North is an advertising agency in Portland, Oregon, founded by CCO Mark Ray and CEO Rebecca Armstrong. They’ve done amazing work for brands like Columbia, Hydro Flask, Nuun, Keen, and many others. They were invited into a very attractive pitch recently for the Ledlenser business (Ledlenser is a German company who makes the world’s best portable lighting products) and North felt they needed to manufacture every advantage humanly possible in order to win. After a deep strategy cycle designed to unearth the brand's "real,” they decided to augment their own creative muscle with a bit of IX creative juice.

Here's their story as told by Rebecca.

It gave us so much more to work with.

We’ve used Ideasicle X in the past with great success. What we love about it is that it’s like a magical extension of our internal teams. We set up a job online, recruit a team of four Ideasicle Experts, and let them go. The ideas start populating almost right away. It’s exciting to get the email notifications every time a new idea was posted. It’s like this parallel dimension where these ideas are all just happening. Almost addictive to follow along.

But it’s not just about following along. The platform allowed us to assigned our own creative maestro Mark Ray to be the Idea Director on the virtual job, which meant he could engage with the team as ideas were posted, provide comments or further direction, and even post his own ideas. We even invited Will Burns (founder of Ideasicle X) as an Observer to the job because I like to make sure we are doing it right!

After just a few days we had over 30 ideas and probably 100 builds and riffs to those original ideas. It’s really quite something. But the advantage to us in a pitch is that it gives us so much more for our internal teams to work with creatively. It’s a kind of spontaneous Jackson Pollock approach that fills the canvas with ideas for the North creative team to riff off and hone.

It’s the ideas, sure, but it’s also the inspiration.

Not all of the ideas were quite right, of course. But every single idea we got from Ideasicle X at least made us think. Some of the ideas simply inspired more ideas from our teams. As Will Burns said when pitching the platform to us, that’s part of the value of the experience—the team of four may nail it and/or provide lots of inspiration to our teams. Either way it’s a victory. In the case of the Ledlenser pitch, we got a little of both.

Several of the ideas inspired our teams to come up with new ideas we developed for the presentation (I think we presented three different campaign ideas). But one of the Ideasicle X ideas had a line posted as a build to one of the other ideas. It was a really great, provocative, truthful, and creative line that really encapsulated our strategy incredibly well. It jumped out at us.

We took that line and built it into a full-on campaign and presented it as one of the options. And it won us the pitch. We’re actually in that rare and awesome position of being able to produce the work that we pitched.

We will definitely be using Ideasicle X again in our next pitch. It’s a powerful way to get loads of ideas from top talent both affordably and in collaboration with our internal teams.

P.S. A little tip. Involve Will Burns in your first couple projects, if you choose to subscribe to the platform. He’s a super helpful coach and is generous with his time. You can tell he loves this stuff.

north’s Ledlenzer pitch use-case details:

Ideasicle Expert Team: Claudia Caplan, Ernie Schenck, Ted Gilvar, Don McKinney

Pitch Client: Ledlenser

IX Product: Subscription

Timing: 4-5 days

Total cost: $8,800, including four talent and IX fee

Result: complete and total victory

Will Burns is the Founder & CEO of the revolutionary virtual-idea-generating company, Ideasicle X. He’s an advertising veteran from such agencies as Wieden & Kennedy, Goodby Silverstein, Arnold Worldwide, and Mullen. He was a Forbes Contributor for nine years writing about creativity in modern branding. Sign up for the Ideasicle Newsletter and never miss a post.