Three Exercises for Living a Commitment to Creativity

Each year, the organizers of the Sunday “Agency Only” program of the iMedia Agency Summit bring in an expert to focus on addressing on the most important challenges facing our industry. This year’s speaker was Tamara Birdsall, Chief Creative Officer of Real Girls Media and a veteran of both the buy and sells sides of the business.

For Tamara, the most important thing that we can do to create a more creative environment – whether we are in Creative or in another Agency discipline, is to make a commitment to walk the walk of making the time and practicing the art of creativity. And then actually walking that walk.

She demonstrated her long running belief that a series of exercises can help us:

• Break out of our linear “ruts”
• Improve our own individual creative thinking
• Drive richer and more valuable group creativity

To help attendees address these three challenges, Tamara engaged the group in three critical exercises.

1. Creative description. Tamara underscored the importance of switching gears – to break out of our day to day activities and busyness with a purely creative exercise. For the purpose of the session, she asked attendees to come up with innovative descriptions for a Granny Smith Apple. Now, obviously, this exercise was not directly applicable to a business challenge. But to Birdsall, that’s the point – that breaking free of our patterns of thought and behavior is a critical first step to being more creative more regularly. And it is the sort of exercise we should be making time for in our daily work life.

2. Mind Mapping: to help us unleash our own internal creative juices, Birdsall had each member of the Agency Day develop a Mind Map for a specific marketing challenge. The nonlinear nature of this exercise proved tremendously valuable to expanding our horizons. Birdsall asked the group to consider a fictitious financial institution considering opening a bank especially for women. By asking each of us to riff individually on the idea of “women and money,” we were each asked to create our own mind maps on the topic. When it came time to review peoples’ maps, it became clear that taking the time to stretch our own thinking can help create more truly innovative concepts.

3. Brain Writing: Her third exercise focused on the technique of brain writing, which asks people to do some initial ideation on paper, and then passing their ideas to the next person for them to build upon. For many people in the room, this written method of ideation was cathartic in that it offered so many advantages over the sort of freeform “brainstorms” that are core to the way most agencies operate, and yet don’t always yield great results.

Tamara was quick to point out that these exercises are only a starting point set of examples of things we can do – that we should explore online resources that further explain these and other tactics so we can find tools that work for us.

What made the session so powerful was the tremendous number of innovative ideas the group was able to generate in only a few moments using the exercises. For those of us who have sat in a tremendous numbers of ineffective freeform brainstorms, Tamara’s suggestions and her passion for trying to find new and more disciplined techniques were a refreshing call to rethink the tactics that aren’t unlocking our full potential.

I know I speak for dozens of attendees when I extend a personal thanks to Tamara for her passion, ideas, and participation.

Special thanks to iMediaConnection for running this first.

Brand Belief Starts with You

Do consumers believe in your brand? Do you?

I’ve talking to my Father a lot over the past few days, and one of his favorite topics is the Dodgers.

The Brooklyn Dodgers. He was a proud Brooklynite. And a major Dodgers fan. Until they moved. For him, the move was a betrayal. A realization that the team owners cared not one whit for Brooklyn or its people.

Which was, in his view, a violation of the brand though he wouldn’t use those words. But the nature of Brooklyn and its people was a big part of the Dodgers brand. They weren’t just a group of players brought together by paychecks – they were an embodiment of the spirit of the Borough – always in the shadow of Manhattan, and determined to scrap and scrape to be on top.

In my 25 or so years in marketing, I have been struck by the number of people I’ve met who were charged with building brands they disdained. People who had contempt for their targets if they were downscale or religious or extremely pedestrian in their aspirations and dreams.

Enter social media. The powerful thing about a TV ad you produce once a year or a print ad you spend thousands on is that it gives the savvy the opportunity to pretend – to pretend to share the values of the users that drive the brand. To pretend that a product is far better than it is. Car photographers and food stylists and supermodels can also be used to obfuscate product issues instead of focusing resources on fixing them.

What I love about social is that there’s no place to hide anymore. No way to paper over fundamental product issues or elitism. In this new environment, truth will out. If we don’t believe in what we are selling, we’ll surely be found out.

We have instincts about which brands care about their products – and us. Is there any doubt in your head that Steve Jobs is a believer? Jeff Bezos? Tony Hsieh?

Even when we don’t know who is behind brands, we love it when brands and the people behind them demonstrate genuine belief in their offerings. Take Cadillac. There are lots of reasons why Cadillac is back, but I think a big part of it is that Cadillac got its groove back – the brash, in your face, look at me sense of this aspirational brand returned as the design team started designing actual Cadillacs again, and everyone else – from the dealer to the men and women on the line – felt good about what they were making and doing. You could feel it. You can feel it.

What other brands feel like they believe in what they are doing?
• Tide
• Hyundai
• Contadina
• Ford
• Flip
• Tyler Perry Studios
• JC Penney
• Tourism Australia

Those are some on my list, anyway.

The popularity of cause related marketing is an interesting side to this belief thing. Many brands are using borrowed interest to give their brands a sense of purpose. I think that’s great – but it doesn’t replace the need for everyone involved in a brand to actually care about their product. Because cause related marketing makes me feel good about this purchase, whereas brand pride and brand belief make me feel good about being loyal to the brand. Now, causes can make me feel better about buying a brand, but they can only supplement – not replace – genuine belief in the things were are making and doing.

Let’s head back to Ebbets Field for the closer. There were a lot of reasons why the Dodgers moved, not least a big fight with the city over a new stadium. Sound familiar?

Anyway, whatever the reasons, there’s no doubt that most Brooklyners felt betrayed. For the Dodgers it didn’t matter much – after all, baseball was a local business and LA was a long ways away from Coney Island. But when we fail to believe in the people that buy our products -- and in those products themselves, the consumer can sense that betrayal.

Think about that the next time those consumers you disdain aren’t signing up in droves for your FaceBook page.

Thanks to iMedia Connection for publishing this first.

Ryan's First Post

Check out Ryan's first post as a Catalysta! So interesting to talk to him and see what people outside the adbiz think of our "danse brandabre."

http://www.mediabizbloggers.com/catalyst-s-f/111853999.html

So long to ya 2010

Let's Avoid Do Not Track

There's nothing like a Youtube video to show you that you are serious need of a diet. Beyond serious. Not that I didn't know, but ouch this is painful to watch.

But what I had to say was important enough for me to post this.