So, how do you get creative? What secrets can you uncover that will transform
you from businessperson to creative genius? Unfortunately, I can’t offer you a magic potion.
But I can tell you that you can jump-start your creativity by gathering a few friends, family members, or employees around and doing what the professionals do: Hold a creative brainstorming session.
Advertising agencies often hold creative sessions, or brainstorming sessions, when they’re designing new campaigns (or redesigning old ones). In my mind, these meetings are the most fun an ad person can have –– at least while at work.
You can always find a more creative, memorable, unique way with which to get your message across. Your idea doesn’t need to be earth-shattering in its creativity — just different, clever, and memorable enough to grab the eye or ear of the consumers and motivate them to at least consider giving you a shot. The trick, of course, is to find what that hook is for your business or product.
Involving everyone in the brainstorming process
In a creative session, all the people who will be working on a particular account — owners, creative directors, copywriters, artists, even the account service people — gather in one room. You trade as much information as possible about the account, the product, and the primary market, and then you begin tossing out ideas. The initial ideas beget more and more ideas, which will, eventually, result in the perfect creative answer to the problem at hand.
The only rule in a brainstorming meeting is that no idea will be laughed at or discarded out of hand. The session should be a stream-of-consciousness type of gathering, and no idea is far-fetched or stupid. Every idea gets tossed onto the table and considered.
Recording your brainstorming ideas
In creative sessions, when someone throws out an idea, a scribe should write it in marker along with other ideas onto large sheets of paper (a cheap and easy way to record your ideas; plus, you can keep the sheets for reference, which you can’t do if you write on a blackboard or whiteboard). As the sheets of paper fill up, your scribe should tape them to the walls. Before long, the room will be festooned with ideas — good and bad — from wall to wall. The entire group should study the ideas, and then refine, change, and resubmit them Eventually, the creative hook — your new advertising message — begins to take shape. And when everyone in attendance agrees that a certain concept is the best answer to the problem, the group focuses on that superlative idea and begins to massage it into the final product.
Creativity is hard work. Ideas don’t just jump up and bite you (although the bad ones have some pretty gnarly teeth). You need to search for them very diligently . . . but they will happen. I’ve gone into creative sessions with no clue as to what we could come up with for a particular account, and I’ve walked out armed with great, new ideas that we could ride for months to come. The creative session is the two-heads-are-better-than-one approach — a tried-and-true method of generating dozens of fresh, new ideas.
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