Speed Brainstorming: three techniques to jump start creative

A New Path

Trying to come up with new creative executions that move the needle is, of course, what direct marketing and creative pros do on a daily basis... but that doesn't mean it's easy, especially if you seem to have reached a performance plateau. Here's a few tactics that might come in handy when you need to revisit well-worn ground.

1) Individually visualize your target.

It's one thing to know your audience at a demographic level, but that rarely produces creative breakthroughs. So instead of thinking about what might work for, say, 18 to 34 year old men in urban markets who are interested in sports for an apparel play, name your guy. Put some touch points on a white board as to what music he listens to, what car he drives, where he went to school, the beer he drinks, what sites or books or magazines that he reads, the apps on his phone, and so on, and so on.

When you take a few minutes to put some flesh on the skeleton and to start thinking about people outside of the abstract, you will be in a much better position to do great work. By the way, taking this exercise to the extreme of decorating an entire room as the bedroom of your ideal target, then having brainstorming sessions in that room? That's what the very expensive agencies do. As a matter of routine practice.

2) Moments of charity.

I once had a project to develop tests against the control for short-term financial services in acquisition email. (Not the cleanest of consumer categories, admittedly, but sometimes you don't get to choose your clients.) The winning controls all looked like lottery or sweepstakes creative, with fans of cash and speed messaging making everything in the category look interchangeable.

From the client's demographic materials and feedback, we learned the true reasons why lenders went for the service, and they were far more responsible than you might gather from the art. So we made work that swapped in children receiving medical care, cars getting fixed, and happy families reuniting from the use of the service. The copy changed as well, and the project created new controls, with a promising new way to engage with the prospects.

The bigger point for me, from this exercise, was to have a moment of charity for why a prospect would engage with a service. Once again, it just led to better work.

3) Graphical relevance with visual innovation

When testing against a control, it's important to realize why the control is working. In an exercise with working in the life insurance vertical, research showed winning art across the category that showed families with young children. So the reason why the ads worked was fairly obvious, since you don't really think about life insurance, for the most part, until you have kids. Hence, why the controls all looked the same.

Our next move was to try pieces that, more or less, tried to reach the prospect at an earlier but still valid place in the buying cycle -- so, pushing a baby stroller, holding a newborn in a hospital, and so on, and so on. Once again, the exercise allowed us to exceed the control, and to also develop a wide range of creatives that gave us more room without succumbing to creative wearout.

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You've read this far, so by all means, connect with me personally on LinkedIn.You can always email me at davidlmountain at gmail.com. And, as always, I'd love to hear what you think about this in the comments.