Where do your better ideas happen and when does it just click? I don’t know the answer to this but I’m starting to work it out even after just a short few months in the industry.
Great ideas don’t appear with overkill, spending many hours in a row staring at a blank page is very bad for your mental state and for things to just flow. Escape the office, read books, surf the web, work on another. Do something that is anything but that brief.
We are currently doing a promotional box for Blackberry, having had our concept accepted it was then about refining and improving and adding that wow factor. Stuck, I went to our little library we have of books and dvds and pulled out a book on Japanese graphics. I was looking for manga style free flowing edges and I found what we claim to be the best bit of redefining our concept you could think of. It was a very random find, I hadn’t expected to find what I did in this book but it sure as well looked good.
It’s going to Blackberry tomorrow, so the wait is on, we’ll be gutted if we have to change the concept to be a more Vodafone branded concept.
But back to my question, we also were given a brief for VISA today at 12, due at 6, and this was not a small task, print, press, radio and ambient ideas all wanted. With John and Alistair (CDs) and us working on it, it was all up for grabs, and a chance to impress. 4 hours, with lunch, a meeting and a brainstorm to fit in too we had little more than an hour to have a go.
John and Al had everything you could have thought of, cracking radio and promo stuff, some of which we thought of, but they executed some much cleaner and our thoughts. Ours consisted of all ambient, as we felt we wouldn’t get close to CDs thoughts in an hour. Little did we know, almost all our ideas were liked and 2 were loved and hit the nail on the head with what they were looking for. 1 of which would be awesome if they pulled it off.
So a quick fire brief that requires thought but you can bash out knowing you have so little time is great too. I’m dreading the infamous Christmas Card, it’s been looming over our heads for a while. I might go and liquidise a christmas pudding and pretend it’s an Innocent Smoothie. Chicken and stuffing boiled sweets anyone?
So far so good with 2 and half weeks under our belt, lets hope the ideas keep flowing and our placement continues beyond next Friday.