Will’s IX Playbook
If you subscribe to IX Original, this is the place for you. I’ve been doing projects using our Ideasicle X software platform for years now. Heck, I designed it. Below are a number of tips to help make your idea sessions as genius as possible.
How to properly brief the virtual team.
Most people in advertising know this, but not everyone. Creative people abhor overwhelming amounts of information. And it makes sense. If a creative person is overwhelmed with information, that means the input to them (the brief) was indecisive at least or just a mess at worst. It’s very important to have the hard decisions with your team internally in order to get the assignment down to a one page, digestible, inspiring creative brief.
Here’s a short blog post I wrote a while back about writing an inspiring creative brief: Brief Your Creative Team With Inspiration, Not Just Information.
So we have a tight one-page creative brief in green (green because this study suggests the color green primes for creativity). You can steal this brief in Keynote format by clicking the image to the right.
The platform also allows for a video to accompany the creative brief. We always do one because in the video we can explain the brief top to bottom, can add biases we have or things we want the team to explore, and just include things we don’t want to junk up the single page brief with. The video doesn’t have to be fancy. Just a “Zoom-like” head-shot video of someone on your team explaining the brief. Just try to keep it under 10 minutes so we don’t, again, overwhelm the team.
How to recruit the perfect team of 4.
Recruiting a team is my favorite part of the Ideasicle X process other than the actual Idea Stream, where all the ideas are getting posted. The art of crafting the perfect team comes down to a few things:
Need at least someone with category experience, if not brand experience.
Need at least someone with the right skills (e.g. a writer if the assignment is ad campaigns).
Need at least one man and one woman.
And all four should not be clones of each other.
That last one is worth expounding upon. I find that the more “different” the team is from each other—meaning, the more different in perspectives, skill sets, world views, whatever—the better the idea sessions are. And that’s because of a little thing called diversity. Diversity of thought. When four very different people collide intellectually on the same assignment, they all see the assignment in their own way. Their ideas and builds on other ideas comes from their different perspective. That necessarily means each expert on the team is being exposed to thinking unlike his or her own. And THAT leads to exponential idea generation. Faster, better ideas.
With me so far? Let me give you an example.
We had a project recently for Hallmark Health Care. They wanted ad campaigns for a relatively small budget. The target was Chief Nursing Officers in hospitals, so I wanted to have at least two on the team with pretty heavy health care experience. I wanted the entire team to be creatives, but not all writers. And I also wanted to make sure I achieved gender diversity. I invited about ten people from my pool of Ideasicle X Experts to make sure I could field a team of four and the four that were assigned fit the bill perfectly. Ernie Schenck is a genius writer and storyteller, and he also had health care insurance. Rich Wallace is a brilliant art director, and also had health care experience. Claudia Caplan is a fantastic writer and an unafraid approach to creativity, which I love. And Roger Baldacci is a writer, but wildly a conceptual lateral thinker. They were a great team.
When you get to that step in the IX Original process, note there’s a search box there to search for whatever you’re looking for. And when in doubt, just call me (seriously) and I will help you. I know all these experts really well and know what they can do.
More to come…
The perfect health care team: Ernie Schenck, Claudia Caplan, Rich Wallace, and Roger Baldacci.