IX Use Case: Amy’s Retail Pitch

The first in a series of use-cases for Ideasicle X in the advertising world, this one focusing on jump starting a pitch.

The pitch sitch

An advertising agency in New York City is in a pitch for a major retail account. Thing is, the agency doesn’t have a lot of big-box retail experience. But they do have a creative brief ready and a creative presentation to the client looming in two weeks. To jump start the creative process internally the creative director, Amy Smith, creates an Ideasicle X project to have a team of four freelancers quickly generate a bunch of high-level advertising platform ideas against the agency’s brief. And she figures she can recruit creative people with the retail experience the agency doesn’t have.

Recruit talent you don’t have

Amy knew that the Ideasicle X platform was designed around having four people on a team. Given that it’s a pitch for a retail account, she wanted to be sure at least two of the four creative freelancers had retail experience so they could “ground” the other team members in the realities of retail advertising. But for the other two Amy wanted no retail experience so she’d increase the odds of “category fresh” thinking.

She logged into the Ideasicle X platform and when recruiting freelancers she searched “retail” to find freelancers in the database with retail experience. She actually knew a few of the people who came up personally (advertising is a small world). By chance, she also found a really great sounding brand promotions expert. While this person wasn’t a “creative,” per se, Amy thought it would be cool to have someone with a promotions background thinking about ad campaigns. To round out the team, there was someone Amy had worked with before that she just loved—one of her “go to” freelancers—but this person wasn’t in the Ideasicle X database. So she added the person’s email to the invite list within the platform so her “go to” would be invited to fill out a profile and work on the project.

She invited eight people to be safe, figuring some wouldn’t be able to do it for whatever reason. Five accepted the job, three rejected it. But five was too many. So she politely rejected one and ended up with two creative directors with retail experience, one brand promotions expert and as it turns out the “go to” Amy invited using email was thrilled to be invited into the platform, and became her fourth.

This entire recruit happened within a couple of hours.

Brief the team

While she was waiting for the freelancers to respond, Amy prepared the briefing materials for the team. The creative brief was already done and in PDF form, so she uploaded that to the platform. Then came the video. Amy liked to personally brief freelancers herself to make sure they understood what she was after. Ideasicle X makes that easy. Amy simply opened up the brief on her computer, opened up a new project on iMovie, and shot herself from her laptop explaining the brief from top to bottom and providing some initial creative direction. She saved the iMovie file to her computer and then uploaded it to the platform. Once the team was finalized and the job began the team would see the video and PDF right at the top of the Idea Stream.

Ideas stream

The team went straight to work on the Ideasicle X Idea Stream, some posting ideas within 15 minutes of the job starting. By the end of the session three days later Amy counted 40 original ideas and countless builds and riffs within each. There were all-copy ideas, ideas with photo references, others with video references, and builds with all of the above as well. Her instincts were right to include two creatives with retail experience as Amy could see them guide the others’ ideas into more useful form. The promotions person didn’t have a lot of original ideas, but was amazing at augmenting the other team members’ ideas with urgency, calls to action, and promotional hooks to drive more traffic. And her “go to” freelancer delivered with high-level original ideas (and builds on other ideas) like Amy knew would happen. They all came at the problem from different perspectives inspiring each other along the way.

Amy was careful in the beginning to let the team go and explore lots of different areas before intervening with any kind of direction. Remember, Amy is not only running the project she is able to see the ideas as they are posted over time. She gets an email whenever anyone posts anything on the job, so she can remain close to its evolution. After a day or so, Amy started to tighten the reigns a bit to make sure she got what she needed. She started posting what she loved about these ideas and what she thought fell short on those. The team responded in kind sometimes trying to fix the ideas that fell short, sometimes coming up with new ideas closer to the ones Amy loved.

Forty ideas later, Amy closed the job, rated her freelancers and paid them right from the platform. Now it was time to pick favorites.

Export and shop

Once the job was finished Amy selected her favorite ten ideas from the forty the team came up with and with a click of a button exported these favorites to a tidy PDF. The PDF included a cover sheet that summarized the job—the dates, the team, the mission, the number of ideas, the number of builds and riffs, etc. And the rest of the PDF was made up of Amy’s ten favorite ideas, one idea per page. She pinned all ten ideas to the wall in her conference room so the teams could “shop” them all and, if one struck a team’s fancy, that team could remove it from the wall and go develop it. One team pulled down a fairly developed idea because they couldn’t wait to write the scripts for it. Another team pulled down a more design-oriented idea because it spoke to them. Incredible conversations ensued as the teams, Amy, the account team, and the brand planner discussed the pros and cons of each. Even completely new ideas came out of her team inspired by the ideas on the wall from the Ideasicle X team.

Having these ten idea on the wall sparked so much more creativity so much more quickly than any blank wall could.

Creativity is a process

What this use case illustrates is that Ideasicle X can be a powerful weapon in a time-constrained pitch to jump start an agency’s creative process. Within days Amy had forty ideas she wouldn’t have otherwise had. And her favorite ten ideas inspired her own teams to come up with new ideas.

Amy could have started the creative process organically with nothing or she could have started with ten ideas on the wall. She chose the latter and within a week had four tight, fantastic ideas ready for presentation. And enough time to flesh those ideas out further than the client required.

Ideasicle X. That’s the pitch.