Ideasicle X Empowers Creative Departments
Ideasicle X, as wonderful as we think it is for coming up with great ideas quickly, is not designed to replace any creative departments. It’s a fear we’ve heard more than once. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Ideasicle X is designed to be a behind-the-scenes complement to magnify the power of creative departments. Let me explain.
Ideas inspire ideas.
Great creative briefs inspire creative ideas. Everybody knows that. But what if your process went a step further and got a multitude of “kick-starter” ideas against that brief for your teams to react to? I see it happen all the time—ideas from our platform inspire more ideas with the customers teams. Ideas that never would have happened otherwise.
In-house agency CD, Tim Weldon (pictured), put it perfectly after one of his Ideasicle experiences,
“They delivered a lot of high-level ideas that our team could take as is, reject, revise, or simply find the germ of an idea to form our own concept. Ideasicle is a great behind-the-scenes creative partner.”
A typical Ideasicle X project yields about 40 original ideas and 300 builds within those ideas within a span of 3-5 days. Talk about a jump start to your creative process.
deploy your own employees in creative ways.
Ideasicle X is not only about bringing freelancers together from the outside. It’s also a mechanism to bring your own employees together to work virtually on idea assignments. And here’s where it gets fun.
Maybe you’ve got a creative department, a PR department, and some social media specialists. They may work on the same account but never actually work together coming up with ideas. Imagine putting two creatives, a PR person, and a social media person on a team through Ideasicle X. Imagine those four very different perspectives colliding maybe for the first time on an idea assignment. All on equal footing, all contributing ideas, all inspiring each other.
Your people will love being a part of it (good for morale), but more importantly you will accelerate your creativity without any outside influence.
Outside perspective can broaden yours.
Fact is, teams working on the same account for a long time can get stuck in creative traps that are difficult to shake. The larger campaign idea gets comfortable for the agency and its teams. But be wary of comfort. Comfort is the first smoke signal that an agency review may be coming.
Ideasicle X is a completely non-threatening way to present your brand idea to an outside team of four and see how they might evolve it. Many of the ideas will likely be wrong or unusable or ideas you’ve had before because the team lacks the knowledge you have about the business, but there will be a few gems that your teams may never have thought of simply because they’re too close to the business.
So, no, we’re not out to replace any creative departments. We don’t ask for credit or a “slash.” We just want to make your creative department more efficient, more creative, and more powerful. Let’s go.
Tim Weldon, former Creative Director at Constant Contact