How to come up with an idea
The other day I went to a wonderful event called Doodle Club. It was wonderful for a few reasons, firstly the name (what a great word ‘doodle’ is), secondly the concept, and thirdly the fact that it included free pizza. Shout out to whoever made that happen.
But to understand what it has to do with this blog, first you need to understand what it entailed and why that made me have a small emotional crisis.
The idea of Doodle Club is that you sit on a table with some blank sheets of paper and a shed load of colourful pens. That is it. What you do with the paper and the pens is entirely up to you. There is no brief, no guidelines, no rules. Just you, the paper and pens and the pizza. For some people this creative freedom was ideal, but for me, a man who eats briefs for breakfast and shits out conceptual copy, it was INCREDIBLY ANXIETY INDUCING.
There was no proposition, no target audience, no call to action. Just endless, relentless freedom and no-one to tell me what I was doing wrong. How the hell was I supposed to cope? (Spoiler - I drew a superhero and called him Doodle Man. That’s how I coped.)
Fortunately, most of my life is spent responding to briefs with tighter boundaries. This is how I come up with ideas for them, and how you can do it too.
Step 1. Start with asking why anyone should care
I used to work with a creative director who always said, “Start with the why.” I always thought this was bullshit, and I still kinda do, but if you extend that saying to '“Start with the why anyone should care” I reckon you’re onto something.
Whatever it is you’re trying to sell, think about its benefits and ask yourself how they’ll make someone’s life better. Is it a shoe that will make it feel like you’re walking on air? Is it a bus ticket that will save them a fiver? Is it solid gold that tastes like smoked bacon? Unlock it, analyse it, explore everything about it, and make that your reason for being.
Maybe you’ll have a few reasons why anyone should care. Maybe there’ll only be one. But however many you’ve got, the rest of your ideas should revolve around them.
Step 2. Be a little bit silly
A lot of advertising looks the same, and that’s because all the silliness gets crushed out of it by the corporate machine, or HR. But now you have all the freedom to be as silly as you like. Take those reasons why people should care and go crazy with them. How will they make someone’s life good? How will they make it fantastic? How will they make it GODLY? Stretch them as far as you can, go wild. Come up with stuff that you just know will never run, but right now it doesn’t matter because you’re being creative. Fill a notebook with silly little thoughts that make you laugh, make you cry, make you scared, and would make your account manager terrified.
Sure, you could sell a box by saying ‘Put things in me,’ or you could sell it by suggesting it might be the home of an alternate universe where Elon Musk was stopped earlier. The choice is entirely yours.
Step 3. Stop working immediately
As much as some CEOs with investments in offices believe that being in the office is essential to getting good work done, it isn’t. Very few, if any, truly good ideas come from being stuck behind a desk. They come while you’re having a walk, while you’re in the shower, while you’re beating some kid online at some game, or while you’re trying desperately to sleep. Good ideas come when your mind is being filled with imagination, and imagination does not live at your desk. No matter how quirky your office is, no amount of phone booth meeting rooms or ping pong tables is going to make creativity happen.
When you’re thinking of ideas, you need to give your mind the energy it needs to think. Once you’ve taken in the brief and thought about its purpose, your brain will have the key ingredients swimming around inside. Inspiration will mix them all together and potentially produce something interesting.
Step 4. Write ‘em up
I know I might sound a little biased, but I really think writing your ideas out is the best way to see if they’ll work. Whether you’re a designer, an animator, or even a brain surgeon, writing your thoughts up will help you see whether they make sense outside of your brilliant mind. Take all that inspiration you’ve got and imagine how it would look as a press ad. How would it look as a headline? What would the message say? What would you want people to take away from it? What would the call to action be?
This way you can see if your silliness makes any sense. It helps you cut out the fluff, seeing which ideas would actually work in the real world. A press ad is creativity in its most brutal form - even if this won’t be your final execution (which it possibly won’t be, cos kids are all about the Bebo and FourSquare these days) it will help you see it. It will make it real.
Once you’ve written all your ideas up as ad concepts, you can start to kill the ones that don’t work. Which leads us nicely on to step 5…
Step 5. Destruction
Imagine, if you will, that you are a sperm. You’re swimming along quite nicely, picturing a future where you’re a landscape gardener or a contestant on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, when suddenly - BAM! - you’re obliterated by an immune system trained to see you as an enemy. You’ve been killed because you are too weak. You don’t have the genes for a strong child, and you will not be given the chance to evolve.
Your ideas need to go on the same journey. While you might love all of them, most of them won’t be destined for the world and need to be confined to the special part of your notebook where only the crazy thoughts live. Killing your weak ideas will help your other ideas look stronger. Instead of presenting your boss/ account manager/ client with a whole load of bonkers, you’ll actually give them work that has been considered and carefully thought about.
There might be elements of your other ideas that you’d like to preserve, and maybe you can. Bring them over to a less crazy idea, combine the two. But, more often than not, you’ll need to say goodbye to your dreams of whatever the hell that was and accept that you’re just too artistic for this world to understand.
Step 6. Crafting
So now you’ve got rid of your less good ideas, you’re left with only the ones you think are decent enough not to smash to pieces. Still, you’re not there yet. These brave survivors need messing with to make them truly worthy of presenting. To craft an idea, you need to stress test it. So far it’s only a good idea in your head, and while your head is a very good place, it’s not the heads of all your target audience.
Show it to a colleague. “Hey, coworker, here’s a thought I’ve had. Do you like it or think it’s totally idiotic?” Read it out-loud in a public space and see what reaction you get. Send it to an unsuspecting friend without any context, and see if they’re still your friend after reading it.
Public opinion at this point is crucial. Talk your ideas through with someone, anyone, and take their opinions on board.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: You don’t have to listen to anyone’s opinion at this stage. If one person doesn’t like it, someone else might. But if two people don’t like it, or three people, or four. or everyone you work with, maybe it’s worth paying attention.
Step 7. Present them
Ultimately, no matter what job you do, there will be someone who needs to like your work in order for you to get paid. Someone will need to see that the time you spent pissing about getting inspired was worth it. Someone will need to sign something off.
When it comes to presenting your ideas, it pays not to put much too much effort into how they look. If you spend ages mocking them up and making them pretty, you can get end up getting feedback that’s more about their appearance than the actual concept. Instead, go for a scamp - a quick visual that shows your idea in its purest form.
Give them a headline, a hero image, a tagline, the essence of what you’ve been mulling around with. That both gives someone all they need to know to judge your work, and also prevents you wasting too much time putting it together. If they hate everything, which does happen occasionally, it’ll be quick enough to go back to the drawing board. If you’ve spent hours putting something together, starting again will feel like a real kick in the teeth.
Step 8. Don’t forget none of this really matters in the long run
Perhaps the most crucial step of all is also the final step. It is always the final step. On any brief, this is the step you need to finish with. In this silly little world we work in, ultimately it doesn’t matter if our ideas never see the light of day, or if they do but not as you wanted them to, or if they do but someone else takes all the credit.
I’ve seen good creative people lose their way because they’ve cared too much. Put all of that nonsense in at the start, at the fun bit, then forget all about it once the feedback starts to come rolling in. Only fight for the ideas you really, truly care about, and let things like a banner ad for a new mortgage offer, and a TikTok campaign for peanuts, slide.
They won’t define you, but caring about them too much could destroy you.
Can’t be arsed with any of that?
That’s cool. I’ll do it for you. I love thinking of ideas, especially if they can be executed via the written word. Whether you need ideas for your website, ideas for an ad campaign, ideas for a massive billboard or just an idea for how to tell the person next to you that you think they’re swell, I’m happy to do all eight of those above steps for you to a very high standard.