Want to learn where great ideas come from?
There’s an exercise that helps you get an insight into how brilliant work was made.
Start with an old awards annual, pick an ad, then try to ‘backtrack to the brief’.
Put yourself in the shoes of the creatives concepting the idea and imagine the different questions, steps or logic they used to get to the answer they found.
Obviously you can’t be sure you’re right but it doesn’t matter. At the very least you’re thinking through how you might have come up with the same idea.
That’s what it’s really about. Seeing new and different ways to get from a brief to great creative.
Then you can apply those thought processes on your own work.
Do it with bad ads too. See where things went off track so you can avoid doing the same.
You can even try it out on campaigns with an online case study, so you can see how close you were.
I did this a lot. And still do.
Especially as it also helps you to judge work. If you look at an ad and can’t work back to a strong brief or proposition there’s a decent chance that it’s a case of style over substance. Lacking any real meaningful take-out.
And if you’re struggling to find it then the general public, who’ve no interest in trying to work ads out, certainly won’t have had much of a takeout.
It’s a pretty interesting test to use on whichever ad’s doing the rounds aboard the weekly industry hype-train.
I was tempted to say try one of mine and I can then tell you how close you were to the brief. But there’s always the chance that would go badly for me.
