Creative Briefs. Two Decks on making them evolve.

August 11th, 2010 • 1 comment Jobs, Strategy
Tags: Agencies, Cool, Creative, creative briefs, Ideas, Jobs, Prediction, Presentation, Process, Strategy, Tools, World

As a strategist it is kind of a fixation to think about creative briefs. Creative brief? Yes, a piece paper which traditionally is created by a strategist/client directore to serve as a guideline for the creative process. There are literally hundreds of these templates out there. Some are good and some are bad.

In fact, most creative briefs circulating in agencies nowadays are pretty old school. That’s not surprising. Most agencies are pretty old school in the first place, secondly all too often the briefing context is the key problem and not the template. Finally, the ownership over the document is frequently not shared among the different stakeholders. Stupid process that is.

Jasmin Cheng has pulled together quite a nice deck that collects a lot of thoughts about this problem.

Making it Move. How Content gets Social.

Februar 25th, 2010 • 1 comment Social
Tags: Content, Diagram, Process, Social, Social Influence Marketing, Strategy, visual

The following diagram may look a little confusing in the first place. And it does not even answer most questions you might have. But it’s a good overview about one of many different social media processes (if done correctly). Unfortunately the figures in this diagram are without connection to a certain project. I simply found no additional information added to the visualization by its creators Social Reflexion. Anyway it’s a good overview about a huge archetypical (U.S.) social seeding process.

Ideas. Rethinking the process.

Juli 12th, 2009 • Ideas
Tags: Business, Creativity, Ideas, Philosophy, Process

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

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