We believe there must be something like a creative ovulation. Considering how many times you’re damn uninspired and have to force yourself to be productive, there must be a creative ovulation. So only during a few days a month you’re able to get pregnant with a great idea. And even then, you have to be lucky if it has ten fingers and ten toes. Cause the difference is that in this world you won’t love your baby if it looks like a freak. So the rest of the month I guess you’ve got to absorb as much as possible to get inspired and creatively challenged.
I’m really curious if there’s another way to do it. A more mechanical, scientific way of coming up with creative ideas, based on some kind of a structure. I guess every team has their own structure how to generate ideas (if you have a genius one, don’t feel shy to e-mail us and share it). Ours is more or less every time the same - you start to come up with insights about the product, consumers behaviour or needs and so on. So first you have to fill at least three A4 papers with what you think are insightful truths. Until you wake up the morning after and realize it’s all obvious, expected and stereotypical. So then you look at your partner thinking “He’s really dragging me down this guy, making me do this kind of crap” and he thinks the same about you. Anyway, you throw away your first thoughts that you’ve put down on those papers and phase 1 is finally over.
What you tend to forget though, that all these obvious and not-insightful-at-all ideas made the wheel rolling and what have been born are different tracks of thoughts. So then eventually you find an insight - a strategy - a concept that makes you both smile. And you have something to start discussing about and coming up with different campaign ideas for. Even in this phase it’s pretty much the same every time. In our case, we start to come up with stories. “Imagine this guy and he does all those crazy things and you can follow him online and it goes viral, it’s a hit!” And this is the second time in the process where we feel a bit ashamed that we for a short moment believed that people would be interested in following this stupid character we just invented. However, we can recognize it’s a process in progress.
The third phase is really classic too. There’s an idea that feels fresh, twisted, relevant and slightly innovative. But something is missing. It’s not round yet so you have to solve it and create the last piece that will make it all fit together. Then the moment comes when your brilliant minds come up with the idea of a competition. People can vote for nonsense stuff or do something to win something that no one really wants or be a part of the campaign in some constructed way. A short time after this phase you realize that it’s time to go home and sleep again.
The forth phase is the only one where every time is a surprise, cause this is where the magic starts. You put away the brief for a while and you look with new eyes at the work you’ve done during the previous, what seemed to be, hopeless phases. And as you’re about to give up and on your way to the unemployment office line, suddenly you see your partner is standing there with a huge belly and the water breaks.
(Note the epical and metaphoric ending. It belongs to one of our brightest moments).
