Ideas & Creative Process
If you're not relaxed, stop until you are. Just the simple act of physical relaxation will bring on new ideas.
Eventually, you get to an idea that dramatizes the benefit of your client's product or service. Dramatizes is the key word. You must dramatize it in a unique, provocative, compelling, and memorable way.
Bernbach said, “Dullness won't sell your product, but neither will irrelevant brilliance.”
Eavesdropping is the best way to learn what customers think
If an idea based on these feelings makes sense to you, it'll probably make sense to others. So sort out the feelings you have about the brand and then articulate them in the most memorable way you can.
Admitting any kind of weakness may be a counterintuitive way to establish trust, but it is effective.
The best ideas are truth brought to light in fresh, new ways.
Density of content and elegance of form
The interesting part of an ad shouldn't be a device that points to the sales message; it should be the sales message
Quit trying to come up with “advertising ideas” and work instead on coming up with ideas worth advertising.
To design something wrong is easy. A little wrong is no good, and a lot wrong is even worse—whereas rong? Rong can be perfect. The key is that the idea must be in direct opposition to all prevailing wisdom.
Be provocative. But be sure your provocativeness stems from your product.
Consider where a message or an experience from your brand would be seen less as an ad and more as content.
If you don't have conflict, you don't have a story.
To be interesting, a story needs both positive and negative forces in play.
Creativity happens in response to a problem
A platform is an idea that creates ideas. And the richer the set of rules in your world, the more stories you can pull out of it.
If you can't write your idea on a Post-It note, it's probably not a very big idea
Emotions that inspire sharing (high arousal) and those that don’t (low arisal):
Process techniques
“The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of ideas.…At first, they'll seem as hard to find as crumbs on an oriental rug. Then they start coming in bunches. When they do, don't stop to analyze them; if you do, you'll stop the flow, the rhythm, the magic. Write each idea down and go on to the next one.”
Your first order of business working on a project is to write down the truest thing you can say about your product or brand. Then start looking for conflicts/tensions that happen as a result of that truth.
Write down why you think people are doing something.
Then ask “Why is this important?” three times
Each time you do this, not your answer, and you’ll notice that you drill down further and further toward uncovering not only the core of an idea, but the emotion behind it.
Try this. Begin your headline with: “This is an ad about.…”And then keep writing.
So begin by taking the strategy and saying it some other way; any old way.
Try anything that will change the strategy statement from something you'd overhear in an elevator at a sales convention to a message you'd see spray painted on an alley wall.
Once you've decided what the right emotion is, it may help to put up some pictures that put you in the mood.
What does the ad want to say? Not you, the ad.
What doesn't the product do? Who doesn't need the product? When is the product a waste of money? Study the inverse problem and see where the opposite thinking leads.
Don't edit anything when you're coming up with the ads. Then, later, be ruthless. Cut everything that's not A-plus work.
Take your product, change it visually, and by doing so dramatize a customer benefit.
Don't look for what's wrong with a new idea; look for what's right.
Interpret and attack a creative problem from wildly different angles, including to:
Draw a rectangle with a line down the middle and imagine the line represents the term “vs.” Now let the two spaces on either side of the line represent any kind of conflict that works for you: life with the product vs. life without it. Our product vs. their product. Or before vs. after.
