This is the first guest post on my blog by great and very creative guy Michael Trenerry who have chosen Finland over Australia. You can read more about Michael and his company iKONIC here as well as follow him on Twitter and read his blog to get more of his wisdom. Enjoy!
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Over my time I have sat in many idea generation or brainstorming sessions both within media and advertising agencies, hotshops and on the client side or with the client. These sessions can be to generate ideas for an individual campaign, a long-term strategy, a product launch or they might very well be for your next new business pitch.
Amongst these sessions though, only very few have been in my opinion highly successful. The reason is quite simple. There has been a lacking brief, lack of structure, no leadership and no real collaboration.
The Brief
Mentioned in my earlier blog, the brief is vital. What exactly are we
aiming to achieve from the session. What are our objectives & what
do we already know. Sessions take time and that means money for you, so
lets be sure that we have a good brief that outlays exactly what we
intend to achieve during the session.
Structure and Process
I don’t want to take the fun out of these sessions because that is what
they are all about but you do need some structure to tackle the brief.
The structure does a few things. It ensures we maximise the time we
spend in these sessions constructively. It ensures everybody gets to
put ideas in. It ensures we cover all the points we need to and most of
all it ensures that when we leave & finish the meeting, we leave
with an action list of clear indicators & the key persons involved
in ensuring those tasks are met.
A good session while structured doesn’t really feel structured. Like the term brainstorm, we start by dumping down lots of ideas. From these ideas we decide which are the most innovative and interesting and which best meet the objectives of the brief. When we have a few good ideas we can move forward – expand them, dig deeper, pull out insights, and create example case studies and so on until we feel we have our winning idea. The winning idea will often come in a second or third session after we have analyzed our key ideas in more detail.
Make sure in all cases before a meeting is over that everybody who has attended agrees with the idea & that everybody is cleary aware of what they are required to do to get to the next stage.
Session leader
In all cases, there should be a person in the session that is the
session leader – the person who structures the workshop, understands
the brief in minute detail, a person that listens to others, mediates
and writes ideas down. This person should be skilled in running
ideas/brainstorming sessions and a creative mind. The person should
help the group move along in a clearly structured manner.
Without this person, we essentially normally end up having lots of ideas but no central focus – people walk away from the session with a smile but when they sit down, they don’t really know what next…
Collaboration
I have been involved with many new business pitches. The great ones
show real collaboration, they show that the team worked brilliantly
together and they all believe in the idea and their ability to deliver
it. The successful sessions are fun, a birth of great ideas from
everybody and in the end a united approach that shows very clear
collaboration. The unsuccessful ones seem to have people working in
modules – one digital guy creating digital ideas, one print person
creating print ideas and one television person creating television
ideas – no integration between the overall idea. The idea should show
that all parties have worked together seemlessly on all aspects of the
project.
I could continue to write more about good and bad sessions but to wrap it up, just remember what these sessions are for! Its business, we all have limited time and resources so plan & think strategically at all times BUT also remember to be super creative – don’t let the structure and process ruin the creativity required to build great ideas…
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, gives his 10 rules for surviving an unpredictable world with dignity:
1 Skepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be skeptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behavior. You will always have the last word.
5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.
6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximize trial and error — by mastering the error part.
7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).
8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.
9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.
You can find the whole article here timesonline site.
It's good add on to my previous post on life being a succession of moments.
Image by Midnight-digital via Flickr
I had a fantastic afternoon yesterday with a bunch of people that mad my whole evening bubble with energy and good ideas. Thanks Stephanie & Carl, Karim and Joachim! If only all people were bold and open minded as you ... :-)
Many things have been said about the creativity and innovation. In Denmark, you even have a Innovation and Entrepreneurship Line at business school that will teach you how to be innovative...hmm. Can it?
Being innovative or creative is a mindset and it doesn't happen from 9.00 to 17.00, at least not for me and a few others. According to my experience and the piece of research I've found claims that if you want to get some ideas, you need to stay up.
'Early to bed, early to rise, makes you healthy, wealthy and wise', says proverb, which I've never believed in and reminds me rather about Max Weber's Protestant Ethic.
Being innovative is not just staying up late and night, it is also spending time with other people, being inspired by others who dare to color outside the lines. I am fascinated to observe the reinforcing effect such meetings has on the participants. One word leads to an idea, the one idea leads to another, the ideas become to concept and then someone bold says, let's do it! And the snowball gets rolling on.
More brains are clever than the one. Maybe not strictly clever but the brains can influence each other and provoke the incredible streams of ideas. All you need to do is to stay open and listen to others and let your imagination rule. There will be time for rational selection of ideas afterward. The common sense so often destroys great ideas as it doesn't allow them to mature.
After my meeting yesterday I recalled the friends gatherings I was participating when I was in high school. We could sit hours and talk about the craziest stuff provoked by others. It was like chain reaction and the more insane ideas get the more we talked, the more we created. We weren't afraid to say something stupid. The latter fear embraces us totally when we become grown ups. Shame!
My key to creativity is to shake off the fear of saying something wrong, putting aside the common sense for a while and hang out with people who already did it, leaving the office and walking, and of course stay late up in the night.
How do you open the doors to being innovative?
...is the new green. I am about to finish reading (listening) to Seth Godin's new book Tribes (you can downloaded it here for free or buy on iTunes for $ 0,99).
It is really interesting reading, so important for agencies that strive in finding their way of working in the new more connected reality.
The main outtake to me so far is that it takes changing mindset and attitude. The copy and paste into new template isn't the way for the winners. In order to become the part of the game in the connected world, we need to become heretics and lead the tribe, instead of managing and using old logics pimped with new hype words. It is about telling stories that unite the tribe, instead of giving orders.
Can't wait to get home and finish the book.
Only God knows how many briefing templates, I’ve created during my career at agencies, hoping clients would fill it out. Nope. It didn’t happen. I’ve asked, I’ve explained but it seemed like the word brief evoked some allergic reactions. I’ve begun to wonder whether it was my fault. Was I too pushy? Were my questions too stupid? Were my templates too bad? Clients kept on sending short mails with target group (people 25-45 years old) and budget and the list of wishes. So I called back and asked: What are the objectives? What do you want to achieve? Hmmm. Silence followed by some vague explanations. Then one day - Eureka! Finally I got it. After long consideration and many discussions with both clients and my colleagues, I have found out that people fear briefing as it implies responsibility. Writing things down on paper means not only that you have to give a deep thought to your business, see the way you are going and define where you want to go, but it also makes you responsible for the results. Brief creates unwanted expectations, not to agency, but to the marketer. My experienced showed me that many tend to dislike it. They would rather keep their media down to 5 insertions in glossy magazines, rather then get into discussions and uncomfortable questions about the state of their business. And on the other hand, the intimidating briefing form I was trying to enforce wasn’t helping in any way. The amount and the depth of information, the form and the boundaries the template implied, made it impossible to succeed. It is impossible to hit the jackpot with briefing using the traditional methods cause briefing is a process and it requires a specific set of mind and approach.
Stay Curious
First of all it is an exploration. We are not supposed to jump right away to the answers we believe to be correct. Briefing isn’t any linear process, we might get lost before we find out what the right path is. The trick is to let it happen and stay curious.
Secondly, briefing should be focused on deep understanding and honesty – saying what you think and believe. Honesty is the beautiful virtue and it can make magic at briefing meetings when both agency and client are inclined to say what they think and believe. It takes everything to the next level, it allows not only being clear about tasks and expectations, but also ignites insights and ideas to be used later on.
Dialogue
So you may ask, how can one get a good brief? My answer is, you have to make one yourself. How? By talking with your clients, by having an interesting dialog session* that is a collaborative creation, an exploration of the issue and focuses on the clients and the task. Afterwards writing it all down and reviewing with the client before the final approval.
Dialog session usually starts with the definition of task. What do we expect to achieve? What are the objectives? The next step is the exploration of the task from a number of different perspectives: business, organization, competitors, trade, brand, consumers, society and communication. We just ask questions prepared before and the questions that emerged during the session. It is about listening and monitoring the flow of information. The point is to leave the meeting with a clear understanding of the job to be done, and why it needs to be done, as well as, how to measure the success (KPIs). Not just a piece of paper filled with marketing jargon.
Of course we need the piece of paper for the files and to be sure we have the common understanding of the goals and KPI’s. This time, it is not a template but the document crafted as a result of in-depth discussion about the client business, understanding obstacles and challenges, the consensus on the purpose for the communication and KPIs.
The simple change, turning briefing from questioning into conversation, make it more bearable, useful and insightful tool for creating ideas and making things happen.
Article written for TalentZoo
...and the rest of your lives
"If one spent one's whole day working and sleeping there would be no time for observation, let alone thought." (Thomas Pynchon)
I do a lot of conceptual work lately about innovation and creative work processes within the media agency. It brought to my mind the distinction Aristotle made, and which seem to be forgotten. He divided the world into parts: the first in which things can't be other than they are and another in which things can be other that they are - a simple but very strong distinction. The first part is typified by the physical world in which a rock is a rock and can't be anything else. In this world, Aristotle's Analytics lays out a fabulous toolbox - rigorous, objective, quantitative analysis which goal is to establish and document the reality of the situation. This world is the most known and most of marketing communication is created within the "unchangeable reality", where the being consistent matters.
The other world, where things can be other than they are, is the world of people, of organizations and of cultures. For example, a bad communication strategy can be something else - a great communication strategy - if someone figures out how to turn it around. In this area analytics are inappropriate tool. Instead, Aristotle described the thinking tools: conversation, invention, and intention. Here our efforts aren't focused on the description of what is real but rather on the creation of something that does not currently exist, that must be first imagined.
Media agency must operate within those distinctions. We need to deliver both hard and soft facts. We need to provide our clients the rigorous and quantitative analysis, we can't run away from numbers and we still need to be kind of accountants for our clients and describe the reality by using the hard facts, ROI, reach, awareness, etc. But we can't stuck in that role, we need to evolve into the new type of media planners, into communication guides who take the clients, consumers and brands on the fascinating journey to the modern and fragmented world of plenty.
If media agency wants to keep up with the changes, embrace the media proliferation and get in touch with its most important client - human being - we have to understand and operate in the second of Aristotle worlds - the world where things can be changed via creativity and innovation. I know we people are not so fond of changes in general, we are afraid of losing control. For safety reasons we stick to routines. But if we, media planners want to stay in the game, we don't need to get the new fancy title. In order to stay in the game, we have to develop the new skills, be enthusiastic and curious. We must believe and dare to influence the world and make media plans and brands look different. It is worth it. It is a fantastic adventure.
Every day routines, work, duties, deadlines. Damn you get so serious. Serious title on your business card. So close to be convinced that you are grown up and life is nothing but serious.
Every time I feel that this kind of seriousness is about to hit me like the truck, I turn on this video. It brings me back down to the earth. After all, we are just kids who want to play and we are not so serious as we'd like to look like. It is so easy to be a grownup. Nurturing an inner child is an art. sometimes you just need to go on a silly walk to discover what's life is about.
This is crazy video with crazy kitesurfing stunt. It made me think about the way we work avoiding to take risks and tend to stay on the safe side. But sometimes it is necessary to take the big jump to the other side, break the rules and routines. Try something new and feel the rush. Take a walk on the wild side.
There is nothing worse for your business than bad presentation. There are estimated 30 million presentations each day and around 50% of them kill people. I wrote earlier about the scientific findings showing that power point isn't good for our brains, so I believe we should definitely do our best to improve those power point slides, that will probably never die themselves.
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