The creative power of advertising holding companies looks great on paper. WPP holds all the brains from Y&R, Ogilvy, and Grey. Omnicom holds creative powerhouses TBWA, BBDO, and DDB. IPG holds creative gems like MullenLowe, FCB, and R/GA. Sounds amazing, right? And it is, on paper. But to what degree does this “paper power” translate to real, tangible benefits to the clients who buy into the promised depth of resources within a holding company? Do the agencies really play nice together?

I’ll let you answer that question yourself. But what I know for sure is that a holding company deploying a virtual idea-generating platform like Ideasicle X will facilitate bringing specialized “super teams” together across multiple held agencies for any given local client need or pitch. Let me explain.

Generating ideas virtually unleashes a holding company’s true creative potential.

The minute you divorce yourself from the old-school bias that creative teams must be together in the same room in order to create is the minute the entire holding company universe of talent opens up to you. The fact the platform is virtual suddenly means anyone on earth can work on your assignment. Imagine the teams you can create.

If you look at the diagram above, you’ll see some of the possibilities. Sometimes the thinking on Account A can become stale. One way to resolve that is to create a team from within the same agency, but who work on a different account - Account B, with the assignment to come up with ways to refresh an existing campaign for Account A. Or maybe the assignment is for a pitch and is quite broad, so a team made up of different disciplines is the ticket. Simply invite a PR person, a social media person, a cultural anthropologist, and a creative director together, and watch what happens. Or it could be you need a digital ringer from a different agency within the holding company. Just invite that person into the job and he or she can work with three of your people on the assignment.

Of course, you can always invite any outside freelancers from your go-to list or from our list of A-list “Ideasicle Experts.” But the point is, with our virtual platform a holding company’s clients can now truly experience the full resources of the holding company.

The question is, how do you do this in a manageable, disciplined way?

Ideasicle X was designed for virtual creativity.

We have found that the virtual creative process is actually better in many important ways than brainstorming in-person (lots more on that here). We have researched, designed, developed, tested, and used our proprietary virtual model for over a decade now and understand first-hand its tremendous creative wielding potential.

As an example, we figured out through much experimentation that four is the ideal number of people on a virtual team. Any more than that and they feel like they’re “on stage” and are less likely to feel fearless. Creativity abhors fear. Any less than than four and we lose the exponential ideas that result from four different perspectives colliding against a single brief (talking 35-50 ideas in just days). Our model is built, then, for teams of four.

We also realized early on that virtual creativity plays into how human creativity naturally works. Meaning, you can inspire a team of four with a great brief (on the platform, of course, with a video and pdf) and then let the team live their lives, tend to other things, even work on their day-jobs. Ideas for the virtual assignment will hit them when they least expect it, often during the “in-between” times of their day. That’s how creativity works and our platform conforms to that truth and doesn’t resist it. We equip the team to be able to post an idea from their phone from wherever inspiration struck.

Lastly, we discovered that it’s not only the four individuals on the team that makes the outcome exponential, it’s what happens between the team members. One will post an original idea and the rest of the team is pinged and invited to go in and make that idea even better. It’s the building and riffing the team does that is the true magic of the platform.

You could build your own platform, but why spend resources on that? You’re not in the software business and the perfect platform already exists. You could reverse-engineer an existing productivity platform like Basecamp or Slack, but creativity requires calm and focus, neither of which those provide. What’s important is that your holding company has a platform that can get the virtual job done. And we’ve got one.

Schedule a demo of Ideasicle X.

Every holding company is different. Every agency within a holding company is different. So hear us out and let’s see. Email me to schedule a demo so you can see the Ideasicle X platform, how it works, and how it can work for you.

Your holding company just might live up to, if not exceed, what’s promised on paper.

Will Burns is the Founder & CEO of Ideasicle X. Follow him on Twitter @WillOBurns.