable causes your business supports. This is a goldmine for potentially brilliant content. Speak to them, explain what you are trying to achieve and see what they might have to help you. It’s important that you are playing an active role in supporting them, before you start to use it in your marketing. Walk the walk, before you talk the talk.

5.    Listen and be open minded – there are stories all around you. By keeping what you are trying to achieve in mind, you may be surprised how many potential story subjects you come across.

Testing, refining, reiterating creative

Take time to understand the audience, their interests, concerns and all the different elements outlined in their audience profiles. Once you have these, you should create three different ideas quickly and cheaply and test them either with your subscriber/membership group or with the wider market. This will give you a huge amount of data – how many people from which target groups watched which pieces of content, where did they drop off, were there any surprises in the data. Once you have this information you can share more content based on the learnings from the first tranche. You should continue this approach, reiterating, sharing, learning. All the while you will be gathering information that you can use to improve the effectiveness of your future content.

Creative Confined

Corporate film production has historically got a bit of a bad rap. At the glamorous end of the corporate film world – advertising, there has always been an incentive to be as creative as possible. Corporate has languished in magnolia mediocrity because there has never been the incentive to create really great work. The audience was traditionally captive, because the audience was historically captive – they had to watch what was sent to them by head office.

One of the questions I get asked relatively often is how can you be creative when you are producing work to communicate dry financial or corporate messaging. The fact is that creativity without constraint is anarchy. By providing constraints you actually make it easier, rather than harder for creative thinking to flourish. 

I illustrate this point in some of the presentations I give with the following two stage thought experiment… 

First, I want you to pause for a moment and try to think of something funny happening.

Now I want you to think of something funny happening in a pie shop with a butcher and a chicken.

You should have found it significantly easier to think of something when I provided you with some constraints. There is nothing particularly funny per se about the above situation, it just gave your mind something to work with.

How can you work with this fact? Make sure that your briefing includes all the required information and stipulations and then let the production team run with it.

Happy idea hunting.

...

This is taken from my forthcoming book:

The New Fire: Set your Brand Alight with Video, out in October 2018.

[1]https://adage.com/article/digital/digital-online-ads-working-blame-creative/139795/