Ideas. Rethinking the process.
Juli 12th, 2009 • Ideas
As an agency guy much of your work revolves around ideas. Thinking about new and unseen ways how to promote good products and brands is our business. The key question is, what is an idea and how do I get one? My dad (who is 60) thinks we just sit around all day and get ideas.
In fact, by now most agencies try to work that way. But the classic waterfall model of idea generation doesn’t take anybody very far… except by mistake. Forcing people to sit together and to make them them think about how to solve a problem through brainstorming is plain and simple wrong. Nobody can just sit in a meeting room and create great ideas that work instantly. The classic approach simply won’t do the job anymore. Especially not in a time of 24/7/365 idea-driven activation.
Friday and Saturday last week I had the pleasure to take part in a workshop with Mario Pricken, one of the most succesful German-speaking creative coaches who was guest at Neue Digitale / Razorfish . Pricken has published two very succesful books on how to catch ideas (especially the great “Creative Advertising“) and he really gave me/us a great insight on what ideas are and on how to structure creative processes. Pricken’s basic assumptions
- Ideas are result of a multi step approach, they don’t just ‘come’
- Structuring this process and integrating different players in each level is essential
- The process takes you from ugly, unapplicable ‘idea material’ to beautiful, working concepts
- Generating material is not the same as assembling an idea
- You need different people for every step of the process, nobody really ‘owns’ an idea. It’s teamwork
Pricken proved his concept valid by making us ‘generate’ ideas in a couple of sessions. The results were stunning: A whole load of new idea fragments which may serve as stepstones to come up with a couple of campaigns. Plus, of course an agency which has understood how wrong the classic understanding of brainstorming was/is and why all of us went to the ad industry a while ago. Time to get a new creative process out on the street… 
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